Georgia: Athens-Clarke County broke law by pulling machines, SOS says | Doug Richards/WXIA

The state election board is challenging a decision in Athens to set aside the state’s new voting system in favor of hand-marked paper ballots. The state board posted its intention to meet in Athens Wednesday, March 11 to get an explanation from local election board members who dumped the state’s new voting system and began allowing early voters to cast hand-marked paper ballots. The board withdrew the large, bright electronic ballot-marking devices Tuesday, following concerns about whether voters’ ballots were sufficiently concealed from people inside the precinct. The state election board, posting a meeting notice on the Secretary of State’s website, cited four Georgia laws that the local board may have violated by withdrawing the voting machines. The election board is chaired by Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who selected the Dominion voting system amid a flurry of sometimes-partisan controversy over whether the electronic system was susceptible to hacking. Critics of the selection contended hand-marked paper ballots were the only way to avoid electronic election hacking. The state bought 33,000 of the machines last year, at a cost of more than $100 million. The state delivered the last of them to Georgia’s 159 counties Feb. 14.

Indiana: What’s next in Tippecanoe Co. ballot machines? | Dave Bangert/Lafayette Journal & Courier

What sort of voting machines should Tippecanoe County go with? For two hours Monday evening, voters will have a chance to test models from four companies, as Tippecanoe County election officials consider what will replace a system in use since 2006. “We want to know what people like, what they prefer, after they get to try them out,” Tippecanoe County Clerk Julie Roush said. “We think we know what we like, as an Election Board. But we’re hoping this will help us make sure it’s what people want.” That night, voting equipment from four vendors – Election Systems & Software, Hart InterCivic Inc., MicroVote General Corp. and Unisyn Voting Solutions – will be on display. People will be able to test the features of each machine, all of which will be equipped with a verifiable paper trail. Roush said the vendors come from a list of those approved by the Indiana Secretary of State, which has a site dedicated to the particulars about each machine and each company. To see it, go to: www.in.gov/sos/elections/4532.htm. Roush said the Tippecanoe County Election Board will not make decisions about the machines. Instead, the open house will include a survey to get feedback from those who come test the equipment.

Louisiana: Secretary of State says 2020 election secure without paper ballots | David Jacobs/The Center Square

Louisiana Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin hopes to acquire electronic voting machines that also record votes on paper, though he said this year’s elections will be secure even without a paper trail. Ardoin spoke Thursday evening at a panel hosted by LSU’s Manship School of Mass Communications. Panelist Susan Greenhalgh, policy advisor for the National Election Defense Coalition, said digital-only voting is the “most concerning” method from a security standpoint. Critics say Louisiana voting machines’ lack of a paper component goes against the national trend and violates best practices. Greenhalgh said voting machines can malfunction and can be “maliciously infected” even if they’re not connected to the internet. Paper ballots allow voters to see for themselves that their vote was tallied correctly, while a “black box” voting machine does not, she said.  Paper backups also can be used to audit the electronic results, Greenhalgh added. “We need to trust the process,” she said.

South Carolina: Richland County selects new elections director. Can she whip the office into shape? | Bristow Marchant/The State

After almost a year, Richland County is close to having a new elections director. The county elections board voted Thursday to offer the job to Tammy Smith, currently the deputy elections director in Wilson County, Tennessee. Smith would be the latest person to hold what has become a revolving door position, with seven people serving in the position in the past seven years. The county has struggled with long lines and lost ballots in past elections. “She’s ready to hit the ground running,” said board vice chair Craig Plank. “She’ll be able to watch things with meticulous detail.” Smith would be the first full-time director since Rokey Suleman was fired last May after two years heading the department. That decision came after Richland County failed to count more than 1,000 ballots in the 2018 general election, and the entire election board was fired by Gov. Henry McMaster. Current board chair Charles Austin said Smith’s biggest challenge will be restoring staff morale and public confidence in the office.

Texas: Dallas County asks for Super Tuesday recount after discovering it missed some ballots | Alexa Ura/The Texas Tribune

Dallas County officials are seeking a recount of the March 3 primary results after discovering that an unknown number of ballots were not initially counted. In a petition filed late Friday in state district court, Dallas County election administrator Toni Pippins-Poole said her office has discovered that ballots from 44 tabulating machines were not accounted for in the election results reported by the county on Super Tuesday. It’s unclear how many ballots were missing from the county’s tally of votes. The issue turned up after county officials were unable to reconcile the number of voters who checked in to cast ballots at some polling places and the number of ballots received from those sites. The tally of ballots had been compiled from flash drives that were turned in to the county, and the county initially believed it had received all ballots from the 454 vote centers, Pippins-Poole said in an affidavit filed with the court. “However, it was later determined that there are ballots from 44 of the precinct scanner and tabulator machines that are unaccounted for,” Pippins-Poole said. She could not immediately be reached for comment on Saturday.

Texas: Bexar Elections Official: Software Issue Will Be Resolved by November | Iris Dimmick/Rivard Report

Bexar County wasn’t the only county in Texas that experienced difficulties reporting election results on Super Tuesday, but it was one of the last large counties to start doing so. While software issues caused a delay in reporting vote tallies Tuesday night, one problem election officials encountered early on election day was fixed with a simple flip of a switch. Backup generators kicked on at the Copernicus Community Center voting site to power printers, laptops, and voting machines during the early hours of Tuesday. Utility crews and facility staff investigated the problem; they couldn’t figure it out at first, said Bexar County Elections Administrator Jacque Callanen. “There [were] no power issues. … Everything was plugged in, it looked great,” Callanen said. “Well, nobody had turned the surge protector on. … They had not looked at the little light at the bottom.” Power was restored to the far East Side voting site by 2 p.m., she said. Callenen called a press conference Wednesday morning to outline the factors that led to Bexar County’s “rough morning” and slow, cumbersome posting of voting results on Tuesday night. In short, a record-breaking number of voters resulted in technical issues.

Editorials: In West Virginia, every voter counts | Mac Warner and Jeremiah Underhill/WVNews

It is often said, “every vote counts.” In West Virginia, every voter counts, too. For too long, segments of voters have been disenfranchised from our democratic process through no fault of their own. Deployed armed services members often lack access to mail, printers, and scanners — components needed for casting paper ballots from remote locations. Similarly, voters living with a physical disability are often prevented from marking and casting a ballot secretly when they cannot make it to the polls in person. Technological advancements have torn down barriers to convenient interaction with government and private entities and have increased accessibility without sacrificing a person’s privacy. It is common for people to bank, transfer money, sign documents, shop and receive sensitive medical information via mobile devices, regardless their location around the world. Not only is technology available to help people vote, West Virginia law now requires it. On February 3, 2020, West Virginia took a huge step forward to expand the voting franchise with the signing into law of SB 94. This law requires election officials to make absentee voting fully accessible to voters with physical disabilities who are prevented from voting in-person at the polls and from marking ballots without assistance. These absentee voters with physical disabilities now have an option to mail or electronically submit their ballot back to their county clerk using approved technology.

Editorials: Dumb decisions led to long Texas voting lines. Here’s what to do next time | Fort Worth Star-Telegram

For a brief moment Tuesday night, Texas was in the national political spotlight, with huge voter turnout and a pivotal role in the changing direction of the Democratic presidential primary. But before long, we were the story of the day for the wrong reason — intolerably long lines to vote in several of the state’s big cities. The most attention went to Houston, where voters waited up to six hours at a polling center at a historically black college. But Tarrant County had its problems, too, with Democratic voters often facing long lines while machines dedicated to the Republican primary sat largely unused. Blame has flown in all the expected directions for these failures, with finger-pointing at county and state officials, the political parties, and the Supreme Court for weakening federal supervision under the Voting Rights Act. There’s elements of truth to each, and it’s a mistake to judge an entire system on the worst possible anecdotes. But polls are only going to get busier in November. Elected officials and political players at all levels need a plan of action that’s based in reality before our democracy breaks down right in front of our eyes.

Philippines: Comelec to test mobile voting app in the Netherlands, Spain | Leslie Ann Aquino/Manila Bulletin News

Aside from San Francisco in the United States, the Commission on Elections (Comelec) will also test the mobile voting application in the Netherlands and Spain for possible use in future polls. The Comelec was initially planning to conduct the test run in San Francisco, Singapore, and Middle East but decided to drop the last two due to the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) there. “We will be testing this mobile voting app in San Francisco (United States), Amsterdam (the Netherlands), and Spain,” Comelec Commissioner Rowena Guanzon said in an interview Thursday. “During the test run we will see how fast it is and also the problems before we make a recommendation to the Senate, House of Representatives and the JCOC (Joint Oversight Congressional Committee),” she added. Guanzon believes having a mobile voting app system would be very helpful especially in situations where there is a disease outbreak or natural calamity.

Venezuela: Fire will not destroy Venezuelan electoral system: official | AFP

Venezuela’s electoral system was damaged but not destroyed after a fire broke out in a warehouse used to store voting equipment, the National Electoral Council said Sunday. A 6,000-square-meter (65,000 square feet) warehouse in Caracas caught fire on Saturday. In just half an hour, the fire devoured thousands of pieces of electric equipment. These included 44,408 voting machines, 582 civil registry computers and more than 49,000 biometric identification devices used in the elections, according to the electoral council (CNE) president Tibisay Lucena. “The Venezuelan electoral system is far from being destroyed,” Lucena said, adding the electoral procedure is a multi-step process, only two of which have been damaged. “This act, which we are waiting to hear if it was criminal, affected only two of the processes: the inventory process and the machine production process,” she told reporters.

Georgia: Lawyer warned Georgia county on dumping new voting system | Kate Brumback and Russ Bynum/Associated Press

A Georgia county has opted to ditch the state’s new voting machines and switch to hand-marked paper ballots during early voting for the March presidential primary, despite a warning from the county’s attorney that the decision could result in litigation that’s tough to defend in court. The Athens-Clarke County Board of Elections voted 3-2 on Tuesday to mothball the new machines after less than two days of using them in early voting ahead of Georgia’s presidential primaries. The board ordered poll workers to switch to paper ballots marked by hand starting Wednesday. Board Chairman Jesse Evans said concerns that bystanders at the polls could see the choices voters made on the new system’s touchscreens rendered it impossible to guarantee ballot secrecy. The March 24 presidential primaries mark the first statewide test for Georgia’s new $103 million voting system, which combines electronic touchscreens with printed ballots to provide a paper record of the vote. Some election integrity advocates have argued the bright touchscreens with their large fonts make it easy to see how other people are voting.

National: Super Tuesday gives feds and states a test run for securing November vote | Sean Lyngaas/CyberScoop

Federal and state officials were up late Tuesday monitoring for threats from hackers and trolls to the biggest primary day of the 2020 election season. A watch floor at the Department of Homeland Security kept election administrators across the country plugged into threat data coming in from the intelligence community.  While there were some notable technical glitches in the voting process, nothing malicious came to pass. Bleary-eyed officials can go back to work Wednesday with a sigh of relief but also some lessons learned on how to protect the November presidential vote, which U.S. officials have repeatedly warned will draw foreign interference attempts. “We had well over 100 state and local officials in the room with us exchanging information with us throughout the day,” a senior official at the Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity division said on a 9 p.m. Eastern call with reporters.

National: Report: Russian social accounts sow election discord – again | Amanda Seitz and Barbara Ortutay/Associated Press

Four years after Russia-linked groups stoked divisions in the U.S. presidential election on social media platforms, a new report shows that Moscow’s campaign hasn’t let up and has become harder to detect. The report from University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Young Mie Kim found that Russia-linked social media accounts are posting about the same divisive issues — race relations, gun laws and immigration — as they did in 2016, when the Kremlin polluted American voters’ feeds with messages about the presidential election. Facebook has since removed the accounts. Since then, however, the Russians have grown better at imitating U.S. campaigns and political fan pages online, said Kim, who analyzed thousands of posts. She studied more than 5 million Facebook ads during the 2016 election, identifying Russia’s fingerprints on some of the messages through an ad-tracking app. Her review is co-published by the Brennan Center for Justice, a law and policy institute, where she is a scholar. The Russian improvements make it harder for voters and social media platforms to identify the foreign interference, Kim said. “For normal users, it is too subtle to discern the differences,” Kim said. “By mimicking domestic actors, with similar logos (and) similar names, they are trying to avoid verification.”

California: Voting changes, computer glitches mar California primary | Adam Beam and Janie Har/Associated Press

A series of changes in California meant to boost voter turnout and smooth its new Super Tuesday primary election led to a surge in last-minute voters, computer problems and short-staffing that appeared to catch elections officials by surprise, triggering scathing criticism Wednesday. Long lines, sluggish computer connections and general confusion plagued polling places statewide — raising serious questions about the ability of the most populous state to handle November’s general election, when millions more voters are expected. Critics called for an overhaul before then. Los Angeles County rolled out a new $300 million voting system, including new scanning devices and voting machines that the state certified despite known security and technical problems. Many of the voting devices didn’t work and there were not enough check-in machines or poll workers, leading to wait times of two hours or more. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign filed a legal complaint in the county that has more than a quarter of California’s 20 million voters, a county supervisor demanded an investigation and a Democratic Party leader gave a stinging rebuke of the “abysmal” infrastructure.

California: State wants Los Angeles County to mail ballots to every voter to avoid delays in November | Adam Beam/Associated Press

California’s top election official says Los Angeles County should mail ballots to its 5.5 million registered voters at least 29 days ahead of the November general election to avoid the lengthy delays that plagued polling places in the nation’s most populous county on Super Tuesday. Secretary of State Alex Padilla said in a letter to Los Angeles County Registrar Dean Logan that he had “deep concerns” about how the county handled the election. As the county rolled out a new $300 million voting system, many machines failed and other problems at polling locations led to wait times of two hours or more. Plus, traditional neighborhood polling places were replaced with fewer multipurpose “voting centers” that were unfamiliar to voters and contributed to the confusion. The centers, where people could register and vote, were among a series of changes in California meant to boost voter turnout and make voting more convenient. But they also saw problems statewide on Tuesday. Of the 15 counties using the vote centers, 14 mailed ballots to every registered voter at least 28 days ahead of the election. Los Angeles County—with a population bigger than most states—was exempt. That must change ahead of the November general election, Padilla said Thursday. “This would be just a first, but important, step in better meeting the needs of the largest, most diverse voting jurisdiction in the nation,” Padilla said.

California: The Scramble To Fix Los Angeles Voting Before November (And What Went Wrong) | Libby Denkmann/ LAist

Los Angeles County’s new voting system is supposed to make elections more accessible. But on Tuesday, many voters found casting a ballot to be anything but easy. At L.A. County’s new in-person voting locations, many people faced long wait times — sometimes in excess of three hours — caused by technical problems that marred the system’s debut. Late Tuesday, the county’s top elections official apologized. On Wednesday, L.A. County Supervisor Janice Hahn called for an investigation. “Some hiccups are to be expected with a new system,” said Hahn in a statement, “but there were widespread reports of problems.” “These issues,” Hahn added, “need to be fixed before this November.” The snafu prompted California’s Secretary of State to issue a stern statement Thursday: “In Los Angeles County, too many voters faced unacceptably long wait times,” Secretary of State Alex Padilla said. “Voters who waited patiently for hours deserve our praise for their commitment to democracy. Voters deserve better.” Padilla said Los Angeles County should mail a ballot to every registered voter, and address staffing, logistical, training and equipment issues that bogged down voting in the country’s largest jurisdiction on Super Tuesday.

California: Probe of Los Angeles County voting problems needed now, supervisor says | Los Angeles Times

A Los Angeles County supervisor on Wednesday called for an immediate investigation into widespread voting problems Tuesday that resulted in people waiting hours to vote. Supervisor Janice Hahn said the county needed to launch a “forensic autopsy of what happened yesterday” amid widespread complaints and outrage over the handling of the new balloting system. “I’m not happy with the number of problems,” she said. Hahn pushed back when asked whether the Board of Supervisors had failed to provide oversight of the creation and rollout of the new voting system. “It was about a yearlong, at least, process of testing these machines. There were focus groups about these machines; there was a lot of reports by our county registrar recorder on rolling out. Of course, Alex Padilla, our secretary of state, certified these machines with a few conditions. I think we were all waiting for the proof, which was yesterday, and I’m not happy with the number of problems,” she said. Los Angeles County elections chief Dean Logan acknowledged the problems. “This was a challenging day for a lot of voters in L.A. County, and I certainly apologize for that. That’s something that has to be better,” he said.

Georgia: State Election Board Investigating Athens-Clarke’s Decision To Use Hand-Marked Paper Ballots | Stephen Fowler/Georgia Public Broadcasting

The Georgia State Election Board is holding an emergency hearing in Athens next week to determine whether Athens-Clarke County is violating several state laws by not conducting elections on the state’s new $104 million voting system. According to a notice sent to the county board of elections, Athens-Clarke officials should be prepared to present evidence explaining why it voted 3-2 to determine that it would be “impossible and impracticable” to use the ballot-marking devices. Athens-Clarke officials have moved to paper ballots instead. The secretary of state’s office says it is investigation whether there are violations of at least six different state laws and rules regarding elections, including OCGA §§ 21-2-300, 21-2-265, 21-2-266, 21-2-267 and State Election Board Rules 183-1-12-.01 and 183-1-14-.02. One of the laws mentioned mandates that every county use the same voting system, which Athens-Clarke is not following after the board cited a different state law that says an election may be conducted by hand-marked paper ballot if the use of the machines “is impossible or impracticable.”

Idaho: Canyon County rolls out new Hart Ballot Marking Devices for all voters equipment ahead of March election | Rachel Spacek/Idaho Press

Thursday morning the Canyon County Elections Office was bustling with county and poll workers unpacking the county’s new voting equipment to prepare for Election Day on March 10. Canyon County voters this election are using the new $3 million system for the first time, a system that will use both an electronic and paper ballot system. Canyon County Clerk Chris Yamamoto said the new system isn’t really “electronic voting,” because the machines print out a completed paper ballot once votes are cast. “What the machines are doing is it is running the pencil for you, it prints out a paper ballot that we store. We have it on digital, but we also have a paper ballot,” Yamamoto said. Voters who have participated in early voting have already used the system under the guidance of trained poll workers.

Maine: High voter turnout drives long lines; some towns forced to photocopy ballots after running low | WMTW

Maine’s top election official said turnout in the presidential primary election was heavier than expected on Super Tuesday. Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap said he’d projected turnout of 15 percent Tuesday, but final turnout will surpass that projection. Long lines were reported across the state, particularly Tuesday evening after people got out of work. Some towns had to get permission from the Secretary of State’s Office to print photocopies of ballots after running low.

If you hear your town is running low on ballots, no worries- we are granting permission to municipalities (upon request) to photocopy ballots as needed. They’ll be hand-counted, as tabulators cannot process them. Be assured: You will receive a ballot and it will be counted!

— MaineSOS (@MESecOfState) March 4, 2020

The law allows Dunlap to certify more copies being made in order to ensure everyone can vote.

Minnesota: Lawmakers question election security funding after Minnesota poll finder error | Stephen Montemayor/Minneapolis Star Tribune

Some GOP lawmakers are questioning a new round of federal election security money after an employee error caused the Minnesota Secretary of State’s online poll finder to link to a partisan liberal website on Super Tuesday. Republican state lawmakers sharply rebuked Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat, for what he called a “lapse in judgment” by an IT worker who linked the state’s overloaded poll finder tool to a BoldProgressives.org web page. The link was active for 17 minutes on Tuesday before the office removed it. “How can an employee just redirect and get into IT and do all of this?” said state Sen. Mary Kiffmeyer, a Big Lake Republican and former secretary of state, speaking at a Tuesday hearing in her Senate state government and elections committee. “It’s a very concerning issue, especially in this time of security — and ample money was given already in May of last year.” Kiffmeyer engaged in a monthslong standoff last year with Simon over $6.6 million in federal election security money approved by Congress. Minnesota law requires the Legislature to sign off on the funding before it reaches Simon’s office.

North Carolina: Super Tuesday vote counting problems in Warren County North Carolina | Will Doran/Raleigh News & Observer

Officials in a North Carolina county accidentally inflated the votes in one Super Tuesday primary election, but fixed the problem on Thursday. Tuesday’s election results are still unofficial everywhere in the state, and officials at the N.C. State Board of Elections will do audits all around the state regardless of whether voting results appear wrong. In one rural area, however, they have already found an issue and say it was due to human error. “It’s very important to note that the results on the election night reporting system are unofficial and this is ongoing,” Pat Gannon, a spokesman for the elections board, said in an interview Thursday morning. Warren County, a small community north of Raleigh on the Virginia border, has only 41 registered Libertarian voters. But on Tuesday the county reported more than 800 votes cast in the Libertarian presidential race.

North Carolina: How did Guilford’s new voting system work? | Taft Wireback/Greensboro News Record

The votes are in, and Guilford County’s new system of hand-marked, paper ballots came through its first, full-fledged test without any major snags. Elections Director Charlie Collicutt said the new equipment worked well in Tuesday’s primary and voters adapted successfully to the shift away from touchscreen voting to paper ballots. “There was some apprehension early in the process because it is something different from what you’ve been doing for the last 15 years,” Collicutt said Wednesday. Voters came out for Tuesday’s primary in robust, if not record numbers: 112,728 cast ballots, or about 31% of the county’s registered voters, Collicutt said. That’s 5% below turnout for the last presidential primary in 2016 when 122,897 voters participated, he said. Once voting got under way Tuesday, the only significant drawback came from delays by state government’s computer system in displaying Guilford’s results online, Collicutt said. “The big issue was how slow the state’s website was,” he said. “The upload was so slow.” Guilford County spent about $2 million for its new voting equipment to comply with changes in state law that require systems to leave a better paper trail than the touchscreen terminals Guilford had been using for years. The new system relies on printed, multiple-choice ballots that voters fill out in ink and feed into a tabulator at their precincts.

South Carolina: Richland County board votes to hire new elections director | Chrisa Trainor/The Post and Courier

After nearly nine months of searching, Richland County will look to Tennessee for its new elections director On Thursday night, the Richland County Election Commission unanimously voted to offer the director of elections and voter registration position to Tammy Smith, who is currently the assistant administrator of elections in Wilson County, Tennessee. Wilson County has a population of more than 136,000 and is just east of Nashville. Election commission vice chairman Craig Plank said Thursday that Smith would be notified of the board’s decision “as soon as possible.” Plank says he feels confident Smith will accept the post and that she “has expressed her desire to be an active part of Richland County.” The election commission chose Smith over the other finalist for the position, Terry Graham, the former Chester County elections director who has served as Richland County’s interim elections director since July 2019.

Texas: Long voting lines in Texas spotlight concerns about access to the polls | Elise Viebeck/ The Washington Post

The lines stretched in the dark across the plaza at Texas Southern University, as hundreds of would-be voters stood for hours Tuesday to cast ballots in the Democratic presidential primary. As they waited, students shared phone chargers, activists sent in pizza and exhausted voters resorted to sitting on the ground. The voting center at the historically black university in Houston was one of a number of such locations around Texas that were plagued by long delays on Super Tuesday, raising questions about the readiness of local election officials and spurring outrage among voting rights advocates. Many cited as a factor the closing of hundreds of precincts around the state after a pivotal Supreme Court decision in 2013. One of the remaining Democrats in the presidential field — Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — seized on the episode, tweeting that it revealed a “crisis of voter suppression.” However, interviews with election officials, activists and voters pointed to a number of complicated factors that combined to produce the massive lines in Harris County. “There was actually a failure in the system at multiple junctures,” said Beth Stevens, the voting rights program director with the Texas Civil Rights Project, in an interview  “The effect is that you have black and brown people on college campuses standing in line for two hours, four hours, seven hours to vote,” she said.

Texas: Harris County’s cascade of election day fumbles disproportionately affected communities of color | Alexa Uren/The Texas Tribune

From the sunlit atrium of the science building on campus, former Vice President Joe Biden asked Texas Southern University for an assist. It was election day eve, and Biden was visiting the university just days after black voters in South Carolina had forcefully revived his presidential bid. That Biden had chosen to spend precious hours at Texas Southern ahead of Super Tuesday seemed to signal he hoped to make the historically black college and the community it represented a nexus between his last pivotal win and the next crucial test of his campaign. “Tomorrow, Texas is going to speak,” Biden said to a raucous throng of supporters surrounding him. “I think we’re going to do well here in Texas with the help of all of you. I’m asking you for your vote. I’m asking you for your support because I’ve got to earn it.

Texas: Bexar County’s new ES&S voting system ‘crashed’ 3 times, tying up race results, election chief says | Scott Huddleston/San Antonio ExpressNews

Bexar County Elections Administrator Jacque Callanen said computers used to post results in a new voting system “crashed” three times, forcing election officials to post separate sets of numbers, rather than consolidating them as they had on past election nights. “We will be working today with the vendor to get the regular report that y’all…

Texas: Harris County Democrats waited for hours to vote. Two-thirds of polling sites were in GOP areas. | Zach Despart and Mike Morris/Houston Chronicle

Many of the 322,000 Harris County Democratic primary voters who surged to the polls Tuesday faced long lines that forced several balloting sites to stay open late into the evening. Though Democrats outnumbered Republicans 2 to 1 on Election Day, almost two-thirds of the county’s voting centers were in county commissioner precincts in west Harris County held by Republicans. And, in a decision that worsened delays, the Harris County Clerk’s Office placed an equal number of voting machines for each party at every voting center. That meant that in Democratic strongholds like Kashmere Gardens, where Republicans were outnumbered 30 to 1 during early balloting, Democratic voters languished in line while GOP machines sat unused. Adding to the frustration was a County Clerk website that is supposed to show wait times at poll locations. Numerous voters on Tuesday complained the website led them to a polling place showing a minimal wait only to stand for hours because poll workers failed to update the site. Housing advocate Chrishelle Palay said she saw two or three Republican voters while she waited two hours to cast her ballot in Kashmere. “People were confused and infuriated,” Palay said. “They were definitely upset at the approach and how the machines were set up.”

Texas: Voting delays in Fort Worth area blamed on machine set up | Anna M. Tinsley/Fort Worth Star-Telegram

Some Tarrant County voters waited in long lines — some that took an hour or more to get through — to cast their vote Tuesday in the presidential primary election. Officials said that was because the turnout at some sites was larger than expected, some sites were understaffed, and some voters are still getting accustomed to the new voting machines. But frustration grew on Super Tuesday when there was, for instance, a long line of Democrats waiting to vote at a polling site as several machines went unused because they were set aside for Republicans. Tarrant County Judge Glen Whitley said he believes the problem can be avoided. “I hope we will take advantage of what technology offers us and share the machines between the two parties,” he said Wednesday. The catch is that early voting, which is run by the county, lets residents use any of the 600 voting machines set up to cast ballots in either the Republican or Democratic primary.

Washington: Senate committee reviewing Secretary of State’s election security bill | Northern Kittitas County Tribune

Secretary of State Kim Wyman’s election-security legislation, Senate Bill 6412, received a hearing in the Senate State Government, Tribal Relations and Elections Committee recently. The bill aims to bolster election security on four fronts — eliminate cyber threats by removing risky electronic ballot-return methods, improve third-party ballot collection, provide post-election security through statistical audits, and appropriate $1.8 million in order to draw nearly $9 million in federal matching funds to augment security. Sen. Hans Zeiger, R-Puyallup, is sponsoring the bill. “These critical election security improvements cannot wait. Cyber criminals are relentless, and in this upcoming, momentous election cycle, voters need to have confidence that our systems are secure and their information will remain protected,” said Wyman. “The race to secure our elections has no finish line, but Senate Bill 6412 propels elections officials in the right direction for 2020 and beyond.” Testifying in support of the bill was Kirstin Mueller, election-security issue chair for the League of Women Voters of Washington. “Over the last few years, detailed cybersecurity reports have been released, outlining what each state can do to improve the security of their elections. These reports have many recommendations in common – ensure a secure chain of custody of voted ballots, require paper ballots that voters have marked by hand or with the use of an assistive device, perform statistically based post-election audits that can catch and correct incorrect election outcomes, and keep all elements of voting and tabulation away from the internet. This legislation improves Washington’s election security in all of these critical areas,” Mueller said. “We believe this bill provides the right balance of access and security, and it protects organizations like the League, who want to help, by providing a way to track ballots.”