HARRIS COUNTY, Texas — Harris County’s top election official said Wednesday she’s looking for ways to speed up vote-counting for the Dec. 14 runoffs after going through long delays Tuesday while tallying up more than 231,000 Election Day ballots.
County Clerk Diane Trautman said a surprise, last-minute rule change by the state forced the county to use a vote-counting contingency plan meant to be used during natural disasters and power outages.
Trautman said her office found out about the Texas Secretary of State’s Oct. 23 election advisory on Oct. 31, five before Election Day, through a third-party email.
She says the directive forced them to drive ballots from all 757 polling stations to downtown for counting. Originally, they planned to transmit results through an encrypted, private network from 10 drop-off sites.
“We said, ‘What’s going on? Why so late?’” recalled Trautman on Wednesday. “(Secretary of State staff members) said, ‘Well, this is the law.’ Why wasn’t it the law in the May election or the last November election? Why did it just now become the law, and why did you give us successful status approval in August?”
Trautman said the state denied Harris County’s request for a waiver.
“It would seem to be some kind of political pressure was put on them to backtrack everything they had told us,” Trautman said, declining to elaborate further. “I’m not interested in getting into a political back-and-forth.”
The County Clerk said her office was unable to get extra counting machines with five days’ notice.
Long lines, equipment replacement issues, security measures, and shutdown time added to the delays, with most of the ballots not arriving downtown until 2:30 a.m. Wednesday.
Trautman says they’re still looking at options for short-term fixes for the Dec. 14 runoff and 2020 presidential election, though she did not offer specifics.
“The same election night reporting process will be different,” she said.
Trautman said county officials are considering buying new voting machines built with technology to help speed up processing for elections starting in 2021.
KHOU has reached out to the Texas Secretary of State’s office since Nov. 1 for an explanation but had not heard back as of Wednesday afternoon.