TEXAS ACTIVISTS CALL FOR FEDERAL OVERWATCH OF HARRIS COUNTY ELECTIONS TO STOP POSSIBLE VOTER SUPPRESSION
October 2022
Harris County officials and Texas activists wrote a letter to the state calling for federal oversight in response to state officials sending election inspectors to Harris County polling stations. Activists say this is a strategy to sow doubt into the integrity of the election process.
Less than a week before early voting began, Harris County Election Administrator Clifford Tatum received a letter from the Texas Secretary of State with a plan to send a “contingent of inspectors” along with a “task force” from the Texas Office of Attorney General to Harris County, one of the most populous and racially diverse voting districts in the U.S., the Houston Chronicle reported. With election integrity in question, Emily Eby, senior election protection attorney and policy counsel at Texas Civil Rights Project (TCRP), is working to ensure that voters can cast their ballot free from intimidation and suppression.
Eby was in law school at the University of Texas at Austin when she first heard about TCRP. The attorney said she believed the law profession has too bureaucratic and hated her first year of law school until she took a class about voting rights taught by the president of TCRP.
“This was the first time where my weird legal knowledge could be translated into human language and used to help human beings exercise their own rights,” Eby told me. “It felt much more democratic than, you know, my contracts law class, or my criminal law class.”
Now, returning to her alma mater to train law students who were once in her shoes, Eby sits in the law school’s courtyard to address many of the controversies facing the midterm election, her third election since graduating.
Based in Austin, Texas, TCRP lawyers frequently testify at the capitol against legislation that may interfere with the rights of Texas citizens. In 2021, Eby testified against Senate Bill 1 and duplicate bills that attempted to suppress marginalized voters.
SB1, signed into law in 2021 by Republican Gov. Greg Abbot, limits the ability of voters of color in predominantly Democratic counties to cast their ballots. This bill looms over Harris County, banning voting methods that were proven popular among people of color such as overnight early voting hours and drive-thru voting.
Eby said Texas legislators who supported SB1 and its many duplicates will continue to pass legislation that makes it harder for voters to cast their ballot.
“People of color are going to grow and grow as a sector of voters in this state. And they're just like desperately chopping off heads trying to see what they can do to stop it,” Eby said. “But I do think that means they're gonna get more desperate and try worse and worse ways and more and more outright racist policies to stop voters from voting.”
In 2019, TCRP implement the state’s first-ever online voter registration because the state was not complying with federal law that requires voter registration at the same time as driver's license transactions. In 2018, TCRP observed that eight different polling locations in Houston had machines that did not open until an hour after voting times began. Voters called the TCRP hotline and organization attorneys sued on election day to keep the polling locations open for an hour later in the evening to make up for the lost time.
This election season, TCRP is focused on working with other Texas civil rights organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union and Common Cause Texas to deploy federal observers to monitor the midterm election in Harris County to ensure that the state-sent election inspectors do not interfere with the voting process.
Eby said voters should be aware of two things: The new voter identification law, which requires voters to know if they originally registered with their social security number or drivers license, regardless of how long ago one may have originally registered as well as poll watchers looking to intimidate voters.
“I am not super fond of making people feel like they're bad people for not voting, because Texas has made it really hard on purpose,” Eby said. “It's not a voter's job, to move heaven and earth to vote in addition to parenting and being part of their church and having a job or three jobs and working to pay the rent. Voting should be easy. And I just want to do whatever I can to smooth the pathway.”
With over fifty years of experience teaching political science across the nation, Bob Stein, a professor at Rice University said he observed a drastic change in elections in the last four years, attributing this change to voting becoming less accessible and voters having less confidence in the integrity of the election process.
Stein, who has conducted a national survey interviewing over 6000 poll workers about their concerns for the midterm election, says poll watching could disrupt the election process. A concern Eby also raised.
“A poll watcher at the polling location can come in and challenge a voter, not only does that have a suppressive effect on that voter, but what else does it do? It slows down the voting process” Stein said. “It makes the line longer the waiting time and that can lead people to do what means the line or never getting in the line.”
Stein said the highly polarized and hyperpartisan nature of our elections leads voters to believe that something is “amiss.” While voter fraud may not have been proven to actually exist during the 2018 midterm elections, the consequence of convincing voters that it did created doubt about the legitimacy of the election process.
“We have so degraded voter confidence in our election system, to the point where I think it can undermine democratic institutions. What do I hope for? I hope for clean, simple elections,” Stein said.
Much of Clifford Tatum’s job as the new Harris County Elections Administrator is ensuring that elections are fair, accessible, clean and simple and that voters are educated on their rights. Getting the word out about election dates, locations and ballot-casting methods are a few of the goals Tatum hopes to achieve in this election cycle.
In a process that takes months to bring together, Tatum delegates responsibilities for countless departments from ballot coders, who create the voting ballots, to outreach and operations teams who help to keep the election running smoothly. Tatum’s primary focus is to continue to educate voters, though questions about the intent of the supposed election inspectors remain.
Roxeanne Werner, director of communication with the Harris County Attorney's Office said there is confusion across the board to understand what the state-sent election inspectors would do at the polls, as this is an unprecedented action taken by state officials.
“It's not a normal election procedure to send a taskforce because it's not clear what that attorney general's task force would be doing and the Department of Justice has an avenue for concerns that can be raised around that,” Werner told me. “So our ask is that they are a neutral third party that could come help make sure, that everything that is being done is is legal, it's in line and that there isn't any intimidation to the voters or election workers.”
Lynn Munford, Tatum’s communications coordinator, said the letter from the state has left many questions for the election administrator’s office, however, efforts to get voters to the polls are still in action as voter turnout is down compared to 2018 polling data.
“So as you talk about voter suppression, the question becomes, are we educating the voters enough so that they understand what their rights are and understand what the election process is all about so that they recognize what they can and can't do,” Tatum said.
With less than a month left until election day, Tatum’s daily routine has become a whirlwind of meetings, emails, telephone calls, interviews, and voting machine tests to ensure that the election is fair and accurate.
Harris County’s outreach program educates voters on what their options are to cast their ballot which includes submitting a mail-in ballot, showing up for early voting at one of the 99 early voting locations or voting on election day at any of the 782 locations.
“My first focus is to prepare to conduct the November election in the most efficient and effective manner possible,” Tatum said. “I am conducting an assessment of every division and asking questions and understanding what it is we do, and understanding how we do it, and understanding why we do it the way we do it.”