Harris County vote counting screw up delayed results

KPRC:

The Texas Elections Director Keith Ingram is taking shots at Harris County Clerk Diane Trautman (a Democrat).

The election results on Tuesday were as slow as anyone in Southeast Texas can remember. Slower than molasses on a cold winter day.

Almost 12 hours after the polls were supposed to close only 23% of the vote was reported.

As all of this was happening the Harris County Clerk’s Office went into a six plus hour blackout. During this time they provided no updates which had a lot of people scratching their heads in confusion.

Local politicians stayed away through the night waiting for more complete election results data but no such information was ever reported.

On Wednesday morning Trautman placed the blame on the Texas Secretary of State's office stating, "We found out about this last-minute advisory from the Secretary of State from someone who sent us an email about it at the end of early voting five days before the election."

But Texas Elections Director Keith Ingram wasn't having it.

He released the following statement:

“As the clerk’s office confirmed to us, the county was proposing to take memory cards (MBBs) containing raw vote totals and insert them into a computer connected to an intranet,” Ingram said in an email. “They were then going to transmit these results over a T-1 line to another computer connected to the intranet for tabulation. The MBB and the computer tabulating results are both components of the voting system used in Harris County. The clerk was planning to use this risky method of results reporting even though they were fully aware it was illegal to do so, and with apparent disregard to the fact that the intelligence community has repeatedly warned election officials since 2016 of the continuing desire of nation-states to interfere with our election process. Directly connecting the county’s voting system to the intranet would have eliminated the protections that an air-gapped system provides and subjected the county to major security risks.”
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Harris County voters made the mistake of putting Democrats in office in 2018 who were ill-equipped for the responsibility.  It was not just the clerk's office.  They elected several judges and other officials who were unqualified for the jobs.  Harris County is one of the most populous ones in the country with more votes than many states have.  Entrusting the operation to Democrats was a mistake.