Chaos erupted on Election Day in the Houston metro area of Harris County, Texas. Voting machines malfunctioning in several precincts, ballot supply issues, and court interventions has left voters bewildered and yet another left-wing Democrat eking out an extremely tight victory.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) has had enough. He is now calling for an investigation into another botched election that has undermined many voters’ trust in the system.
“I’m calling on the Secretary of State, the Attorney General’s Office, and the Texas Rangers to initiate investigations into allegations of improprieties in the way that the 2022 elections were conducted in Harris County,” said Governor Abbott. “The allegations of election improprieties in our state’s largest county may result from anything ranging from malfeasance to blatant criminal conduct. Voters in Harris County deserve to know what happened. Integrity in the election process is essential. To achieve that standard, a thorough investigation is warranted.”
“A number of polling locations in Harris County allegedly failed to open on time on Election Day, which spurred the Texas Civil Rights Project and the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas to file an emergency lawsuit — and the county’s 782 polling places were ordered to stay open an hour past their typical closing time,” the Hill reported.
But the Hill conveniently neglected to mention anything about the malfunctioning voting machines.
“Voters at Metropolitan Multi-Service Center, a large polling place in a predominantly Hispanic area, were unable to cast ballots for roughly four hours because voting machines were malfunctioning and other issues,” Axios reported, based on NYT’s sources.
But reports from witnesses in the Harris County area suggest the problems were even worse than the mainstream media let on.
“Absolute & total incompetence of Houston / Harris County Texas on full display,” @Txsvn925 griped. “100+ voting machines available, maybe 5 or 6 actually work, with over 1,000 people in line..”
“If this does not make your blood boil about how Harris County’s elections department conducted our election, I don’t know what will,” said Merissa Hansen, who closely watches Harris County politics. In the video, a veteran is nearly in tears over the election disruption due to the voting machine issues.
Hansen also highlighted machines being down in the West Gray voting location.
Harris County uses a brand-new ‘Hybrid Hart Verity’ voting machine system that has trackable paper ballots. It cost taxpayers $54 million to upgrade from the previous voting machines, which had caused controversy in 2020.
After the Election Day disruption, incumbent ‘progressive’ ‘rising star’ Lina Hidalgo had emerged victorious.
“Lina Hidalgo, the progressive Democrat who leads Texas’s largest county, which includes Houston, narrowly won re-election despite a well-funded effort by a Republican first-time candidate who made crime a centerpiece of her campaign, according to The Associated Press. The race was close enough that a result did not come until Thursday,” the New York Times reported.
Unfortunately for voters, Harris County’s voting disruption was far from a unique case. On Election Day in Maricopa County, when most Republicans turn out to vote in elections, it was reported that voting machine problems caused delays at an estimated 27 percent of the polls.
Kari Lake on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” said that the voting machine delays caused issues in predominately Republican-leaning precincts in Maricopa County.
“I feel a hundred percent certain I’m going to win,” Lake said. “The question is, how big will that win be? Can you believe this, Tucker? We still have 650,000 votes that have not been counted. And guess who these voters are? They’re the people who showed up on election day, right? They’re the people, 275,000 of them, are people who brought their mail in ballots to the polls on election day because they don’t trust the mail and they don’t trust the drop boxes. So guess who those voters are? There are voters, and we’re only down by a few thousand votes right now. When those votes come in, I think we’re gonna see a lot of liberal minds kind of blowing up.”
“They’ve been calling me an election denier,” she went on. “I’ve been sounding the alarm on the 2020 November 3rd election, which was disastrous. And we had problems in the August 2nd primary as well. And now we have the same problems. They have all this time to get this figured out.”
“It was really a shame,” she added. “We ended up voting in a very liberal part of town because we can choose which vote center to go to and they said they’d had no problems. The bigger issue is we can’t keep having this problem. This is what I’ve been trying to say. I want all Democrats, independents, and Republicans to trust in the system. And when I win and trust me, we will win this. This is going to be top of my agenda.”
That may not come to pass as Kari Lake now has to wage a battle for transparency on another Maricopa County election gone wrong. In a race that was separated by a scant one percent of ballots counted, the Election Day chaos may have played a significant role.
Since Arizona’s race is being overseen by the ‘victor’ in the race, transparency and accountability won’t come anytime soon. But in Texas, there is at least a dim hope that a governor and attorney general can start taking these suddenly recurring issues more seriously.
Current Founder, CEO and Chief Editor of Becker News. Former Writer & Associate Producer at Fox News for #1 top-rated prime-time cable news show. Former Director of Viral Media and Senior Managing Editor for award-winning startup website IJReview, which grew to a readership of 20-30 million Americans a month. Led editorial and social media team that was #1 ranked news & politics publisher on Facebook for story engagement. Writer whose thousands of digital articles have been read by over 100 million unique users.