HOUSTON — Texas Democrats are seething after a lack of preparedness from election officials caused large swaths of voters across the state, from Houston and Dallas to San Antonio and San Marcos, to wait more than five hours to cast a ballot on Super Tuesday.
Texas Democratic Party Chairman Gilberto Hinojosa issued a blistering statement in the early hours of Wednesday morning directed at Texas’s Republican Secretary of State Ruth Ruggero Hughs and “Texas election officials across the board.”
“Texas voters were still waiting to have their voices heard at midnight,” Hinojosa wrote.
He added, “Texas election officials need to do far better than having people wait in multihour lines just to cast a ballot. Texas elections and reporting systems require significant modernization. It’s past time for our election systems to be able to support the growing excitement and enthusiasm Texas voters will continue to show.”
More than 1 million Texans cast ballots early in the Democratic primary, breaking 2016 voting records. Predicting historic turnout in November, Hinojosa warned the situation would be worse in the general election if no premeditated action was taken. His team had pushed a voting information website and a hotline service to report any issues in the days prior to Super Tuesday.
At Texas Southern University, a historically black college in one of Houston’s lower socioeconomic areas, one voter, Hervis Rogers, waited almost seven hours to cast his ballot shortly after 2 a.m. EST. Rogers, the last person in a line that wrapped around the LBJ Student Center even after polls were supposed to close at 8 p.m., told reporters he then had to go work his night shift.
The last voter at Texas Southern University has walked out of the voting booth. It took Hervis Rogers nearly 7 hours to vote tonight. #supertuesday2020 pic.twitter.com/kEQ0HgPZHg
— ed lavandera (@edlavaCNN) March 4, 2020
Earlier Tuesday, Harris County election officials, who oversaw the Texas Southern University precinct, had dispatched extra voting machines in an effort to alleviate the delays, the Texas Tribune reported.
The lack of preparedness didn’t just affect minority Democrats.
Youth voting rights nonprofit organization MOVE Texas also blasted Hughs for long wait lines at Texas State University in San Marcos and the University of Texas in San Antonio.
We are proud of the students at @txst who are turning out in historic numbers, but these lines are unacceptable. @TXsecofstate is failing these students by not adequately investing in the infrastructure to support the growing student electorate. #YouthVote pic.twitter.com/y0sbSYcQ1Q
— MOVE Texas (@MOVE_texas) March 4, 2020
Similar experiences were reported at the University of Texas at Austin.
I’m at the Peter T. Flawn Academic Center, part of the University of Texas at Austin.
Students are still queuing up to vote here, some have been waiting 1hr and a half, and there’s another 45 min wait. pic.twitter.com/jDRFBxdPft
— Oliver Laughland (@oliverlaughland) March 4, 2020
A Hays County elections official who oversaw voting at Texas State University pushed back on the complaints, saying they were “more than prepared and organized to handle the number of ballots cast at that location.”
“There are significant challenges in the length of time it takes to process some student voters into the polling place and how long it may take for some students to cast their ballot. That in itself can slow lines down,” the official told the Washington Examiner.
There was a two-week period of early voting on campus, “yet many students chose to vote in the last hours on the last day of the election,” the official said.
“This is common for all voters from all demographics, which is why the lines tend to be longer at the end of Election Day at all locations. On that front, Texas State wasn’t the only line at the end of the day in Hays County,” the official said.
Democrats are trying to pitch Texas and its 38 Electoral College votes as a possible pickup for the party in the brewing fall fight against President Trump and congressional Republicans. Joe Biden, 77, surprised many political observers with his last-minute surge in the delegate-rich state before Super Tuesday’s 2020 Democratic presidential primary.
Biden, the two-term vice president, won 33.7% of the vote and 56-plus pledged delegates of the 228 delegates available in Texas on Super Tuesday, with 95% of precincts reporting. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator, had a disappointing night, earning only 29.9% support and 47-plus delegates, a weaker than expected showing. A total of 1,991 delegates are required to become the next Democratic standard-bearer.
