Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has signed two bills that single out the largest county in Texas—a Democratic stronghold home to one in six Texans—by allowing state Republicans to potentially take over the local administration of elections on questionable grounds.
In Texas, county officials hold wide authority when it comes to running elections in their jurisdictions. A state takeover could allow Republicans to restrict voting access and potentially even interfere with certifying election results. County officials have argued that the new laws violate the state constitution's prohibition on targeting any particular county or city and have vowed to sue.
The legislation in question is indeed extremely specific, as it only applies to Harris County, which is home to Houston and 4.7 million people. That makes it not only Texas' most populous county but the third-largest in the nation—one that's become an increasingly pivotal battleground. Once a Republican bastion, Harris County has swung sharply to the left during the Trump era and in 2020 backed Joe Biden by a 56-43 margin. Democrats also took over the county government in 2018, with rising star Lina Hidalgo securing a second term as Harris' top official just last year.
Under Democratic leadership, Harris County has made voting more accessible, but Republicans want to turn back the clock. The first of their new laws empowers Republican Secretary of State Jane Nelson, an Abbott appointee, to take over nearly every aspect of election administration.
Nelson needs very little in order to act: If a candidate or party files a complaint, she only needs to claim she "has good cause to believe that a recurring pattern of problems with election administration or voter registration exists in the county" in order to assume control of the voting process. This vaguely worded provision—which doesn't actually require hard proof—therefore sets a very low threshold for a state takeover.
But even if the state does not take over Harris County's elections, the second bill significantly alters who runs its elections. That law abolishes the position of election administrator, a nonpartisan official appointed by county lawmakers, and instead reverts its powers to the elected county clerk and tax assessor. While Democrats currently hold those offices, too, Republicans could readily win those posts back
The system that Republicans want to reinstate, under which the county clerk manages most aspects of running elections while the tax assessor handles voter registration, is a vestige of the Jim Crow era, when the assessor was responsible for collecting poll taxes. Harris had been the last major Texas county to maintain this arrangement, but it passed legislation in 2020 establishing the election administrator's post, something that state law had previously allowed all counties to choose whether to do until now.
Republicans have not tried to conceal the fact that this effort is aimed purely at Harris County. The first bill applies only to counties with at least 4 million residents, while the second affects only those with more than 3.5 million inhabitants. Dallas County, the state's second-largest, has a population of just 2.6 million. The laws therefore cover Harris County and only Harris County.
Republicans claim their legislation is necessary because of ballot shortages at some county polling places last year, though the shortages were far less widespread than the GOP has said. Local officials, moreover, issued a report in December that said it wasn't possible to determine whether those issues actually prevented anyone from voting. And while a polling place running out of ballots can pose a grave problem in many states, Harris and many other Texas counties allow voters to cast a ballot at any polling location within their county, giving them alternatives.
However, the lack of evidence of widespread disenfranchisement hasn't stopped a number of local GOP candidates from suing to overturn their defeats, including Alexandra del Moral Mealer, who lost to Hidalgo 51-49, a margin of 18,000 votes. Mealer has asked a court to declare her the winner or order a new election, but court documents showed that even the county GOP chair has stated that party officials believe only 2,600 voters were "turned away" due to voting problems—not enough to affect the outcome even in the unlikely event that every last such voter intended to cast a ballot for Republicans.
Republican complaints about voting problems and disenfranchisement in Harris County ring particularly hollow, since GOP lawmakers are responsible for passing numerous laws to restrict voting access over the past two decades, including previous measures that have also targeted Harris County.
These include a bill that eliminated straight-ticket voting, a popular option that helped reduce waiting times at polling places. And after the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, Harris County took several innovative steps to protect voting access without compromising public health, which included drive-thru and 24-hour early voting options. Republicans responded the following year by banning those practices.
The Republican usurpation of power from local governments that lean Democratic or have large Black or Latino populations—all of which are true of Harris County—is also part of a national trend dating back more than a decade. While Republicans have long claimed to favor local control, gerrymandered legislatures in states such as Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas have passed numerous bills to override locally enacted laws, strip local governments of power, and even gerrymander local legislative bodies to manufacture GOP control.
Harris County officials have promised to oppose the new laws in court, but Republicans hold every seat on the state Supreme Court and a majority of them were first appointed by Abbott, presenting a difficult obstacle for any lawsuit to overcome.
There have been sooo many hot takes about the 2022 midterms, which is why we're joined on this week's episode of "The Downballot" by Michael Frias and Hillary Anderson of the progressive data firm Catalist to discuss their data-intensive report on what actually happened. They explain how they marry precinct-level election results with detailed voter files to go far beyond what the polls can tell us. Among the findings: Highly competitive races were much more favorable to Democrats than less-contested ones; Republicans paid a "MAGA tax" by nominating extreme candidates; and non-college white women shifted toward Democrats by notable margins compared to 2020.