Harris County will keep missing election-night deadlines if laws don’t change, elections chief says

If there aren’t changes to Texas election law, Harris County will likely continue to blow deadlines for reporting election results, the county’s election chief said Wednesday in Austin at a hearing with the House Elections Committee. Last year, the Texas Legislature passed several bills relating to elections, including one that requires counties to use paper ballots. A previously existing state law set a 24-hour deadline to offer full, unofficial vote counts, and the elections official said the combination of the two is untenable moving forward for large elections. Harris County failed to meet the 24-hour deadline in the March 1 primaries, the first major election since the law came into effect, when officials realized on election night that they had failed to count 10,000 votes. The county has lagged behind other large counties in the state in vote-counting, including the most recent election.

“I think given reasonable timelines and reasonable expectations of resources available to us, … your March primaries, your November elections, I think it will become increasingly difficult for anyone working a paper system to hit that 24-hour mark,” said Isabel Longoria, the county’s election chief, who testified before the committee Wednesday. Longoria announced after the March primary that she would step down from the job July 1. In Texas, counties largely pay for their own elections, so when the state adds more restrictive requirements or deadlines, the counties must foot the bill. Counting paper ballots is particularly difficult, Longoria said, as machines can jam, ink can be smeared, or other physical mistakes can happen that delay the process and wouldn’t happen in computerized systems. Committee members stressed a desire for the public to know who won elections by the end of election night. Due to the math involved, this is just unfeasible for large elections, Longoria said.