GOP seeks to improve election administration in Harris County, Texas

 AP:

A second Texas audit in as many years of elections in Harris County, the third-most populous county in the U.S., called for improvements but does not suggest that race outcomes in 2022 were impacted by issues that Republicans have used to contest losses and take more control over voting in the Democratic stronghold.

The preliminary report by Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson, a Republican, was released days before Houston residents begin early voting for a new mayor. It also follows Republicans increasingly targeting elections in the county of nearly 5 million people, a size that makes Harris politically significant as Democrats try to end decades of GOP dominance in the state.

Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed a law this year that removed Harris County's elections administrator and transferred the responsibility to other local officials. One is County Clerk Teneshia Hudspeth, who in response to the audit said her office is working to make sure “past issues are not repeated” but defended previous elections as successful.

“But the public should know that ‘successful’ isn’t the same thing as 'flawless,’” Hudspeth said.

Democrats who lead Harris County have acknowledged issues, including limited paper ballot shortages and machine malfunctions, on Election Day last year. But they said the difficulties were not intentional and have accused critics of stoking conspiracies.

Nelson, who was appointed by Abbott, said the county “clearly had multiple failures" last year. Republicans cheered the findings as justification for the new laws that transferred election oversight.
...

As a former resident of Harris County, I recall that these failures were rare when Republicans dominated the County. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t
Read more