Election Debacle Report

I haven’t had a chance to debrief, following the November 8^th Midterm Election. Maybe it’s better to have waited a couple of weeks, so I can look at data and facts, and not be overcome by emotion.

In Texas at large, Republicans won big. We won some House districts that I’m quite happy about—special congratulations to Terri Leo Wilson and Mark Dorazio, both of whom I consider my friends. And, again, we won all the statewide offices.

But in Harris County, where I live, it was one disappointment after another. And there were widespread problems with the election. Were our losses a failure to GOTV? Or were they insurmountable election system issues? Or some combination?

Let me look first at the voter apathy issue. I can look at my precinct, and my polling place. They may or may not be typical, but at least it’s data I have. This relates to the energy of the electorate, which is at odds with the final results. But if you’re not interested in this very local detail, you can scroll down to the broader county report.

 

My Precinct and Polling Location

When we opened our polling place at 7:00 AM (workers arrive at 5:30 AM to make opening on time a reliable reality), we had 70 people already in line, waiting to vote. We never caught up throughout the day. This is even though we are very efficient in getting people to fill every available voting machine. We marked the end of the line at 7:00 PM, and it took us until 8:00 PM to clear all the voters in line.

The school where we have our polling location. We use a band room,
with its own entrance, off to the left.
image from Google Maps

We had a record number of voters for this polling place—around 900.

Our polling place is not limited to our precinct, since there is countywide voting now on election day. When we had polling places assigned to precincts, prior to 2019, there was another polling place in the elementary school next door to the middle school where we’re located. The problem with countywide voting was that, if polling places are too close together, a person could vote at one location and then vote again at a second location that was within 20-30 minutes away, before the electronic pollbook was updated to show that voter had voted. The one within 5 minutes of our location, then, was eliminated. So heavier voter traffic than historically is hard to measure back further than a couple of years.

In March, during the Primary Election, we ended up running both the Republican and Democrat polling, because the Democrats didn’t hire any workers for our location and asked us last minute to step up and help without any additional pay. We did it. We had about 100 more Republican voters than Democrat voters that day at our polling location. Our area is close to even between the parties but leans Republican.

In my precinct (which includes early voting and voters who go elsewhere on Election Day) I had 437 Republican Primary voters. I got 639 known Republican votes in the November election. That looks to me like a pretty excited Republican electorate.

I have data to drill down a little deeper for this election, but I don’t still have access to data to make apples-to-apples comparisons to previous elections.

I had 2231 voters from my precinct in the November 8 election, of 5002 registered voters, for a turnout of 44.6%. Of known Republican voters, I got 639 out of 806 for a turnout of 79.3%. Democrats got 488 out of 656 for a turnout of 74.4%. Swing voters are the largest cohort; we got 1104 out of 3540 for a turnout of 39.8%. I don’t have That’s not an unexpected increase. Only committed party voters show up in a primary election. Those, plus Democrats or other parties who cross over, plus the “swing voters, which includes not just people who swing from one party to another, but those who are not committed to a party, the independents. You get even more in a presidential election year, such as 2020, because a lot of voters only tune in enough to vote when they’re bombarded with presidential election ads and news for a full year.

Those who are saying our turnout was down are comparing it to the 2020 election. I had 3465 votes cast from my precinct in the 2020 election; that’s out of 4792 registered voters, 72.31%. 1709 were for Trump; 1673 were for Biden. That’s a difference of just 36 votes.

If you look at differences in this election, my precinct was significantly more Republican. I put it in a table.  Here is a key: CD 38 is my US Congressional race; it’s a new district. “Comptr” is Comptroller, the state controller of funds. “GLO” is General Land Office. “Ag Comm” is Agriculture Commissioner. “RR” is Railroad Commissioner, which handles Oil & Gas mainly—long story regarding the name. “SBOE” is State Board of Education. “HD” is state House District. “DJ” is District Judge; I chose a particular race as a representative race, rather than the many dozen district judge races. “HC Judge” is the Harris County Judge, the administrator of the county. Then we have District Clerk, Harris County Clerk, Harris County Treasurer. And “CC Pct 4” is the County Commissioner for county precinct 4. The County Commissioners Court consists of four County Commissioners and the County Judge.

Note that this table shows only my precinct data, not necessarily the winners of those races.

My precinct data for several races, November 8, 2022 Midterm Election.
I gathered the canvass report data from the Harris County elections report site.

This lets me do at least a bit of comparison. For example, in 2018, the last Midterm Election, I remembered my Texas House Representative won by just a tiny margin, and a lot of it was the difference in my precinct. This time that race was a 7-point spread in my precinct, which was by no means the highest spread. Here’s the 2018 table for comparison. There was no SBOE race in my area that year; the other races are the same as the 2022 table. However, not all races have the same candidates.

My precinct data for the same races, from the November 2018 Midterm Election.
I gathered the canvass report data from the Harris County Elections Archives.

Support for the Governor went down—mainly due to pandemic orders that went against freedom, plus the ongoing border crisis. Just about every other race, the Republican vote in my precinct was a much higher spread.

HD 138 went from 0.8% to 7.0%, with an increase of 135 Republican votes. The DJ 248 race went from 2.6% to 12.6%, with an increase of 206 Republican votes. The County Judge went from a very respectable 7.5% to 12.4%, with an increase of 84 Republican votes. My precinct still just leans Republican, but it’s a much stronger lean than in 2018.

I believe we had both better turnout and more Republican voters. While some precinct chairs could claim credit—because of their blockwalking and get-out-the-vote efforts, I’m not one of those. I mainly contact active Republican voters and get them the information they need to be informed voters. The overall excitement was not coming from me. That’s why I believe we had that excitement over all or most of the county.

And that’s why I’m so shocked at our complete sweep of losses across all county races.

So that brings us to what else was going on in this election.

 

The Mess That Was the Harris County Election

We had ballot security expert Alan Vera come and speak at our Tea Party again on Saturday, to give us a report. It wasn’t pretty. He starts off this way:

Earlier this year, during the heat of the fight over the primary election, some guy named Alan Vera looked at the TV cameras from every major Houston TV station and said, "Incompetence is the perfect camouflage for malfeasance." I refuse to use the word incompetence anymore in discussing elections in Harris County. We’re long past that phase. The accurate words to use are malfeasance and collusion.

Ballot security expert Alan Vera, at Cypress Texas Tea Party, November 19, 2022.
screenshot from here

It’s hard to know how much our local news makes its way to other places. But, as Vera says later,

General and Special Election in Harris County, Texas, and Maricopa County, Arizona, have replaced Broward County, Florida, as the election laughingstock of the country. Think about—those of you who are old enough to remember—who won the presidential election in 2000. Remember that that year, and for years afterward, Broward County, Florida, was the cesspool of elections in the US. If something was going to go wrong, it was Broward County that was going to screw it up. Today you're living in one of two main cesspools of election integrity in the US. I’m not sure there’s a bottle of Rid-X [septic treatment] big enough to clean out the mess we have in Harris County.

So, what were the problems this time? Let’s just say, if there were issues in the past elections—and they were so bad the County Judge actually required the resignation of her specially chosen crony that she’d appointed as the Election Administrator (we covered details here)—those were still present. But today we’ll deal mainly with the new ones. Here’s the list, and then we’ll go into a bit more detail.

·        Preventing Republican Election Workers.

·        Misallocating polling places and equipment.

·        Failing to provide ballot paper.

·        Spoiled ballot problems.

·        More ballots than voters.

First, trying to prevent Republican election workers. The law required that any judges and workers be provided by the parties by the deadline of the end of June; any such listed persons had to be appointed. Done—we thought. Harris County Republican Party provided more than ever before. But then the County, after the deadline, instead of confirming these workers, sent out an invitation at large for workers. If the workers who had already signed up saw those emails and didn’t respond—because they had already applied and been selected by the party weeks or months earlier—the Harris County EA’s office kicked them out of the system and replaced them with workers of their own choosing. Just a minor miscommunication? On top of all their other shenanigans, I don’t think so.

Second, misallocating polling places and equipment. Some background here. Up through 2018, when Stan Stanart, as County Clerk, ran the elections, the County was facing an ADA lawsuit (that’s the Americans with Disabilities Act). The lawsuit claimed that there were hazards preventing people with disabilities from voting. There were no such actual claimants, only an organization that wanted to impose its will. Before Democrat rule, Stan Stanart and Harris County fought the lawsuit and refused to submit. But the moment the Democrats took the wheel, they took on the fines and the burden of dealing with ADA requirements. The ADA training, added to our poll worker training, the first time or two added an extra hour that could have been handled with a 5-minute explanation saying essentially, “If you need to make adjustments to your polling place, you’ll get equipment and instructions when you pick up your voting equipment.” I’m not against that accommodation when needed. But there’s more to it. And they have since much condensed the ADA part of election worker training.

One of the ADA requirements is that a polling place must be within one block of public transportation. If you’re from some eastern city, you might think that makes sense. But we—out here beyond the Houston city limits, and many places within those limits—have no public transportation. At all. You drive, or you hire an uber. But this rule gave the Democrats the idea that they could disqualify all those suburban schools and other polling places—in mainly Republican strongholds. They couldn’t fully get away with that, but they did make polling places more scarce for Republicans, and it doesn’t look random.

There were entire school districts—I believe Spring Branch ISD was one—in which the Elections Administrator’s office said, “They refused to allow us to use their schools this year,” which I believe the schools can’t even do. But HCRP made calls to Spring Branch ISD and learned they had received zero requests for the use of their schools, but they were willing to host polling locations, as they always had. Hmm.

We got our regular polling location this time (we’d been placed elsewhere in 2019). It took some insistence, and repetition, and reminding them that we had a relationship with the school, which would make things go more smoothly. And, as you might have noted from above, we’re only just barely Republican leaning, so there are a lot of Democrat voters they’d be disenfranchising here.

But they cut the number of machines and workers from our Primary Election allotment, even though the November General Election typically has a much higher turnout than a Primary Election. We had 21 working machines in March (because we ran the Democrats’ Primary for them, we only opened one controller line for them, which is all we could staff, but I think there were more machines). They cut our staff to PJ, AJ, plus four clerks. We needed six clerks to fill their requirements. As a result, I was planning to just volunteer (work without pay), and the AJ’s husband ended up going to a different polling location to work. A few days before the election, they let us have our full six.

We asked why we had been given these smaller allotments and couldn’t get an answer.

Third, failing to provide ballot paper. This isn’t the first time for this one, exactly. In the Primary, they figured out, during the weekend of handing out equipment, that someone had estimated ballot paper as one page per voter when we have a long ballot that requires two legal-size pages. In that election, some Presiding Judges got the wrong size paper—letter-size rather than legal-size, all of which was unusable. Others just got half of what they needed, so they had to go back for a second time to the pickup location to get more. That was our experience.

So you’d think they would figure this out. But somehow they managed to underestimate how much paper would be needed—at these various locations similar to ours where they thought we’d get way fewer voters than in the Primary, instead of more. (Remember, a general election is both parties plus independents, so it’s almost guaranteed to be more voters than in the Primary.) In our polling location, we had a clerk start making phonecalls for more paper by around 10:30 in the morning, based on the kind of traffic we were getting. We got lucky. The roving technician assigned to us, who stops by every two hours, had two extra boxes of paper in his vehicle, and he gave us one. Giving these technicians all the extra paper their route might need would have solved the problem entirely.

By the time the County got around to delivering the requested paper, around 6:00 PM, we were two reams into the new box. (The delivery guy left the extra box anyway, showing that a paper shortage was never the issue.) We would have been one of those shut-down polling places, if we hadn’t been both proactive and lucky.

Other polling locations were not so lucky. Stories abound. Many were on hold or were ignored entirely by the County’s call line. One story I heard was a polling place that did that long wait on hold, and then the County told them, “You’re wrong; you have enough paper,” refusing to believe them or send over the needed paper.

They did finally send out additional paper—a pallet load full. They put that in motion at 5:00 PM, during Houston’s going-home traffic hour, ensuring they couldn’t get across the county in less than an hour. By the way, there were places that had run out of paper as early as 2:00 PM. Everyone arriving between 2:00 PM and 7:00 PM got turned away.

There were, I think at latest count, 23 polling locations that ran out of paper—and had to send voters away. Maybe the voters had time to go to some other polling place and wait in lines made longer there by the closing of these polling places; or maybe they didn’t have that kind of transportation or time. Voters were absolutely, definitely disenfranchised by this action of the Election Administrator’s office, which is indeed a criminal offense, since it’s the thing the Democrats are always accusing Republicans of attempting.

But, by the way, all 23 of these paper-deficit polling locations just happened to be in strong Republican areas. What a coincidence.

Fourth, you may recall that we had paper jamming problems in each election since we started using these machines in November 2021. Smaller elections, with one letter-size page, were not as bad as the Primary and General, where we have 99 lines on the ballot. This time they added a paper feeding device to the machine and promised us in training that you couldn’t even force them to jam now. Except, in my training, the first try jammed. And then the demonstration of the duo-go (for handicapped curbside voting) also jammed.

Showing the new paper path guide, intended to prevent jams,
from page 153 of the Harris County Elections Manual 2022-2023

We had paper jams, as if the paper feeding devices did no good at all. We had to have one person working each line, to help voters with paper feeding problems, at all times. That ended up being my assignment for the whole day. I got very good at it. I could hear the little hum that meant the person is ready for printing, and I’d get close to see if they needed help. Sometimes the paper just needed a little much nudge, to catch, than you’d think it would need. Even with my help, we still had some jams. Most of the time we could easily deal with reprinting a page and spoiling the crumpled page.

At our polling place, because of our special care, we had almost no problems at the scanner. That wasn’t true for other places, where scanners couldn’t read smeared or crumpled ballot pages. And this is where the real problems show up.

By the way, I’ll mention here something new Alan Vera told us. Tarrant County, where Ft. Worth is, uses the same machines we do. Also, they are a large county with a long ballot that requires two ballot pages. And yet they have zero paper jams. What’s the difference? They maintain and calibrate their machines. A FOIA request in Harris County reveals that there has been no maintenance schedule for our voting machines. Is this incompetence, or are the people running our elections planning to use the mis-scanned ballots to cheat?

If a scanner takes one of the two pages but not the other, the solution is to put the second page of that ballot in an emergency chute. It is then read by hand at Central Count. But that’s not what people were doing—and this problem arose during Early Voting. Poll workers instead gave the person a new voter code and had them redo their ballot, print it, and place BOTH of the new pages into the scanner. That means that voter got, at minimum, 1 ½ votes.

And there’s more. Some voting locations—innocently or not—very wrongly placed spoiled ballots in the emergency chute on the scanner, instead of in the carefully segregated spoiled ballots envelope, to which we attach the voter’s name and time of voting, to make sure we do not accidentally allow that spoiled ballot to be counted while they get a reprinted ballot page that is counted.

Fifth, that’s one way you get more ballots than voters. But Harris County’s Elections Administrator’s office found another one. Because there were some voting locations that did not open on time (equipment failures, or possibly just not skilled enough workers), they went to a judge—without even notifying the Republicans—and requested an extra hour of voting, which the judge granted, illegally. But we were instructed to take voters who arrived between 7:00 and 8:00 PM and have them vote provisionally. We handled about 10 of these. That means their ballots would be segregated and not counted, until they could be proven to be legal, acceptable ballots, which is called “curing.” That’s what we do if someone needs to provide proof of something—such as, if they were given a mail-in ballot and claim they didn’t use it, they can vote provisionally, and then later turn in their unused mail-in ballot to “cure” their provisional ballot.

In this weird case, these post-7:00 PM provisional ballots were supposed to be segregated from any other provisional ballots. We can’t be sure that happened around the County. Then we got a message, at 8:20 PM, after we’d processed all voters, including those provisionals, that we should not allow after-7:00 PM provisional ballots, because another judge had stayed the first judge’s ruling, so they couldn’t even vote provisionally after 7:00 PM.

I haven’t mentioned yet a new problem we noticed at our polling location this time. There were a large number of voters whose ID did not scan or did not show up in the system. An advanced search by name turned them up. One of our clerks handled 15 of these—at the same apartment address. We don’t have power at our polling location to deny a voter whose name shows up as a registered voter. But 15 from one apartment—young people, lots of tattoos and piercings, all showing up late in the day, and their IDs don’t scan. And that’s just in the line that noticed; we don’t know if there were more from that apartment who ended up in the other line.

Voter roll problems continue, so I didn't list that. But Alan Vera tells us there are 200,000 known names on Harris County voter rolls that do not live here and are not legal voters. We made a big effort this summer to try to identify a number of troubled places, to verify that voters did not live there, particularly in places listing many voters in one location. We sent in affidavits to legally challenge those names. They are nevertheless still on the rolls. 

What I think this shows is fake driver licenses. We had that issue come up last election a couple of times, but it was for addresses that didn’t even exist in the county. When we couldn’t let this one guy vote, he just picked up his ID card and mumbled something about having to talk with his friends. Later I learned that there was indeed an entity manufacturing fake driver licenses for the purpose of voting. Now, apparently, they’ve learned to at least identify an actual location within the county. They just haven’t learned not to have them all assigned to the same apartment—at least not then have them all show up at the same polling location.

Yes, there is a place to report such voting irregularities. In Harris County it is DefendMyBallot.org/.   Elsewhere in Texas, you can make similar reports at Texas.ProtecttheVote.com. This is for any PJ, AJ, clerk, poll watcher, or voter who observed an election irregularity. Getting it in writing by eyewitnesses is the way to build a case.

This is, as Alan Vera put it, “alarming and infuriating.” He also gave us the only real solution: “Plan A for election integrity in Texas is that 99% of all adult Texans live their lives according to traditional Judeo-Christian principles.” But the reality is, “Thousands of people across the state have consented to being human agents of powers and principalities of darkness, and are working to undermine the state and this country, which God himself founded.” So his Plan B continues to be: Deterrence, Prevention, and Real-time Intervention.

Alan Vera (left), HCRP attorney Andy Taylor, HCRP Chair Cindy Siegel,
Senator Paul Bettencourt, former District Clerk and candidate Chris Daniels,
at press conference November 10, 2022
screenshot from here

 

This is what happens when I don’t write often enough; I write one blog post that is long enough to be three or four. If you’ve read this far, congratulations. You might also want to check out these videos and other sources related to the Harris County election debacle:

·        Alan Vera at our Cypress Texas Tea Party meeting November 19, 2022. 

·        Cindy Siegel and HCRP press conference November10, 2022 

·        Cindy Siegel and HCRP press conference November14, 2022 

·        Post by Sen. Paul Bettencourt, with links to several Houston Chronicle stories.