Texas Governor Abbott Calls for Probe Into Harris County Voting Issues

Catarina Saraiva and Madlin Mekelburg
·2 min read
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(Bloomberg) -- Texas Governor Greg Abbott called for the state to investigate election-day voting issues in Harris County, home to Houston.

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“The allegations of election improprieties in our state’s largest county may result from anything ranging from malfeasance to blatant criminal conduct,” Abbott said in a statement Monday. “Voters in Harris County deserve to know what happened.”

The county, the third-largest in the US, was the subject of a lawsuit filed late on election day that claimed at least a dozen voting locations opened late. A local judge ordered polls to remain open an additional hour, but the Texas Supreme Court blocked the order and said any ballots cast after the original closing time should be counted separately.

Some polling sites also reported running out of paper, which forced officials to temporarily halt voting at those locations. Harris County had the longest ballot in the nation, with as many as 103 races in some precincts, and the system requires individuals to cast votes on a computer that prints out the results and then are fed into another machine for storage. After the polls close, the computer drives are transported to a central counting facility for tabulation.

The Republican-controlled state has often sparred with the liberal-leaning county. The legislature last year enacted laws to bar some of the new voting measures used by Harris County during the pandemic, including 24-hour and drive-through voting.

After Abbott announced he would send state inspectors to monitor the voting process on election night this year, Harris County requested federal overseers from the Department of Justice. Both entities were present to observe last week.

After the March primary, it took Harris County more than 30 hours to count its votes, prompting the country’s top election official to resign.

(Adds extended voting hours in the third paragraph.)

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