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. 

Chain-of-Custody Issues

There was voter fraud—enough to overturn the 2020 election, and maybe the Georgia runoff, and maybe a few since then. But mainly we’re concerned about that 2020 presidential election—and consequently also the upcoming midterm election.

Mail-in Ballot Problem

Dinesh D-Souza’s movie 2000 Mules lays out one particular type of voter fraud—related to mail-in ballots. The numbers are pretty staggering. True the Vote, the organization that did the investigations, set very high criteria: a “mule” had to visit at least five nonprofits related to getting out the vote in addition to at least ten mail-in ballot drop boxes. They were trying to eliminate anyone who coincidentally went by such locations. And with that criteria, five of the six states they looked at had more such illegal mail-in ballots that the vote margin, so they would be flipped. That finding alone is enough to overturn the 2020 election outcome.

illustration of someone mailing multiple ballots,
found in this August 29, 2020, New York Post article

But, seriously, who goes multiple times to that type of nonprofit and also happens to go to multiple mail-in ballot drop boxes—when it’s illegal to handle anyone’s ballot but your own? You could set the bar much lower, say maybe only five drop boxes. So they looked at that level of data too. And of course the numbers are staggering.

They looked at only 3% of the country—not to mention other types of voter fraud. What about the rest of the country where this could have been going on but was not looked at?

There’s a story from the New York Post, from August 29, 2020—before that election. This was brought back up via Mike Huckabee, in light of the 2000 Mules information coming out. The story is about a Democrat operative, who confesses (anonymously to reporter Jon Levine) that he has performed voter fraud for years, and describes the methods. He says it’s more the rule than the exception.

illustration of the parts included in a mail-in ballot,
image found in New York Post article from August 29, 2020

The article is full of details and verifications, as well as quite a few photos. Worth the read. But, anyway, here’s the summary of the article from the Huckabee post: 

“An election that is swayed by 500 votes, 1,000 votes—it can make a difference,” this tipster said. “It could be enough to flip states.”

It’s a big operation. He said he had not only altered ballots himself but had led teams, mentoring at least 20 operatives who were active in New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania, which, of course, would turn out to be one of the battleground states at issue on Election Day 2020.

This operative, who said he'd been a Bernie Sanders supporter and no longer had a stake, said he’d come forward in the hope that states would fix their glaring security problems with mail-in ballots, because November 3 was going to be “a (bleeping) war.” I wonder if he had any idea then how bad it was going to get.

The Post includes his descriptions of how election-riggers do their stuff. For example, they can just make copies of the ballot itself, but they have to collect actual envelopes, because it's not possible to recreate those. That’s where vote harvesters come in, going from house to house, “helping” people by mailing their ballots for them, but steaming them open and using the real envelopes to mail the phony ballots. These they would “sprinkle” around numerous mailboxes in town.

He said sometimes postal employees are in on it. If they don’t like Trump, for example, and they work in an area that’s predominantly GOP, they can just “lose” those ballots. They can either dump all the mail in the trash or, if they have time, sift through their mail for ballots, and throw the ballots in the trash. (Or I would think they could take them to be steamed open if more envelopes are needed.)

Then, of course, there are the nursing homes. We’ve discussed how that works, but the Post article provides details.

Sometimes, if they’re in a state that doesn’t require ID, operatives will even go to polling places and vote in person. They go through publicly available information to find the names of registered voters who routinely skip elections, and vote using those names.

They also buy the votes of homeless people. This tipster went on to say that Michael Bloomberg's campaign spent roughly $174 per vote to win his third term as New York mayor. He likened this effort to a mafia organization, with the candidate himself typically kept in the dark about the details, to maintain “plausible deniability.”

This particular political insider even took credit for a helpful little idea that he says was put into practice: bending one corner of the ballot, where the signature appeared, to signal to Democrat Board of Election counters that this was one of “their” ballots and to let it go through.

Huckabee also passed along an additional story from just a couple of days ago, reported by Newsmax. A woman, Christina Repaci, was walking her dog and came upon an entire box of ballots, sitting on the sidewalk, apparently abandoned by the US Postal Service, since it was in one of their boxes.

Box of ballots found by woman in East Hollywood
screenshot from here

These 104 unopened mail-in ballots were in a U.S. Postal Service box, just abandoned there on the sidewalk. Sacredness of the vote, indeed.

Ms. Repaci didn’t know what to do about this; it was only thanks to her persistence that an official picked up these ballots from her. Of course, the chain of custody had long since been shot. The registrar’s office said not to worry, they’ve reissued ballots to all the people affected. But what if someone not quite as conscientious as Ms. Repaci had found the ballots and used them for, I don’t know, bird cage liners?

“Early signs indicate that this was an incident of mail theft and not a directed attempt at disrupting the election,” the registrar’s office said in a statement. To that I say, “How do you know?” I also say, “So what?” because either way, a box of votes that doesn't get counted can affect the outcome of a close election. Doesn't say much for mail-in voting. 

Whether intentional or accidental, if a ballot loses chain of custody, it is an illegal ballot; it cannot be legally counted. Mail-in ballots lose chain of custody between the time they leave the voter’s hands until they are received by an election official. Ostensibly the US Postal Service qualifies as handling that. But I don’t think they’re that reliable. We had other stories around the 2020 election of dumped ballots, and ballots transported across state lines. A truck driver for a contractor of the US Postal Service reported a trailer filled with 288,000 ballots disappeared.[i] But, as with so much election-related material, it wasn’t reported, and it didn’t get heard by a judge.

Our Own Chain-of-Custody Issues

In Texas, mail-in ballots are intended only for those who physically can’t make it to a polling place—at all, during early voting or on election day. This is likely to be someone out of town for an extended period of time or an invalid. It isn’t someone who is “scared of COVID” or too inconvenienced to vote somewhere in person. But in 2020 the replacement Harris County Clerk (after the elected one stepped down because of legal issues against her, and before we had an Election Administrator imposed on us by the County Judge and Commissioners Court) tried to send mail-in ballot applications to every voter on the non-cleaned-up voter rolls. He was stopped, but not before spending big bucks on printing, nor before he actually mailed quite a few.

So his next move was to make more drop-off locations. In theory, the mailbox is sufficient. But voters are also allowed to turn them in at the County Clerk’s office. He tried expanding it to dozens of locations, but I think he was limited to 12 or so. There should be a person from each party wherever and whenever votes are received, so his attempts to open them up, at short notice, to prevent Republican workers from being there was an obvious ploy. But, why would a person be fully capable of driving downtown to one of these various locations—during early voting—but not be able to go to one of the dozens of voting places? There shouldn’t have been such drop-off locations.

Anyway, back to chain-of-custody issues. We had a special election last Saturday, May 7, statewide for ballot propositions, plus in some places also for local jurisdictions, like school boards or water districts. (We also had one for our Emergency Services District, but they handled their own election in separate locations, which was inconvenient for voters, but was run smoothly and provided a vote count promptly.) The Harris County Election Administrator had to turn in her resignation after the March 1 Primary Election failure—so many things wrong that were simply incompetence.  However, she promised to stay on through June, which means she’s there to fail for both this special election last Saturday and the Primary Runoff Election on May 24. 

Chain-of-custody was the failure of choice last Saturday.

Dropping off ballots has been a problem every election since she got appointed. In November, which was a pretty limited election, mostly school boards and a few local races, they had everyone turn in their materials at one location, outdoors. This was at Reliant Stadium parking lot. They thought they had a neat system. You hand off your stuff from your car to the workers who receive it. But they set up lines such that, if someone ahead of you had an issue, no one could move until it was handled. We arrived fairly early, waited 45 minutes in line, and that was uncomfortable but not intolerable. People who got there later waited up to three hours. There were no restrooms; you’re stuck in your car. Some people got fed up and abandoned their election materials (including ballot boxes) on the sidewalk outside the building; those lost chain of custody.

In March, they thought, “Well, that didn’t work. Let’s go back to having multiple drop-off locations.” But they didn’t go back to multiple lines inside the various buildings; they did the outdoor thing again. With similar problems. We waited 45 minutes in line. Then we were told we were missing equipment; we were not. They were wrong. Months later they admitted that. But it was, again, not a smooth handoff.

Remember that election workers get to the polling place at 5:30 AM to prepare the polling place to open at 7:00 AM, as required by law. Polls close at 7:00 PM—plus processing any voters in line by 7:00 PM. Then there is shutdown. The new equipment is slower and more complicated to shut down. We’ve done it with the new machines three times now, and we’re pretty quick. But it’s taking us about 30-45 minutes longer than the old system. Election workers haven’t been able to get dinner yet. So then you add on these extra hours and/or long drives, and you discourage a lot of workers, especially the older ones who think, “I’ve put in my time, and I just don’t want to go through this anymore.”

This past week the County wanted to try yet another new idea. “Hey, how about if we have someone pick up the materials from every polling place?” They decided to use the Constables for that, the local law enforcement. But, again, there were failures. In our case, the Constables assigned to pick ours up were stuck at another polling location where the workers had trouble figuring out how to print out their tally and shut everything down; and the Constables, instead of taking care of the other locations on their route and then going back, stayed and waited. So our polling place Presiding Judge and Alternate Judge had to wait the extra two hours until the Constables came. I heard that others waited even a couple of hours longer than we did.

The real problem came when the Election Administrator (the one who resigned but hasn’t gotten out of the way) decided that, since there weren’t enough Constables, they’d just hire other people. Some of these other people were County Sheriff Deputies, which seem as reliable as the Constables. But others were simply County employees, from whatever department. Law enforcement officers ought to be trusted not to break the law. But I have no such reason to trust some random Democrat-hired county employee.

Harris County Republican Party Chair Cindy Siegel has called them out for breaking the law. The law requires the Election Judge to hand off custody of the ballots and equipment only to another Election Official—somebody from the Ballot Board hired to do receiving and counting. There should be signatures to verify this handoff; there were not.

That means the Election Administrator actually eliminated chain of custody on all Election Day ballots. Oops.

So who knows what the drop-off procedure will be for the May 24 Primary Runoff Election. But it won’t be one of the past failures. They’ll want to fail in a whole new way. If it’s enough of a spectacular failure, maybe they’ll use it for the November Midterm Election.

As my friend, ballot security expert Alan Vera says, “Incompetence is the perfect camouflage for malfeasance.”

They are trying to get us to quit, so they can hire their cronies, who will “count” the ballots the way they want—keeping them in power perpetually. We must not quit.

In November, Harris County Republicans are planning to put a poll watcher at every polling location. In the past we’ve concentrated mainly on troubled areas. But now, with county-wide voting, every place might be a troubled area. We might get a poll watcher at our location for the first time. This is not to show that we are distrusted; it is to show that we all care that the law is followed. 

Alan Vera told us precinct chairs on Monday night that it is all hands on deck this November. No one should be sitting home on election day. Most precinct chairs will be running their elections. So they'll need to recruit other poll workers and an army of poll watchers.

Free and fair elections—what a concept! 

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[i] “Whistleblower USPS Truck Driver Reveals Trailer Filled with up to 288K Ballots Disappeared” NTD News, Dec. 6, 2020. The original link no longer works, but I found the archived video here. 

When Does Incompetence Become Cover for Intentional Wrongdoing?

This is going to be a debrief of our Harris County election last Tuesday, which was pretty much a disaster.

In a pair of press conferences over the weekend (Friday here and Monday here), Harris County Republican Chair Cindy Siegel listed some of the problems:

·       Double booking election workers to the same polling place.

·       Telling election judges who were planning to work that they weren’t needed, instead of sending them where they were needed.

·       Delivering equipment to the wrong places—even to a place that wasn’t even a polling place.

·       Missing equipment.

·       Equipment that didn’t work.

·       Delivering the wrong size paper (the very long ballot required two legal-size pages; they sent letter size to some locations).

·       Poor training, delivered late in the process.

And more.

from left, Alan Vera, Sen. Paul Bettencourt, Cindy Siegel,
Marga Matthews, and Steven Mitby,
screenshot from Friday's press conference

First today I’ll debrief our polling place, which, because of our experience, handled problems relatively smoothly. But—there was a lot the County did that made things more difficult than they needed to be.

Then I’ll cover a bit more of what happened countywide that has led to a lawsuit asking for the resignation of the unelected bureaucrat hired to run our elections “more efficiently.”

 

Our Polling Place

We got to run our usual polling place this time. But back in November, we waited and waited for the County to give us our assignment. When they finally did, they assigned us to another place about 20 minutes away, and assigned our polling place to some random Democrat judge. Traditionally, the party with the majority of votes in the previous election gets to run that place, so I was entitled to it as precinct chair. But since the Democrats took over County government in 2018, they have been trying to marginalize precinct chairs and prevent our connection to our voters. So this wasn’t that surprising.

That November election—a low-turnout election with very little on the ballot—was our first experience with the new paper ballot system. It was a good one to practice on. The system is built by the same makers as the previous eSlate system: Hart. We don’t use Dominion anywhere here in Texas; too many flaws. This paper system was first used last May’s special district elections. But our area didn’t have anything on the ballot, so we didn’t experience it then. Anyway, this election is the third round for the County to be using it.

This system, in theory, is pretty good. Nothing is connected to the internet except the ePollbooks—the tablet we use to identify registered voters, which we’ve been using since around 2016. We use photo ID to check them in. A driver’s license works best; it has a code on the back that can be scanned to bring up their registration, which works pretty well. Other forms of ID—or none of those, under certain circumstances—can be used for those without a driver's license. Some of those we have to type in the information and do a search of the voter rolls. When that doesn’t work, the presiding judge handles it with a call to the County to verify a person’s eligibility.

Once the person is checked in, we print them a code to use at the voting booth. In this system, the machine is called a Duo. They can enter their code in any Duo tied to the Controller that printed out their code. They then insert the paper, just until it catches; it hangs out. They make their voting decisions on the touch screen of the Duo. Once they’re ready, the Duo prints the ballot. It is heat-sensitive paper, which makes it permanent and difficult to duplicate. Once the ballot is printed, the voter goes over to the Scanner, a totally separate machine, and inserts the ballot. The Scanner records a digitally-scanned image of the ballot, saved in a sealed part of the machine, and the paper ballot is dropped into the ballot box below. So the digital scans are quick to count at the end of the voting day, but the paper ballots are available for comparison in case of a recount.

In theory, that’s all good. There are some physical difficulties. The Duo machines are prone to misfeed the paper. If a voter inserts the paper very carefully, with two hands and a lot of patience, no problem. But in real life paper frequently misfeeds.

Add to that, this past week’s ballot required two legal-sized pages—have I mentioned that we have the longest ballot in the country? There were 99 choices (89 races plus 10 resolutions) on the ballot. You need to insert the first page and let it hang out of the machine while you make all those choices on the touch screen. You need to do something with that second sheet of paper. We instructed voters to place it carefully alongside the privacy screen at the side of the Duo. But if a person held it in hand, or let it get scrunched or bent, is was more likely to misfeed. We were suspicious that some machines were more likely to misfeed than others, maybe because paper that had gotten stuck earlier left scraps inside that got in the way. But we were pretty busy running an election to verify that.

For every paper that got scrunched, we had to replace the paper and reprint that page—and we accounted for each spoiled page, and identified on the voter on the judge’s tablet. Those spoiled pages got placed in an envelope for that purpose and were returned to the counting center with the judge’s box at the end of the day.

This was a problem everywhere and kept us busy. We had a sense there were more Republican spoiled ballots than Democrat—but then we had a lot more Republican voters. So it’s hard to know whether the percentage was comparable, or whether our equipment was more often malfunctioning.

The real problems of the day—all around Harris County—were at the Scanner. Sometimes the Scanner wouldn’t scan a page. This happened if the Duo misprinted or smeared. This could easily happen if a Duo only slightly misfed but came through eventually and the voter didn’t notice. It could happen if a voter thought the Duo was finished printing and gave the paper a tug just a tad too early. Anyway, it was a vulnerability. It happened a number of times at our location, but nowhere near as often as the Duo misfeeds.

When the Scanner would not scan a page, we could place the unscannable page in the emergency ballot box, attached; those ballots would be hand counted at Central Counting at night. We followed procedure at the end of the day, placing those unscanned ballots from the emergency box into a special envelope for the purpose, and then sealed them inside the Scanner—which has a coded seal related to chain of custody, as all counted materials do.

But the County changed procedure during the day. Not entirely. We still did all the right things. But this was such a problem for so many polling places, with workers new to the equipment, that they feared people would not follow procedure and would leave those ballots inside the ballot box container.

We broke down the ballot box container as trained. We took out the gray ballot box from inside, made sure there were no stray ballots fallen elsewhere in the box container (there weren’t), and sealed the ballot box. We took the ballots out of the emergency box and placed them in their special envelope, sealed inside the Scanner machine, which was now separated from the box container. And we folded up the box container, which was completely empty of ballots, and placed it on the rack with the other voting equipment—and sealed the rack.

We got to our counting location about 9:40 PM (more below on why it took so long to get there). At 10:10 PM my husband, the presiding judge, got a text—that we didn’t see on his phone at that time—instructing us to remember to bring the black, folded up ballot box container with us to the dropoff location. When we got to the front of the line another 15 minutes or so later, we had everything in order—except no black empty folded-up ballot box container.

It turns out they had sent a text to the tablets—the ePollbooks, but the presiding and alternate judges keep theirs separate to do their other duties—sometime early afternoon. We were busy all day and did not notice the text. It’s not obvious when a text has come in; you have to remember to go look for them.

So at the dropoff location, the official from the County is saying, “That’s on us. We own that. We should have communicated better.” But how do they take accountability for that error? They try to send us back to our polling location in the middle of the night, where we would have to break the seal on the equipment, and retrieve that item, and bring it back to them; but they would let us skip the line when we returned, so kind of them. It was going to require my husband calling the school contact to have them call the custodians to come to the door and let us in to do that—when we knew there were no ballots left inside, because we had followed the appropriate protocol as trained. So we didn’t go get it. Which meant we also didn’t leave the rest of the equipment unsealed, so that’s good for us.

That statement of “It’s our fault; we own that—but we’re making you make up for our mistakes anyway” was a theme of this election.

My husband picked up his equipment on Saturday at the appointed time. Lines got long later, despite appointments, but weren’t too bad for him. He had been warned they were a couple of hours behind at the beginning of the day, so they had adjusted all appointments until they could catch up. They called back on Sunday for him to come and get more ballot paper. According to the explanation, someone had miscalculated and planned for only the amount of paper for one per voter—when each voter needed two. But we actually needed about five times what they’d originally given us. It worked out, but it was an additional inconvenience. Fortunately the pickup location was only about 15 minutes from home.

equipment pickup line on Sunday, February 27
photo posted on Facebook by Robert Jeter III

On Monday night, before Election Day Tuesday, we needed to set up our equipment. We were given a spare orchestra room at the middle school where we usually run our polls. But we shouldn’t have to run a primary election in the same smallish room as the other party. Two years ago, slightly pre-COVID, we did it with a lot of inconvenience. My husband tried to get the school to allow them to use the hallway outside the room—which is already gated off from the rest of the school, so there’s no contact with students. The school said no, so we knew we were stuck. He had tried multiple times to find out who the Democrat PJ would be, to coordinate. There was none by Monday night.

It took about 2 ½ hours to do our setup—this is all so that the morning setup only takes another hour and a half, so we can open at 7:00 AM. The Democrat equipment was there, but was not set up.

He had his alarm set for 4:30 AM, to get to the polling place at 5:30, to be ready for the 7:00 AM start. At around midnight he got a text—asking him to run both the Republican Primary and the Democrat Primary—with no additional staff. He happened to wake and see the text, but at that point there wasn’t anything he could do to prepare.

The priority was to set up our polling place and then do what we could. This required the equipment setup that should have been done Monday night, plus getting the equipment turned on. He managed to get six Duos set up for the Democrats—in addition to the 14 Duos for Republicans. There were more Duos, but not more workers. We got a high school student technician, who was hired by the Democrats to report length of line every so often during the day—at the same $17/hour as the other clerks. We used her, under our supervision, because we had to, to run the Democrat Controller, checking in voters and handing them their codes. Late in the day we got a seventh Duo connected to their line. There were times when three to five Democrats waited in line for an available machine. Rarely did Republicans have to wait. We had more than double the number of machines, so we handled the higher number of voters (about 100 more Republicans than Democrats by end of day).

It took beyond 7:00 AM to get theirs open to voters. A couple of voters got told to vote elsewhere. Another stayed, seeing ours was getting close, because she’d already been to two other locations that weren’t yet open. Much of our delay was because their ePollbook tablet wasn’t working. It required the County to reset it remotely, but that couldn’t be done until their help line wasn’t busy and we could reach them.

So we handled all their voter instruction, machine help, and the extra take down of their polling place at the end of the day. And all the paperwork. Everything. For no extra pay except the extra hour or so that it took us to close down at the end of the day.

There was an explanation that the two county party chairs had consulted and worked together to help each other. So, at some polling places where Republican judges had quit at the last minute (because they weren’t willing to be blamed for running an election with the wrong equipment, etc.), Democrats stepped in, and vice versa. Except—ours didn’t quit at the last minute; they never hired one for our location. And, if we’d been told even a day earlier, we could have done that setup Monday night.

 

County Problems

Alan Vera, screenshot from here

This past Saturday we held our precinct conventions, at locations by House district, and I ran into Alan Vera, head of the HCRP Ballot Security Committee and national election expert. I asked him if we were going to debrief this election. I told him we didn’t have big fraud, but we had some problems. And he said, essentially, what I heard him say later, in today’s press conference. It was in response to a question about how the HCRP was characterizing the problems: incompetence, or intended to influence the outcome. Alan said,

I am wrestling with the question directly related to your comment. The question is this: At what point does election incompetence become the perfect camouflage for election malfeasance? Incompetence because, on equipment pickup day, dozens of judges, both Republican and Democrat, left the pickup point with no ballots at all to run the election. Nothing. But, at least as of right now, only Republican judges were given the wrong ballot size, so that their voters voting on the wrong ballot size, 10 to 13 of their votes at the edge of that 8 ½ by 11 paper will never be counted.

And there's at least 140 voters so far, that we know of, who lost those votes. On Election Day, scores of Republican and Democrat judges had to deal with equipment that didn't work. The Duos wouldn’t boot up; the Scanners wouldn’t scan. That was widespread. But it was only three Republican judges who got to their polls and found there was no equipment at all. Their voting equipment had been delivered to another location, which wasn't even a polling place.

So the question you asked is a good one. At what point does election incompetence lead to election malfeasance? We'll keep digging until we find out.

Let’s add a couple of other details. Longoria asked for an extension to the 24-hour counting requirement. This is law from the 1950s and 1960s, not some new legislation from just last summer. Every previous election official has been able to meet the requirement. She finally got the count done, and certified that all the votes were counted. And then, I think it was Saturday, said (paraphrased)—"Oh, by the way, there’s another 10,000 mail-in ballots that we found that we hadn’t counted. Oops!"

No election official should ever be allowed to get away with “finding” ballots after the counting has been completed. They had one job. Finding uncounted ballots means they failed in that job. It’s a complicated job that requires planning and experience—which this unelected election administrator does not have, but was nevertheless hired by Lina Hidalgo without Republican approval, and without even unanimous Democrat approval.

We had high voter turnout on the Republican side. That was good. But we had polling places that didn’t have enough voting machines for Republicans. They are not interchangeable with Democrat machines on Election Day; setup is different. At one location, 300 Republicans were in line to vote at 7:00 PM; they stayed until all voted, as they are entitled to do, which took until 11:00 PM.

Did we mention that the Director of Training was fired two days before the start of Early Voting? While it ought to be happening far ahead, most training for Election Day workers happens during those two weeks. In fact, they were so late at appointing us—despite our giving our intention to serve months in advance—that the first week of training dates was over by then, and all possible trainings were at bad times (during our church on Sunday was when my husband had to do Judge training) or a long drive to the south end of the county. The training, we thought, was actually improving, now that we can do it in person—and they limit ADA training to the few minutes of necessary info. So I’m not sure why the Director was fired.

So, there were all these issues affecting voters who want to cast their votes. And do they own up to the problem? No. They blame voters for incompetence (don’t know how to put the paper in). They blame presiding judges for incompetence. They blame last summer’s election law changes—which apply to mail-in ballots, which were part of Early Voting count, not Election Day count—different places, different procedures entirely. They even claimed, “See, the errors were found; that means the system is working,” as if that vindicated them. By the way, it was the Secretary of State that found the discrepancy of those 10,000 votes, not Longoria’s “system.”

central counting taking place, screenshot from here

What we have is an absolute mess—followed by a coverup.

What we need is for this to never happen again.

We have a small countywide election coming up in early May. Both parties have a runoff election May 24. We need things fixed by then. But, even more importantly, we need things fixed before the high-turnout November midterm election. Last Tuesday’s disaster was with a 15% voter turnout. What happens when we get a 50% voter turnout?

Senator Paul Bettencourt suggests that we get rid of Hidalgo’s unelected election bureaucrat and return the duties of county elections to the County Clerk. Currently the County Clerk is a Democrat. Bettencourt, a Republican, is making that suggestion. Anyone has to be better than Longoria and crew. And we need someone accountable to the people, with some kind of stake in keeping us from being the worst run election of any large county in the nation.

The lawsuit is intended to force Longoria and her crew to resign or be fired. While that is necessary, I look forward to a day we can return our elections to a Republican County Clerk, with experience and integrity. We miss those days.