Harris County, Texas, the home of Houston and lots of Democratic voters, is turning into a battleground ahead of next week’s election. Republican state officials are cracking down on Democratic local officials, and in response, they’re asking the Justice Department to intervene. The county is a Democratic enclave, with a majority population of Latino, Black, and Asian residents. President Joe Biden got 56% of the vote in the county in 2020, to Trump’s 43%.
So of course Secretary of State John Scott announced last month that he’s sending monitors to Houston to make “randomized checks” of local elections officials' work, and to oversee ballot counting. State Attorney General Ken Paxton, who has remained under a criminal indictment for more than seven years and under an FBI investigation for two, has gotten in on the act. He will “dispatch a task force to Harris County that will be available at all times during the election period in order to immediately respond to any legal issues identified by Secretary of State, inspectors, poll watchers, or voters.”
The “2022 General Election Integrity team” Paxton announced will respond to any issue that inspectors, poll watchers, or voters flag. Paxton is encouraging Texas to submit “information about alleged violations of the Texas Election Code.” Under a new law, Senate Bill 1, partisan poll watchers in the state have new powers to intimidate election officials, being allowed to stand as close as necessary “to see or hear” what they’re doing. It also creates criminal penalties for election workers if they deny those partisan poll watcher access. That’s another setup to allow intimidation and harassment of the staff and volunteers working the polls.
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This is the culmination of what sure looks like a plan to set Harris County up. Last year, the GOP legislature passed the “Election Integrity Protection Act,” which mandated the secretary of state’s office to “conduct an audit of the elections held in four counties during the previous two years.” Any four counties at all, and gee, guess which county was “randomly” selected.
Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee sure didn’t see anything random about that. “Yea, ok. I’m sure the state’s selection of Harris County was ‘randomized’ as the Election Code requires, Just like it was a random coincidence when last year the state announced an audit of our 2020 election hours after Trump sent @GregAbbott_TX a public ltr calling for an audit,” he tweeted after the announcement.
State officials have been harassing county officials since the audit found that the county allegedly had improper security of the electronic equipment storing vote tallies. The county disputes the accusations, but it’s all the impetus Paxton and Scott need to crack down in the county.
Meneffee, along with the county’s chief executive, Lina Hidalgo, and Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner, have requested that the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division send federal election monitors to all the polling and ballot counting locations in Harris County. “Our biggest concern is we’re going to get to the counting process and there’s going to be folks from the attorney general’s office disrupting stuff in a bad-faith way,” Menefee said of Paxton’s office.
Hidalgo responded to the announcement that the county would be targeted with the state goons on Twitter. “The timing of this letter is—at best—suspicious,” she wrote. “It was sent just days before the start of early voting, potentially in an attempt to sabotage county efforts by sowing doubt in the elections process, or equally as bad, by opening the door to possible inappropriate state interference in Harris County’s elections.”
Voters see it, too. Wayne and Lisa Nellums, who are Black, told the Washington Post that they are concerned about the inevitable harassment of voters, particularly people of color, being intimidated by poll watchers and the state poll monitors. But Lisa, 61, is daring them to push it. “What they don’t understand is that when they try to intimidate, it just makes us want to vote more.”
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The 2022 midterms are just around the corner, and you sent us a ton of fantastic questions for this week’s episode of The Downballot.
Among the many topics we cover: which states are likely to report results slowly—and how will those results change over time; the House districts that look like key bellwethers for how the night might go, and which might offer surprises; why and how Democrats make the hard decisions on which races to triage; the top legislative chambers to keep an eye on; and plenty more!