Texas

Texas: In Guadalupe County, an elections academy aims to strengthen residents’ trust in voting | Natalia Contreras/The Texas Tribune

Guadalupe County’s Citizens Elections Academy is the brainchild of Lisa Hayes, the county’s elections administrator, who modeled the idea after a similar initiative by local law enforcement. Across the state, counties and cities offer local government citizens’ academies and local law enforcement agencies run police department academies, but Guadalupe County’s academy — launched in the fall of 2023 — is the first to focus solely on elections. The goal, Hayes said, is to increase confidence and trust in the election process. It’s part of a broader effort by Texas election officials to address rampant spread of misinformation following the November 2020 election. Across the state, election officials have hosted open houses, workshops, and additional public testing of voting equipment beyond what’s required by law to try to regain voters’ trust. Read Article

Texas proposal would ease polling place requirements for countywide voting | Natalia Contreras/The Texas Tribune

Texas state senators Thursday held a public hearing on legislation crafted to update a 2023 law requiring certain counties to drastically increase the number of polling locations if they use vote centers for countywide voting. Last year, Votebeat reported that election officials in several counties said they were struggling to comply with the law as written. “Most election administrators and county clerks will tell you they’re struggling to find workers on Election Day,” Bettencourt said during the hearing Thursday. He cited an example reported by Votebeat last year of election officials in Brazos County who said they were struggling to comply with the law. Read Article

Texas supporters of countywide voting on election day fight efforts to end it | Natalia Contreras/The Texas Tribune

More than a dozen Texas counties are fighting a push by some Republican state lawmakers to get rid of a program that allows voters to cast their ballots at any county polling location on Election Day, arguing that the option saves taxpayers millions of dollars and makes voting more convenient. County officials say it should be up to local leaders and election officials who best understand the needs of their communities to decide whether to offer countywide voting on Election Day. Two bills have been filed to get rid of the option, which is allowed in 99 counties encompassing more than 80% of the state’s voters. Eliminating it would mean counties would almost certainly have to open, equip and staff more neighborhood voting sites, since Election Day voters would be able to vote only at their assigned precinct. In some counties, available facilities are also difficult to find. Read Article

Texas counties scramble after ES&S pollbook decertified | Natalia Contreras/The Texas Tribune

With city and school elections just a few months away, election officials in more than 60 Texas counties are scrambling to replace a key piece of voting equipment that’s no longer in service: the electronic pollbooks they use to check voters in at the polls. The state decertified widely used pollbook software from voting machine company Election Systems & Software in December after several thousand voters in Dallas County received the wrong ballot during the November presidential election, a problem local officials attributed to glitches with the e-pollbook. Now county officials have to decide whether to wait to see if ES&S’s updated software is certified in time to prepare for the May elections, or choose a different certified vendor, which could be expensive. They must also consider whether any new option would be compatible with their existing systems and whether they have enough time to train poll workers to use it. Read Article

Texas: “It kind of sounded biblical”: How a roll of the dice and numbered beads determined a Corpus Christi City Council race | Natalia Contreras/The Texas Tribune

A single Corpus Christi City Council seat drew five contenders in November’s election, a level of interest that ultimately prolonged the final outcome until this week — and at some points left officials scratching their heads as they were forced to dig through archaic rules to figure out how to determine the winner. After the November votes were counted, incumbent Everett Roy and former council member Billy Lerma earned the most support. But since neither got a majority of votes, the contest remained undecided. Both men advanced to a December runoff. The second round of voting didn’t bring a resolution. Turns out, voters were deadlocked. The candidates tied, 1,916 to 1,916. By law, that result triggered a recount. At Lerma’s request, the recount was conducted by hand and took city officials roughly four days.

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Texas: Dallas County scrambles to secure voter check-in software before May 3 election | Tracey McManus/The Dallas Morning News

Less than four months until voters return to the polls, Dallas County is scrambling to secure new check-in software after failures during the Nov. 5 general election. And the window for getting it done is tight. The county’s electronic pollbooks from Election Systems & Software malfunctioned during last year’s election, resulting in nearly 4,000 people voting with ballots tied to precincts where they do not live. As a result, the Texas secretary of state decertified that version of the pollbook software in December, said Judd Ryan, ES&S senior vice president of sales. Read Article

Texas: Can these 5 bills to expand voting access win bipartisan support in the Legislature? | Natalia Contreras/The Texas Tribune

Republican lawmakers in Texas are signaling this year that they will continue pushing for restrictions on voting in the name of combating voter fraud, including ending countywide voting and requiring proof of citizenship to register. But some efforts to expand voting access — including legislation that has come up in past legislative sessions — could gain bipartisan support, some policy experts say. Bills that would expand the acceptable forms of ID voters can present at the polls and one that expands mail-voting access for people with disabilities, among others, have a chance to move forward, said Daniel Griffith, senior director of policy at the Secure Democracy Foundation, a nonprofit research group. They’re not sure bets to become law, of course. Read Article

Texas GOP wants to require citizenship proof from voters | Natalia Contreras/The Texas Tribune

Republicans are making a big push for legislation requiring Texans to provide proof of citizenship to register to vote, and key lawmakers are signaling that they’ll make it a priority next year. The push is part of a national effort by the GOP and conservative allies who assert that such legislation is needed to stop noncitizens from illegally casting ballots, even though such cases are already very rare. Read Article

Texas election bill aimed at increasing transparency could sow chaos for election officials, experts say | Natalia Contreras/The Texas Tribune

Key Texas lawmakers are reviving legislation that would require election officials to respond within set time frames to requests to explain “election irregularities” from certain party officials and election workers. If the complainants aren’t satisfied, the bill would let them take their requests to the Texas Secretary of State’s Office, which would have to decide whether to investigate further and conduct an audit. State Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Houston Republican who authored the bill, said it will help clear up “any misunderstanding” about elections. But experts and local election officials said Texas already has policies in place that have increased election transparency and security. Read Article

Texas ballot secrecy draws attention in Legislature, courts | Natalia Contreras/The Texas Tribune

Texas officials had to issue emergency guidance this year to patch holes in new election transparency laws that threatened to expose the choices people made on their ballots. Now that the 2024 election is over, the issue of protecting ballot secrecy is receiving renewed attention in both the courts and the legislature. A national conservative nonprofit last week filed a federal lawsuit against Harris County, alleging the county isn’t taking steps to protect voters’ right to a secret ballot. Another case involving an activist who claims to have uncovered the ballot choices of more than 60,000 voters is ongoing. Read Article

A Texas election official feels the strain of unrelenting scrutiny | Natalia Contreras/Votebeat

At election time, Trudy Hancock spends a lot of time in her car, delivering equipment to polling sites scattered around Brazos County and visiting poll workers who need her help in the field. She keeps the car radio on, and always tuned to Christian music. Recovering from a tiring Election Day last week, the longtime county election administrator recalled hearing one song that resonated with her. It’s called “The Truth,” and opens with the lyrics:

How many times can you hear the same lie
Before you start to believe it?

At her desk that morning, she recited a version of those lyrics as best as she could remember them, softly, haltingly. “But I know the truth,” she added, as she tried to hold back tears. “It gets hard Read Article

Texas sees no major disruptions to voting on Election Day | Natalia Contreras/The Texas Tribune

After months of anticipation and partisan fights over election administration, voting in Texas went relatively smoothly on Election Day, with election officials reporting no major disruptions. More than 9 million Texans cast ballots early in person or by mail, roughly half of the state’s 18.6 million registered voters. Two million moreo Texans cast ballots on Election Day, according to unofficial totals. The figure doesn’t yet surpass the 11.3 million voters who cast ballots in 2020. As in every election, there were scattered problems or glitches. Early Tuesday, vandals used spray paint to inscribe pro-Palestinian messages on a polling location in Tarrant County, but the incident didn’t affect the county’s ability to use the location for voting. In Dallas and Bexar counties, technical problems with equipment were reported and resolved early in the day. Across the state, voters with disabilities struggled to find signs directing them to curbside voting, according to the Texas Civil Rights Project, a nonprofit voter advocacy group that ran an election protection hotline. Other voters said some poll workers weren’t familiar with a new law allowing voters with disabilities to move to the front of the line. Read Article

As Texas refuses online voter registration, paper applications get lost | Natalia Contreras/The Texas Tribune

Last year, Hannah Murry remembers, she filled out every line of her paper voter registration. She then gave it to a volunteer deputy registrar at a registration drive at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, where she’s a student. “I thought that was handled, so I just went on with my life,” said Murry. It wasn’t handled. Murry, 21, found that out when she went to an early voting location in Nueces County last fall to cast her first ballot, in the constitutional amendment election. She handed her ID to an election worker — who told her she wasn’t on the rolls. At that point, it was too late to fix it. Poll workers let her update her registration on site for the next election, which she did. She left confused and frustrated. Read Article

Texas prepares for Nov. 5 with paper ballots and strengthened security | María Méndez/The Texas Tribune

Only six Texas counties will have in-person voters at the polls use direct-recording electronic, or DRE, voting systems that do not rely on paper ballots, according to Secretary of State data mapped by the group Verified Voting. Paper-backed systems have made a comeback among growing cybersecurity concerns, aging voting machines and changes following the 2020 election, said Mark Lindeman, Policy and Strategy Director of Verified Voting. “What makes the 2024 election fundamentally even more secure than the 2020 election is that almost everyone is voting on paper,” he said. “It doesn’t mean that nothing can go wrong. It means that even if things go wrong, the problems can be corrected.” This transition doesn’t mean voting machines are now “foolproof,” but “paper ballots can cut through a lot of the noise,” and concerns about election hacking, Lindeman added. Read Article

Texas lawmakers signal push to require proof of citizenship from voters though instances of non-citizens voting are rare | Natalia Contreras and Vianna Davila/Votebeat

Texas lawmakers Wednesday signaled plans to consider a new law requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote, though even one of the strongest supporters of such legislation acknowledged instances of noncitizens voting are rare. An investigation by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and Votebeat published this week found the governor’s figure was likely inflated and, in some cases, wrong. The secretary of state’s office confirmed the news organization’s reporting during the hearing Wednesday after state Sen. Judith Zaffirini, a Democrat, cited the article’s findings and pressed Christina Adkins, the state elections division director. The news organizations found that between September 2021 and August 2024, counties removed 581 people from the rolls on the grounds that they were noncitizens, according to a report the secretary of state gave Abbott. Read Article

Texas’ vote harvesting law is unconstitutional, judge says | Xiomara Moore/The Texas Tribune

A federal judge ruled on Saturday that part of a Texas law that enacted new voting restrictions violated the U.S. Constitution by being too vague and restricting free speech. The ruling, made by U.S. District Judge Xavier Rodriguez, immediately halted the state’s ability to investigate alleged cases of vote harvesting, such as the investigation into the League of United Latin American Citizens by Attorney General Ken Paxton. Before today’s ruling, a person who knowingly provided or offered vote harvesting services in exchange for compensation was committing a third-degree felony. This meant that organizers of voter outreach organizations and even volunteers could spend up to ten years in prison and fined up to $10,000 for giving or offering these services. Read Article

Texas: Travis County sues top Texas officials, accusing them of violating National Voter Registration Act | Berenice Garcia/The Texas Tribune

Travis County officials sued Attorney General Ken Paxton and Secretary of State Jane Nelson on Tuesday over the state’s attempt to block voter registration efforts ahead of a hotly contested presidential election. The new federal lawsuit escalates a pre-election war between Republican state officials and Democratic urban county leaders over voter registration efforts and accuses Texas officials of violating the National Voter Registration Act. Developments in the ongoing battle continue unfolding as the Oct. 7 deadline to sign up to vote looms. Read Article

Texas sees high turnover of election administrators since 2020 election | Jack Fink/CBS Texas

A CBS News investigation has found since the 2020 election, Texas has seen a high turnover rate of people who oversee the elections in the state’s 254 counties. More than one-third of the election administrators and county clerks are new as the 2024 election approaches. “I think it’s going to be an intense season coming after the 2020 election,” said Dallas County Election Administrator Heider Garcia. “There’s been a lot of pressure, and the tone and social media can be very difficult.” For Garcia and others who run elections in counties across Texas, the political pressure has been a challenge. Read Article

Texas attorney general sues over Bexar County voter registration program | Erik De La Garza/Courthouse News Service

Making good on his threats to sue one of the state’s most populated — and Democratic-leaning counties — Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit Wednesday accusing Bexar County of enacting an illegal voter registration program. “This program is completely unlawful and potentially invites election fraud,” Paxton said in a statement immediately after filing the lawsuit in state court. “It is a crime to register to vote if you are ineligible.” County commissioners voted 3-1 on Tuesday in favor of a $392,700 contract for third-party company Civic Government Solutions to print and mail voter registration forms to unregistered voters “in location(s) based on targeting agreed to by the county,” according to the resolution. Read Article

Texas Rangers find no evidence of efforts to sway 2022 election results in Harris County | Joshua Fechter/The Texas Tribune

Investigators with the Texas Rangers and the Harris County District Attorney’s office found no evidence of attempts to sway the county’s November 2022 election, officials said Tuesday. Gov. Greg Abbott and other Republicans have heavily criticized Harris County officials for how the state’s most populous county ran that election. Some polling locations saw shortages of paper ballots and malfunctioning voting equipment. Some locations opened later in the day, resulting in longer wait times for voters. Those irregularities drove more than 20 local Republican candidates to contest the election results — and Republican lawmakers in the Texas Legislature to force the county to dissolve its elections administration office. Read Article

How Texas election officials treat voter roll challenges led by True the Vote | Natalia Contreras/Votebeat

County election departments across Texas are trying to reassure voters amid a flood of formal challenges questioning whether their registrations are valid. The challenges, filed by conservative groups and individual activists, seek to remove tens of thousands of voters from the rolls on the grounds that they don’t live in the county, are not citizens, or have died. Election officials say the challenges are complicating the work they’re already doing to keep their voter rolls updated. They want voters to know that they’re following state and federal laws that protect voters from being improperly removed from the rolls if someone questions their eligibility. Read Arfticle

Texas activist frustrates election officials with lawsuit about threat to ballot secrecy | Natalia Contreras/The Texas Tribune

Laura Pressley claims to hold the key to what should be a closely guarded secret: how every voter in Williamson County has voted. Her story about how she got hold of this information goes something like this: She had gathered clues through scores of public-records requests she had made over the years to the Williamson County elections department, looking for a breakthrough in her quest to find flaws with the electronic voting machines that Texans use to cast their ballots. One day, she fell to her knees, weeping, and asked God to reveal to her the vulnerabilities she was certain existed, she told attendees at an April social media event on ballot secrecy issues organized by the right-wing organization Cause of America, according to an audio recording reviewed by Votebeat. “I said, ‘Dear Lord, show me the pattern, because I know it’s here.’” Around 20 minutes later, by her account, “the Lord showed me the pattern, and I found it. I was literally in shock — emotional shock — to actually have the knowledge of how every voter in Williamson County votes.” Read Article

Texas: Fixing ballot secrecy problems won’t be easy, experts say | Natalia Contreras/The Texas Tribune

When Pam Anderson was a county elections clerk in Colorado about a decade ago, she worried about whether the state’s increasingly transparent election process had made it possible to link a ballot to the voter who cast it. As a test, she asked her staff in Jefferson County to see whether they could find a ballot that she had cast in a previous election. It took them less than 20 minutes. Since then, Colorado has taken steps to protect a voter’s right to a secret ballot: Election officials there remove the voting method and polling location from public reports detailing voter participation. The state has invested in training election officials to redact information from the records it releases publicly, and purchased technology to help make those redactions more efficiently, Anderson said. Such measures could help point the way forward for Texas, where recent laws enacted in the name of increasing election transparency have made it possible — in limited instances — to use public records and data to determine how individual voters voted. Read Article

Texas: Voter advocacy groups ask DOJ to step in after Texas allowed some voters’ ballots to be identified | Natalia Contreras/Votebeat

A coalition of watchdog and voter advocacy groups asked the U.S. Department of Justice on Thursday to use “all available legal authorities” to protect the secrecy of ballots after Votebeat and The Texas Tribune confirmed that the private choices some voters make in the voting booth can in some instances be identified using public, legally available records. The two news organizations reported on the limited ability to identify how some people vote after an independent news site published what it said was the image of the ballot a former state GOP chair cast in the March 5 Republican primary. The League of Women Voters of Texas, American Oversight, the Campaign Legal Center, and Southern Coalition for Social Justice cited the investigation by Votebeat and The Tribune that replicated a series of steps that could identify a specific person’s ballot choices using public records. The outlets did not detail the precise information or process needed to do so. The advocacy groups said the ability to identify how people vote could lead to voter intimidation. Read Article

Texas voters could be impacted if countywide voting ends | Natalie Contreras/The Texas Tribune

A long-running conservative push to get rid of countywide polling places is winning growing interest from state lawmakers, as well as a spot on the state Republican party’s list of legislative priorities for next year. But election officials are warning that if legislators scrap the state’s countywide voting program, they will struggle to pull off the changes that would be required — beginning with increasing their numbers of polling places. That means paying for hard-to-find additional locations, recruiting and paying workers to staff them, and obtaining more voting equipment. Election officials also worry that confused voters could be disenfranchised by the shift. Currently, 96 counties allow voters to cast ballots anywhere in their county on election day, according to the Texas Secretary of State’s Office. The list includes counties in every part of the state, collectively encompassing roughly 14.9 million, or 83%, of the state’s registered voters. Read Article

Texas risked ballot secrecy in bid for election transparency | Natalia Contreras, Karen Brooks Harper and William Melhado/The Texas Tribune

Texas’ efforts to make elections more transparent allows the public — in limited instances — to pierce the anonymity of the ballot and find out how people voted, undermining the secrecy essential to free elections. The choices voters make in the private voting booth can later be identified in some cases using public, legally available records, a review by Votebeat and The Texas Tribune found. Since 2020, requests for such records have skyrocketed, fueled by unsubstantiated concerns about widespread voter fraud, and Texas lawmakers have supported changes to make election records easier to access soon after elections. County elections administrators, trying to fulfill activists’ demands for transparency, have also made information public that can make it easier to determine how specific people voted. Read Article

Texas: Texas election chiefs face pressure to get details right after judge orders new election in close race | Natalia Contreras/The Texas Tribune

A judge’s decision to order a new election in a close Harris County race from 2022 is putting election officials statewide on notice: Any type of error — large or small — has the potential to trigger a challenge and disqualify votes if the margins are narrow enough. Some of the problems that prompted the judge’s order occur frequently around the state, especially in high-turnout elections, election officials told Votebeat. With the prospect of election outcomes being negated because of paperwork errors, they said, there’s now added pressure to train election workers and strictly follow procedure. “We have been stressing the importance of paperwork needing to be filled out properly,” said Trudy Hancock, elections administrator in Brazos County. “We emphasize to our workers how important this is, that we get public records requests and that we’re already being questioned about why something wasn’t done properly. We’re telling our workers that people are looking at this.” Read Article

Texas: Gillespie County election costs balloon after switch to hand count | Natalia Contreras/The Texas Trinue

The hand count of thousands of Republican primary election ballots in Gillespie County is on track to cost taxpayers more than double the wage costs of the 2020 Republican primary, according to records obtained by Votebeat. Public records show Republicans employed 350 people to hand count, who collectively reported working more than 2,300 hours the day of the election at a rate of $12 per hour. That means more than $27,000 in wages. Those numbers aren’t final, and they’re likely to grow. The tally does not include hourly wages for election clerks who worked at each of the county’s 13 precincts on election day checking in voters and performing duties other than counting. In addition, Gillespie Republicans will also hand-count ballots in a runoff election at the end of the month, which will add to the costs. Read Article

Texas: Surprise bill, uncertain future prompts Smith County to switch voter registration system vendors | Blake Holland/KLTV

Smith County is facing uncertainty regarding its voter registration system after their current vendor, VOTEC, unexpectedly requested additional funds to stay afloat, prompting concerns about the integrity of the upcoming elections. Elections Administrator Michelle Allcon emphasized the importance of not jeopardizing election integrity and questioned the transparency of VOTEC’s actions. Despite the risks associated with transferring data to a new vendor, Smith County commissioners voted to contract with VR Systems, initiating the process of migrating voter registration data to the new system to ensure its accuracy and completeness before the November election. Read Article

Texas: With lawsuits and recount petitions rising, some elections seem to go on forever | Natalia Contreras/The Texas Tribune

It has been 15 months since Democrat DaSean Jones was sworn in as a Harris County criminal district court judge. He’s presided over hundreds of cases since then. And he’ll be on the ballot again in November, this time for a seat on the Texas Supreme Court. But there’s an asterisk on his 2022 election win: His opponent, Republican Tami Pierce, is still challenging the outcome in court, arguing that there were “improper or illegal votes that shouldn’t have been counted” and that the election was “plagued with mistakes.” Her case is awaiting a ruling from a Bexar County visiting judge. It’s another example of a pattern officials and experts say they’re seeing around Texas in recent years: elections that just won’t end. Read Article