by Randy DeSoto at westernjournal.com
Harris County, Texas, the most populous in the Lone Star State, has become the center of election challenge lawsuits after a myriad of problems occurred on Election Day in November.
The Texan reported last week that the first of 21 election trials wrapped up in Houston. All of the cases were brought by Republican candidates, according to Houston Public Media.
The first trial featured Republican Erin Lunceford challenging Democrat Tamika Craft’s 2,743-vote win out of 1 million ballots cast in a district judge contest. A decision in the case is not expected for a least a month.
On the day Lunceford’s trial ended, Republican county judge candidate Alexandra Mealer filed an amended complaint, alleging widespread violations of Texas election law and possible illegal votes in excess of incumbent Democratic Judge Lina Hidalgo’s margin of victory of approximately 18,000 votes, or 1.67 percent.
Mealer told The Western Journal there are parallels between what happened in Harris County (the Houston metro area, population 4.7 million) in November and what occurred in Maricopa County (the Phoenix metro area, 4.5 million).
In Maricopa County, it was printers malfunctioning at up to 59 percent of polling locations, causing tabulators not to be able to read ballots. Long lines formed and because Republicans vote 3 to 1 over Democrats on Election Day, GOP candidates like Kari Lake were most impacted by the chaos.
Lake further alleged that the areas where most of the problems occurred happened to be Republican strongholds.
Mealer said the same was true in Harris County. Multiple polling stations there ran out of ballot paper, while several other polling sites did not open on time or experienced other voting machine issues.
“At this point, it’s almost a year later, and we still can’t answer how many locations ran out of paper for how long. How many machines were down for how long? West Gray — [the] largest voting center in Texas, so not insignificant — the first few hours had incredibly long lines no one had ever seen,” she recounted.“
It wasn’t one thing that went wrong. It was just the culmination of so many things that made it really hard for a lot of people to vote,” Mealer explained.
“It disproportionately impacted Republican areas and even if they weren’t Republican areas, Republicans disproportionately vote on Election Day compared to Democrats.”
Mealer’s campaign was surprised by Election Day vote totals.
“We were all pretty shocked seeing all the results come in that I did worse [on] Election Day than I did early voting. That just doesn’t happen right now with the way Republicans vote,” she said.
Mealer’s attorneys assert that the official ballot reconciliation report contains a discrepancy of almost 10,000 mail-in ballots.
“Specifically, the mail in ballot reconciliation signed by the Presiding Judge of the Central Counting Station reflects that only 54,952 mail in ballots should have been submitted to the Signature Verification Committee and the Early Voting Ballot Board. However, 64,259 were actually submitted,” Mealer’s complaint states.
Further, she alleges Harris County Elections Administrator Clifford Tatum failed to follow state law in relation to the amount of ballot paper on hand at each polling location.
The Texas election code “required the EA to provide each polling location with twenty-five percent more ballots than were cast at the corresponding location in the previous election,” the complaint says.
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