Harris County's botched election
Harris County Elections Administrator Clifford Tatum says his team will be working to sort out the issues that caused problems on election day.
Harris County experienced many issues from polling sites opening late, machine malfunctions, and even some polling sites running out of ballots. Wednesday morning, election workers were still counting emergency ballots at central counting at NRG Arena.
"We will assess our election operations from early voting through election night through today," he said at a Wednesday afternoon presser.
Polling sites were scheduled to open at 7 a.m. but officials said four locations opened late. BakerRipley House on Navigation opened almost 4.5 hours late due to what officials say was a misplaced key that was needed to access the voting machines.
"I understand there was a problem with accessing the equipment from the equipment cabby," Tatum said. "Then I'm told that there was a misplaced key [for] a judge’s box [it] wasn't delivered which then didn't allow that judge to access the equipment."
Tatum said he wasn't sure if the misplaced key accessed all the voting machines or just one particular machine. Once the key was delivered, the judge for that polling location did not have staff.
"Once we did get the key to him as I understand his clerks that were assigned to him – left him," he said.
Harris County had 782 polling locations opened but there's not an exact number on how many polling sites experienced problems and how many machines were down. Tatum said some judges did report to his team about machine problems at their polling sites.
"We saw that there were some scanner problems, the scanner is the device that actually takes an image of the ballot and records the ballot," he said. "We saw that there were some duo problems – the duo is the device where the voter actually makes their selections and prints their selections onto the ballot, we saw that there were some ballot jams."
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In Washington County where I vote the paper ballot is placed into the scanner by the voter after they finish marking the ballot. It has always worked pretty smoothly when I voted. There is a woman in charge of the voting who does an excellent job. Back when I lived in Harris county, I do not recall any problem with voting. At that time, Republicans were running the county instead of the current Democrats.
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