Trudy Hancock became the first elections administrator in Robertson County, a rural area northwest of Houston, after the county ditched their old model of running elections in 2005. 

Until then, a county clerk was in charge of the voting process and a tax assessor-collector was responsible for voter registration; officials then unified those duties under an elections office managed by someone they would appoint—eventually Hancock, a longtime elections worker. Officials in nearby Brazos County, home to one of the nation’s largest universities, plucked Hancock to run their new elections office in 2016, after they too switched to the new unified system.

Hancock, who still runs elections in Brazos County and is now president of the Texas Association of Elections Administrators, says voters were sometimes confused by the old split system. “If you were a county clerk and their question had to do with voter registration, then you had to send them somewhere else, and lots of times those offices aren’t even in the same buildings,” Hancock told Bolts. 

Counties across Texas, including most of the state’s largest urban centers, have adopted that new unified model for running elections over the past two decades as a way to streamline operations and better serve voters. Besides increasing efficiency, some local officials say this also erases a relic of the Jim Crow era; Texas tax assessors took on voter registration in the early 20th century because they also collected poll taxes. In 2020, Harris County, the state’s most populous and home to Houston, also switched to that unified system for running elections.

But Republicans pushed a bill through the legislature last week that will force Harris County to turn back to the old model for running elections. Senate Bill 1750, which abolishes the Harris County elections administrator position and returns those responsibilities to the county clerk and tax assessor-collector, is one of two bills specifically targeting election administration in Harris County that passed the GOP-dominated legislature and are now heading to Governor Greg Abbott, who is expected to sign them. 

The second bill, SB 1933, grants the secretary of state’s office new powers to investigate complaints of “irregularities” in Harris County elections, and ultimately to petition to remove the local officials overseeing elections.

The two bills are an escalation in GOP attacks on election administration in Texas’ largest county, which has become an increasingly reliable Democratic bulwark against a deep-red state government. During the last session, in 2021, the legislature passed a sweeping set of restrictions aimed at some of the boldest initiatives that Harris County elections officials implemented to expand safe voting options during the pandemic, like drive-thru and around-the-clock voting, which are now banned under state law. 

The bills that passed this session, however, differ from the last in that they explicitly target Harris County: The measure forcing a return to the split system for running elections only applies there, as does the bill granting the secretary of state new investigatory powers. While neither bill specifically names Harris County, SB 1750 and SB 1933 were tailored to only apply to counties of more than 3.5 million and 4 million residents, respectively, a threshold that only Harris County meets.

Bolts reported after last year’s midterm elections that Texas Republicans had seized on ballot shortages Harris County voters encountered at a handful of polling places to push for state intervention and more policing of elections. Nearly two dozen Harris County GOP candidates have pointed to those problems to challenge their losses, claiming the ballot shortages led to thousands of voters being turned away in Republican-leaning precincts. Reporting by the Houston Chronicle, however, has largely debunked that narrative, showing that the ballot shortages weren’t widespread (affecting about 20 of 782 polling places in the county) and impacted Democratic and Republican areas evenly. 

Harris County elections administrator Cliff Tatum, whom the county hired barely two months before early voting started in the November election, issued a report in January saying the problems during the midterms pointed to the “immediate need of upgrades or replacements” in the elections office. Tatum has said his office implemented several changes after the midterms to respond to those problems, from hiring more helpline operators to respond to problems at polling places to implementing a new system for tracking requests from election judges. 

In a statement to Bolts, Tatum stressed how the new legislation would reshuffle elections administration ahead of another important election; Democrats tried but failed to get Republicans to amend the effective date for SB 1750 until after Nov. 7, when Houston will elect its next mayor. Tatum said the law is now set to force changes to election administration on Sept. 1, 39 days ahead of the voter registration deadline and 52 days out from the first day of early voting. “We fear this time frame will not be adequate for such a substantial change in administration, and that Harris County voters and election workers may be the ones to pay the price,” Tatum said. 

Voting rights advocates worry that the bills targeting Harris County will set up whoever runs elections there next to fail, or at least trigger the new oversight powers by the state established under SB 1933. Harris County also saw problems under its earlier split system of administering elections, with past clerks accused of bungling elections and tax assessor-collectors wrongly suspending voter registrations. The oversight bill, which allows for the secretary of state’s office to investigate and petition to remove election officials, would also go into effect in September if signed. 

Katya Ehresman, voting rights program director with Common Cause Texas, said that both Harris County election bills “create a feedback loop of problems down the road.” 

“I don’t think it’s unreasonable that we can expect a huge turnout this November because of the multi millions of dollars that are probably going to be spent in this mayoral race, and the conditions for the elections are completely changing right before it,” Ehresman told Bolts. “That’s something that lawmakers were cognizant of, because they used that as a reason to blame the elections administrator for the problems we saw during the last election. And yet now the legislature is just replicating those conditions, and they will be uniquely to blame for any problems voters encounter because of it.” 

Harris County officials have already vowed to fight the bills in court. Harris County’s clerk and tax-assessor collector, both elected Democrats, declined to comment on any plans to reassume election duties, with representatives of both offices telling Bolts they’d issue statements if and when Abbott signs the legislation. 

Hancock told Bolts she worries that, even if the bill expanding investigations is limited to Harris County, it could erode the relationship between the office and local elections workers. Currently, the secretary of state is largely an advisory role to assist local election officials. “If you’re having a problem, you’ll be less likely to call and talk to someone about that problem if you’re worried they’re going to come back and later feel the need to assert their role as oversight,” Hancock said. 

“We’re worried it will have a chilling effect with the relationship that we currently have with the SOS,” she added. 

Republicans have also targeted election administrators in other parts of the state, most notably by ramping up policing around elections in Tarrant County, home to Fort Worth and the Texas GOP’s last urban stronghold; their actions led the county’s election administrator to resign in April. 

Ehresman warns that the GOP meddling won’t stop there. She pointed to a host of other proposals—from ending countywide polling to giving the secretary of state even greater oversight powers—that failed in this year’s regular session but right-wing officials are already trying to revive. 

“This was an unprecedented move by the legislature to use the entire weight of their branch of government to eliminate an office, effectively fire one man, and target one specific county,” Ehresman said. “So I don’t think it’s unreasonable now that the legislature has gone this far for one county, that they won’t do it for other large urban counties.”

The post Republicans Escalate Attacks on Election Administration in Texas’ Largest County appeared first on Bolts.

“I’m not a conspiracy [theorist]. I believe that Lee Harvey Oswald killed the president, and I believe Joe Biden is the president—I believe all that,” the famously right-wing sheriff told county commissioners at their Feb. 21 meeting. “But I do know that there are people who are concerned, and they have a concern, and it’s a legitimate concern.” 

Waybourn launched the new Election Integrity Task Force “to investigate and prosecute individuals perpetrating voter fraud within Tarrant County” last month in coordination with newly-elected District Attorney Phil Sorrells and Tarrant County Judge Tim O’Hare, both of whom promised to ratchet up policing of elections when campaigning with Trump’s endorsement last year. In his presentation to county commissioners, Waybourn said the task force, which will solicit and investigate complaints about elections, would be staffed with existing county employees, including two sheriff’s investigators, two DA’s investigators and one prosecutor. 

“The whole idea of the DA and sheriff standing together, I think it’s a very important message to the community, and I think it’s a very important message that we’re centralizing that,” the sheriff told commissioners. “I think it’s a very important message that this is being handled by professional investigators and professional prosecutors.”

Roy Brooks, one of the two Democrats on the five-member commission, told Waybourn “there is no demonstrable issue with election integrity in Tarrant County.” Brooks spoke slowly but sternly as he told the sheriff, “I am concerned that we are enshrining in our current county infrastructure the ability to deny the results of any election that the three of you (Waybourn, Sorrells, and O’Hare) take exception to.” 

When Brooks called the task force a “conspiracy” to undermine election results that local conservatives don’t like, he drew audible gasps and jeers from the more than a dozen people in the crowd who had signed up to testify in support of the sheriff’s idea.

The meeting followed years of conservative activists in North Texas spreading baseless conspiracies about widespread voter fraud. As Bolts reported last year, Republican lies about the 2020 election have emboldened conservative activists in Tarrant County, a county of more than 2 million people that’s home to Fort Worth and the last urban Republican stronghold in Texas, to further question local election results and political trends that reflect the increasing left-leaning population of the county. (The county voted for Joe Biden in 2020 by a bare majority.)

These conspiracies continue to rage despite Tarrant County’s election administrators being widely lauded for running smooth and secure elections. A state audit of the county’s 2020 general election concluded that elections staff delivered a “quality, transparent election,” while the former Republican-appointed secretary of state (someone who briefly aided in Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election) recently praised Tarrant County Elections Administrator Heider Garcia as the “prototype for an election administrator.” 

Garcia, who was appointed in 2018 by a bipartisan county election commission, gave the public a lengthy presentation during a county commission meeting last spring, walking people through each step of the voting and counting processes while explaining the various systems for ensuring ballot security. He even threw a mock election ahead of last year’s midterms to try and build confidence in the voting systems. 

That did not satisfy Garcia’s conspiracy-minded critics. Last year, Garcia testified in a letter to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee about the torrent of racist messages and death threats he’s received since the 2020 election. “To this day,” Garcia wrote, “not a single person or entity has been held accountable for the impact this whole situation had on my family and myself.” 

When announcing the Tarrant County election integrity task force last month, the GOP officials who launched it confirmed to reporters that they hadn’t consulted with Garcia, who was also notably absent from the meeting where the sheriff presented the plan to county commissioners. The commissioners were also not informed of the move before the press conference. 

Kat Cano, a Democratic appointee to Tarrant County’s early voting ballot board, which processes early votes, urged Waybourn and other officials to consult with election workers if they want to improve voting. Cano called for better training and pay for elections staff over more policing, and told commissioners that both parties lost election workers last year, in part due to the onslaught of harassment against them by election deniers. 

“This is an election complaint task force, not an election fraud task force,” Cano told Bolts when reached after the meeting.

Waybourn’s new election task force fits into a broader attempt by conservatives to police elections since Trump’s 2020 loss and Republican lies about widespread fraud. In recent years, state legislatures across the country have proposed dozens of laws to increase criminal penalties for people who, even unintentionally, cast an improper vote. An investigation by Reveal found that 14 states last year tried to implement laws that would enable law enforcement to pursue voting crimes more aggressively. 

This year, Texas Republicans have proposed a bill that would allow Attorney General Ken Paxton, who aided in legal efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential race, to ask prosecutors from neighboring counties to pursue election fraud cases if the county district attorney refuses. Another proposed law would allow Paxton to remove prosecutors from office for refusing to pursue certain cases, which could apply to election-related cases that he wants to see prosecuted. Republicans have also proposed bills that would increase voting violations to a felony, punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

Some red states and counties have also started creating specialized law enforcement groups with the express goal of seeking out and punishing improper voters. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has created perhaps the most infamous version, sending out armed law enforcement to arrest almost two dozen people, many of whom were told by public officials that they were eligible to vote.

In other states, elected county sheriffs have picked up the baton, using their politicized position to advocate for additional scrutiny of voters. In Kansas, a sheriff claimed to be investigating multiple cases of voter fraud, but could not produce public records about them. A Wisconsin sheriff conducted an intrusive investigation into voters at nursing homes, but the prosecutor refused to pursue the case. 

Waybourn hasn’t been specific about whatever complaints prompted him to create the new task force in Tarrant County. When pressed by Democratic commissioners, who questioned the need for it, Waybourn offered only sparse details, saying his investigators are currently “looking at 11 cases,” while also stating that they’ve been sifting through “a package of emails and probably 60 or so phone calls, or 70 phone calls.” It’s unclear how many of the tips Waybourn has received so far even alleged actual voter fraud; Waybourn, for instance, characterized some complaints as, “somebody felt like they were intimidated or something to that effect.” 

(The sheriff’s office did not respond to a request for comment.)

Democratic commission member Alisa Simmons, the longtime president of the local NAACP chapter who was elected last year, told Waybourn that many of the complaints he described should be referred to elections officials rather than law enforcement after the sheriff offered up an example of someone complaining after arriving at a polling place and being told they weren’t registered. 

“This is just political posturing,” Simmons told Bolts. “The reason I’m opposed to this unit is because Tarrant County already investigates claims. We already have an elections administration, with 43 staff members, whose jobs include investigating claims of fraud or prohibiting further fraud, educating others, answering their questions, and therefore, there is not a need for the creation of a voter fraud task force.”

While Waybourn has become a sort of right-wing media star since his 2018 election, his critics have accused him of failing at the more core duties of his job, pointing to the spike in deaths at the Tarrant County jail on Waybourn’s watch. Pamela Young, a local activist who has protested the sheriff and called for his ouster over the multiple allegations of brutality and medical neglect inside the lockup he oversees, called his new election crimes task force “a circus they are putting on as red meat to their base.” 

“This was expected and orchestrated,” Young told Bolts. “These people have been plotting for years on how to keep Tarrant County red.” 

O’Hare vowed to create a new “election integrity officer” to do the job of the task force when he ran for Tarrant County’s executive last year, but last month said he settled for the sheriff and DA’s plan because it wouldn’t create any added costs to the county. O’Hare was formerly a city council member in Farmer’s Branch, where he spearheaded ordinances to make English the official language and to require apartments to check the immigration status of renters. He also founded Southlake Families PAC, which funds candidates for local school boards who ran on platforms that supported “Christian values” and opposed efforts at diversity and social justice.

Tarrant County has a history of harsh prosecutions for voter fraud that have drawn pushback from voting rights advocates. Crystal Mason was sentenced to five years of prison for casting a provisional ballot in the 2016 election, which was never counted, while she was still on probation; she is currently appealing her conviction for the second time. Another woman was sentenced to eight years in prison for voting with a green card. In both cases, the women said that they did not realize that they were not permitted to vote. By contrast, a judge was given probation for forging signatures to make the 2018 primary ballot. 

During the meeting last month, many of the concerned citizens who testified in support of the task force asserted that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, local elections were hopelessly corrupted. Some sounded the alarm over the creeping threat of communism and socialism while others called for the elimination of all electronic voting equipment. 

“I’ve seen plenty of surveillance camera footage of all kinds of questionable things happening all over the country,” one woman said, seeming to address Brooks and Simmons, the skeptics on the commission. “And to say that ‘oh, I don’t have a leg to stand on’ is really unfair to me.”

The post Right-Wing Task Force Will Police Elections in the Texas GOP’s Last Urban Stronghold appeared first on Bolts.

Like many young people, Kristina Samuel started voting during college. She was a freshman biology student at Texas A&M University during the 2020 primaries, casting her first ballot that year at the Memorial Student Center in the heart of the school’s sprawling 5,200 acre campus. 

Samuel left what she thought was enough time to vote on Election Day, planning to visit the student center between her biology lecture that afternoon and a lab later that evening. But when she got there, the line to vote wrapped around the building, which was the only polling place on campus. Samuel, who says she waited about three hours to vote, recalls being the only person in her friend group who waited to cast a ballot in the election.

“I only stayed because I just knew how important it was, but I know so many people who are already on the fence about voting or who see it as a chore,” Samuel said. “They’re not going to wait in that three hour line.” 

Samuel, president of her university chapter of the voting rights group MOVE Texas, and other student activists have asked for a second campus polling place to accommodate the largest student body in the state, and one of the largest in the nation. This summer, however, local officials took the opposite approach. The Brazos County Commissioners Court in July decided to eliminate the student center as a polling place during the two weeks of early voting for the 2022 midterms. Now there will be nowhere on campus for students to vote between Oct. 24 and Nov. 4.

“I’m afraid the reality is that we’re going to have such lower student and young person turnout than we normally would in a very crucial election,” Samuel told Bolts. The student center will remain an Election Day polling place this year, but Samuel worries that eliminating the early voting there will lead to longer lines that deter students who try to vote on Nov. 8. 

Other TAMU students have denounced the majority-Republican commission for making this decision in early July, when most students were out of town for the summer. Ever since The Battalion, the university’s student newspaper, highlighted the exclusion in early August, they have asked officials to reinstate an early polling place on campus. The issue was not on the board’s agenda for its Aug. 30 meeting but several students attended to air their concerns. Sophomore Kevin Pierce stressed that the early polling place that officials picked instead for the precinct that includes the university—a new city hall building off campus—is about a half-hour walk each way for most students. 

“The reality is that it’s going to be a lot harder to vote, and there’s going to be a lot of people who don’t vote,” Pierce said.

“The convenience of the MSC (student center) as a voting location cannot be overstated,” echoed Christopher Livaudais, a junior and president of Texas Aggie Democrats. County records show the center has been an early voting location since at least 2016. Another student, Varum Vuppaladadiyam told commissioners that losing all early voting on campus after asking for an additional polling place “feels like a slap in the face.” The commissioners took no action on that day. A later meeting where they agreed to discuss the issue was canceled this week when two commissioners didn’t show up.

The TAMU students join a perennial fight to get or keep polling places on large college campuses in Texas. 

Students have fought for generations for equal voting access at Prairie View A&M University, the state’s oldest historically Black college and the second-oldest in the country. In 2018, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund sued on behalf of students when county commissioners refused to open a campus polling place for the same number of early voting days as in whiter areas of the county. The lawsuit followed decades of voter suppression against Prairie View students, including past attempts by officials to prosecute students for voting, as well as years of civil rights litigation and organizing over voting rights at the school; a federal judge decided against the students earlier this year, ruling that county commissioners had allocated early voting hours on an “objective and reasonable basis.” 

In 2018, the Texas Civil Rights project had to threaten a similar lawsuit to secure access to early voting hours for students at another large public university in the state. Miguel Rivera, voting rights outreach coordinator with the group, says that eliminating or limiting polling places on college campuses compounds larger patterns of disenfranchisement in the state. 

“These are all really big universities, and the demographics of our student population, our youth population, leans towards a population that is heavily people of color,” Rivera told Bolts. “This is just part of a long history in Texas of finding ways to disenfranchise specific segments of the population.”

Alex Birnel, advocacy director at MOVE Texas, says students in the state face numerous barriers to voting that can dissuade someone from casting their first ballot—from a voter ID law that accepts handgun licenses but not student IDs from public universities, to constantly shifting election laws and the cascade of polling place closures in the state over the past decade. Birnel also cited conservative attempts to stop schools from encouraging young people and staff to vote, and high schools across Texas that fail to follow a state law requiring them to offer at least two opportunities for all eligible students to vote every school year.  

“In Texas, we apply the idea of rugged individualism to voting—that if you really wanted to, you’d jump over the hurdle, climb the mountain, cross the river, jump over the moat of alligators to cast your ballot, but then we pretend rhetorically that it’s like going to the grocery store,” Birnel told Bolts. 

At the Brazos Commissioners Court meeting in July, one member dissented from the decision to remove the only polling site on campus. Russ Ford, a Republican, said his colleagues were “not really paying attention to what the people want and ask for,” adding, “we should be trying to get more people to vote, to make it easier to vote.” The four other commissioners, three Republicans and one Democrat, voted to approve the changes.

Nancy Berry, the Republican commissioner whose precinct includes the university, told Bolts that she recommended replacing TAMU’s early polling place with the city hall building after some of her nonstudent constituents approached her and asked for the change. She says they described campus as difficult to navigate for nonstudents.

“I had not heard from students, and I know all the students weren’t in, but we have a lot of students that come to summer school and they were in class and I didn’t hear from anybody,” Berry said, although county records show she was present at a July 2020 commission meeting when TAMU students delivered a presentation asking for more voting options on campus. “After we passed it, then I heard from students, and I’ve heard them loud and clear.” 

Berry and other county officials insist it was too late to change polling places for this November’s election by the time students started speaking out in August, although Bruce Erratt, legal counsel for the county, told local media after the Aug. 30 commission meeting that adding early voting hours at the student center for this election was “legal but not practical.” 

After ignoring the issue on Aug. 30, the commissioners added the future of the student center as a polling place to the agenda of their Sept. 13 meeting, and several TAMU students attended. But the meeting was canceled after two commissioners failed to show, in apparent protest of the county’s proposed tax rate, denying a quorum for the meeting.

Steve Aldrich, one of the commissioners who didn’t attend the meeting alongside Ford, told Bolts that the students protesting the change of early polling places should care more about property taxes, “because they end up paying them anyway…property taxes are also an issue for students.” Aldrich, a Republican, said he’s open to reconsidering the student center for an early polling place in future elections. But as for the possibility of two campus polling places, which was the goal for student organizers until commissioners slashed voting hours on campus this year, Aldrich suggested the cost of expanding campus polling places was too great. 

“I know for a fact that, from a cost perspective, the cities at least are on record as saying we don’t want to have more than one early voting center per precinct,” he said. 

Birnel says he hopes the debate over the polling place on campus ultimately sparks more organizing for greater investment in local elections infrastructure. 

“You can imagine this other kind of system, where we spend resources for local elections departments to hire staff to scale up our ability to reach people,” Birnel said. “You can imagine a state that cared about voting and would fund that, you can imagine a situation in which those local elections departments crowdsource from organizations that do outreach every day and develop best practices in order to turn the tide on the status quo.”

Birnel also pointed to climbing turnout among young voters in Texas in recent elections, which he calls “evidence of a Texas that’s changing.” 

“Every cycle we see those numbers, and it seems like it’s just a matter of continuing to organize young people,” Birnel said. “But for us organizers on the ground in the state, it’s also a matter of preserving the places where students can vote.”

The post Texas Students Are Again Battling the Closure of a Campus Polling Place appeared first on Bolts.

On the list of bullet points Fearer splashed on a big screen behind him was the name of Tarrant County Sheriff Bill Waybourn, a tough-talking cop who first won in 2016 with an overwhelming 81 percent of the vote but only narrowly prevailed when he went up for re-election in 2020. To Fearer, that slide is enough to suggest fraud. “There was no glaring issue with the job that he (Waybourn) had done that we could perceive, yet in 2020 the margin was only 5 percent,” Fearer said. 

That remark would shock Waybourn’s local critics, who have organized against the scandal-plagued sheriff and his policies for years. They have protested the dehumanizing and dangerous conditions that pervade inside the jail he oversees, which has seen a spike in deaths since he took office. 

While Waybourn has become a fixture of right-wing media and a reliable dial-a-quote for comments demonizing migrants, protesters, and leftists, his rhetoric and numerous alarming incidents on his watch—including a pregnant woman with mental illness giving birth alone while locked inside her cell in 2020—have galvanized a coalition of local activists who have demanded his resignation and supported his Democratic opponent in 2020. The group has continued to organize against the sheriff and his policies under the name “New Sheriff Now Tarrant County,” testifying in front of the county commission to demand justice for people harmed in Waybourn’s jail, including a woman with mental disabilities who recently left the lockup bruised and in a coma.

But Fearer’s slideshow to the Tarrant County group drew on rhetoric that has spread among conservatives, pointing to bare election results they dislike as reason enough for suspicion. Rather than providing documentation that justifies those doubts, they treat outcomes that deviate from their expectations—including Trump’s loss, Waybourn’s close call, and even signs of increased civic engagement, like recent record-high turnout—as signs of fraud.

The conspiracies often carry a racist tinge, from Trump’s lies that widespread illegal voting by immigrants cost him the popular vote in 2016 to claims made by Roy Moore, the losing 2017 Republican nominee in Alabama’s U.S. Senate race who was accused of molesting teenagers. Moore pointed to “anomalous” high turnout in the state’s Black communities as evidence of fraud when he refused to accept defeat and sued to block his opponent’s certification. His lawsuit called it “inexplicable” that Jefferson County, home to Birmingham, would have a higher turnout rate than the rest of the state. In 2020, Trump supporters similarly twisted high turnout into a sign of fraud, and Trump pointed to President Joe Biden’s large majorities in predominantly Black cities and counties as reason to doubt the results. 

Fearer and his Tarrant County group, which deny Trump’s 2020 loss, have employed the tactic to spread doubt about local election results in recent years. The group argues without evidence that the record high turnout in Fort Worth’s hotly contested mayoral race last year could indicate fraud. (The Republican candidate prevailed in that race.)

Following the election, the group began mailing out postcards asking residents to “verify” their votes by entering personal information into a non-secure website, spooking state and local election officials, who urged voters not to respond. Last week, Votebeat and the Texas Tribune reported that organizers with Tarrant County Citizens for Election Integrity are physically combing through about 300,000 ballots cast during the county’s 2020 GOP primary elections in search of irregularities. 

And the group has moved to police the vote in other ways. In his January presentation, Fearer displayed a series of photos that he said showed vacant lots and dilapidated properties where people were registered; Fearer also included many places that poor and vulnerable people might be staying like halfway houses, rehab centers, shelters, budget motels and RV parks on his list of “potentially fraudulent addresses.” Fearer, who did not respond to multiple efforts to contact him for this story, said during his presentation that the group is also organizing with activists monitoring elections in other Texas counties and across the country. 

The organizing by North Texas election deniers is part of a larger attempt by some conservatives to police elections across the state. Bolts reported in April on a group of stop-the-steal activists who are raising money for private investigators to search for voter fraud in the Houston area—and whose actions have already led to the armed assault of an innocent truck driver wrongly accused of fraud. In Texas, these activists have benefited from the support of state Attorney General Ken Paxton, who aided in the legal efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential race.

This suspicion about election results has also inspired new restrictions and threats against people who engage in the electoral process. Republicans across the country in recent years have used the specter of widespread fraud to pass laws establishing new barriers to voting while further criminalizing the elections process; 26 states have enacted, expanded, or increased the severity of 120 election-related criminal penalties since the 2020 election, according to a recent analysis by States Newsroom of data compiled by Voting Rights Lab . States like Florida and Tennessee have also ramped up their policing of elections this year.

The North Texas group’s conspiracy theories also extend to Tarrant County Election Administrator Heider Garcia, who was appointed to the post by a bipartisan county election commission in 2018. In April, they posted a video attacking Garcia that focused on his Venezuelan heritage and accused him of eroding the security of local elections. Two weeks later, at a county commission meeting, Garcia delivered a lengthy presentation running the public through every step of the voting and counting systems and explaining the various processes involved to ensure security; he even included sped-up surveillance footage of voting machines sitting in a room overnight, free from tampering after an election. 

The meeting was packed with residents, many of whom applauded Garcia and later testified to express confidence in the county’s election systems. But when Fearer testified, he urged county officials to consult with Tina Peters, an election-denying county clerk in Colorado. 

The group has also hosted virtual forums with Peters, who was criminally indicted this year on charges that she tampered with voting equipment in an effort to boost Trump’s bogus claims of a stolen election; Fearer’s group hails Peters as an expert and hero. Peters handily lost her bid to become Colorado’s secretary of state last month, but refused to concede and promptly claimed the results were false. “We didn’t lose,” she said on election night. “We just found more fraud.”

The post North Texas Conservatives Police High Turnout and Close Races as “Anomalies” Suggesting Fraud appeared first on Bolts.

Except Lopez wasn’t being robbed. He had instead stumbled into the crosshairs of local conservatives hunting for voter fraud ahead of the 2020 presidential election. 

When actual police officers later questioned the man who allegedly held Lopez at gunpoint, former Houston police captain Mark Aguirre, he said his crew had been monitoring Lopez around-the-clock for days and accused the repairman of harboring 750,000 fraudulent mail ballots. According to the lawsuit, Aguirre told police that Lopez had been “using Hispanic children to sign the ballots because the children’s fingerprints would not appear in any database.” Aguirre, who was fired from the Houston Police Department in 2003 over a botched raid, according to the Houston Chronicle, was eventually indicted for a charge of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon two months after crashing into Lopez and holding him at gunpoint. 

Aguirre wasn’t acting alone, but rather as part of a broader effort by the right in Texas to set up and finance private election police. When it indicted Aguirre, the Harris County DA’s office alleged that he received wire transfers of over $250,000 from the Liberty Center for God and Country, a nonprofit run by notorious conservative activist Steven Hotze. Lopez is now suing Hotze and his nonprofit for civil conspiracy and civil theft.

Hotze has kept up his efforts since 2020 and, despite this bungling tack record, some prominent Texas Republicans are supporting him.

On April 2, Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton helped headline a “Freedom Gala” at a hotel in downtown Houston. The gala was a fundraiser organized by Hotze and his group to raise money to, among other goals, “hire private detectives to investigate, identify, and expose the criminal vote fraud scheme in Harris County and across Texas.” Speakers included Big Lie evangelist Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow, as well as Harris County (Houston) Republican Party Chair Cindy Siegel, who also sits on the county’s elections commission. 

Civil rights advocates warn that deploying police or police-like forces to monitor voting has chilling effects, and that it echoes a history of intimidation deployed against Black voters. Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of Common Cause Texas, said Lopez’s experience highlights the dangers of hired-guns motivated by the Big Lie. “The possibilities are kind of endless for how that could go really badly,” Gutierrez said of Hotze’s plans to hire more voter-fraud detectives. 

Other Republican officials in Harris County, a diverse and increasingly blue area that is home to nearly 5 million residents, have built parallel efforts to monitor voting. Last year, as Republican lawmakers passed legislation emboldening partisan poll watchers, local officials started building what they’ve called an “army” to monitor busy urban polling places. In one presentation, party officials even pointed to Houston’s Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church, a hub for civil rights activism that once hosted Martin Luther King Jr., as the kind of inner-city polling place conservatives need to more closely watch in the future. 

Christina Das, an attorney who leads the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund’s election protection work in Texas and South Carolina, says Texas’s new voting law, Senate Bill 1, already seems to be impacting local election systems. “Staffing shortages, poll sites closing… these happened in the March 1 election,” Das told Bolts, saying the threat of new penalties for election workers exacerbated those problems.

“It’s a 360-degree approach to criminalizing our elections so that people don’t turn out, they don’t show up, they don’t work the polls and they don’t get to the polls,” Das said. 

Private voter-fraud squads and S.B. 1 are part of a larger attempt to criminalize elections in Texas. Paxton, who aided in the legal efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential race, has beefed up the voter fraud unit of his office in recent years in order to prosecute more election-related cases, the vast majority of which appear to target Black and Latinx people. And other states are following suit. Last year Georgia Republicans passed a law criminalizing volunteers who give free food, water, or other relief to voters waiting in long lines. Florida’s governor is expected to soon sign a law establishing a new state police force to investigate election-related crimes. Advocates for voting rights argue that these measures, coupled with high-profile prosecutions of Black voters who commit voting errors, seem designed to scare people away from the polls. 

Even if Paxton spoke at Hotze’s fundraiser for more private voter-fraud detectives, it’s unclear what other ties his office has to the group’s actual investigations. Conservative activists in Texas have in the past boasted about working with Paxton’s office to cook up criminal cases alleging election-related crimes. Lopez’s lawsuit against Hotze and his Liberty Center claims that Aguirre called a lieutenant in Paxton’s office to request that they conduct a traffic stop for his investigation three days before Lopez’s roadside assault in October 2020. The lieutenant told Aguirre he couldn’t assign police to make a stop for him, according to the lawsuit, but Aguirre kept calling Paxton’s office, including the morning he pulled a gun on Lopez. 

Paxton, who is up for re-election this year and faces a May 24 runoff against George P. Bush in the GOP primary, dedicated much of his speech at this month’s gala to attacking the all-Republican Texas Court of Criminal Appeals for a recent ruling that limits his authority to prosecute election-related crimes across the state, according to Quorum Report editor Scott Braddock, who attended and wrote about the event. Paxton has urged his supporters to pressure the high court judges to reverse their ruling restricting his authority to initiate voter fraud cases. A prosecutor challenging one of the judges who signed the ruling was endorsed by Hotze and his group but lost in the GOP primary on March 1.  

In Harris County, that March 1 primary was marred by mistakes by election officials, which conservatives have seized on with more unsubstantiated rhetoric about voter fraud. After delays in vote-counting and thousands of mail-in ballots that were accidentally left off the county’s initial vote tally, Harris County’s nonpartisan elections administrator Isabel Longoria announced she would step down this summer. Harris County’s election commission—comprised of three elected county officials and the local party chairs, including Siegel—met for the first time in more than a year last week to discuss a timeline and plan for replacing Longoria. During public comments, one conservative activist said Longoria “should probably be put in jail for her actions.” The commission adjourned without taking action after arguing over the proper way to move forward with Longoria’s replacement.

In a video announcing his recent fundraiser, Hotze called the mistakes made in Harris County during the primary “a prelude to what they will do to us in the general election if we don’t organize.” Hotze also referenced Lopez’s lawsuit. “I’ve already been sued over this whole issue of trying to stop and expose voter fraud by the Democrats,” he said. “I am going to stand, nobody’s going to back me down, I’m going to be the tip of the spear here in Harris County.”

The post Texas Conservatives Want Private Cops to Police Elections appeared first on Bolts.

On the other side of the Dallas region, a rare Republican member of Congress who voted to certify the 2020 presidential election and create a January 6th commission found himself locked into a runoff against a badly underfunded candidate who thinks it’s too early to say who won in 2020 and cheers efforts to overturn the results. Within hours on Wednesday, U.S. Representative Van Taylor announced he was dropping out of the runoff over allegations of infedelity, handing a stunning victory to President Donald Trump’s allies.

The results of the Texas primaries showed once again that GOP politics today is fueled by the force of the Big Lie, the baseless claim peddled by Trump that the 2020 election was marred by widespread fraud.

Big Lie politics have even reshaped how elections are administered in the state since 2020, with Texas Republicans invoking fraud last year to pass a stringent voting law that left local election officials reeling and sent mail ballot rejection rates soaring.

Purveyors of the Big Lie did suffer a big loss on Tuesday, too. They targeted Scott Walker, a Republican judge running for a second term on the state’s highest criminal court, angered by a ruling Walker signed that limited the attorney general’s powers to prosecute fraud and vowing to punish him for it. Walker beat back challenger Clint Morgan, a Houston prosecutor who trumpeted the support of these conservative groups while talking up his tough-on-crime credentials.

But Walker didn’t challenge the premises of the Big Lie during his campaign, telling Bolts that he could not say who won the last presidential election. He joins the long list of GOP officials who are not willing to call out the false statements that are helping their party justify restricting access to the ballot.

Van Taylor was one of just two Texas Republicans who supported creating a commission to investigate the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6th last year. The vote came five months after he supported certifying the results of the presidential election that Trump lost. The twin positions put a target on his back from conservative activists in the state’s third congressional district, anchored in North Texas around Collin County, where his massive financial edge was not enough to shield him from a Big Lie backlash.

Of the 21 Republican members of Congress seeking re-election, Taylor was the only one who failed to clinch the GOP nomination on Tuesday. He received 49 percent of the vote on Tuesday, and was set to face former Collin County Judge Keith Self, who received 27 percent of the vote, in a May 24 runoff. Suzanne Harp, a candidate who has blamed Taylor for the fact that Trump is no longer president, received 21 percent—a number that put added pressure on Taylor.

But on Wednesday, the congressmember bowed out of the runoff, conceding it to Self, who is now heavily favored to join Congress in a district drawn by the GOP to be solidly Republican.

During the campaign, Self attacked Taylor for “voting for Nancy Pelosi’s witch hunt,” and his pinned post on Facebook as of Wednesday morning is an endorsement by Michael Flynn, the former Trump adviser with deep ties to the efforts to overturn the last presidential election. Self also helped Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton avoid trial for felony indictments; Paxton, who sought to overturn the 2020 presidential results, was squeezed into a primary runoff of his own on Tuesday.

In an interview with Texas Monthly during the campaign, Self cheered on the “progress” that he said other states were making in revisiting the 2020 presidential election, incorrectly stating that “one of the chambers in the Wisconsin Legislature has decertified their electors.” (It has not.) He also would not say who won the presidential election.

The only other Texas Republican who supported creating a congressional commission about January 6th, Tony Gonzalez, won the GOP primary for his South Texas seat on Tuesday. Gonzalez had also voted to certify the presidential results.

One of the biggest tests for Republican attacks on election administration was also taking place in North Texas, albeit in a far smaller jurisdiction roughly 100 miles away from Taylor’s district.

Michele Carew, a former elections administrator who was pushed out by conservatives last year, challenged one of the local officials who hounded her: Hood County Clerk Katie Lang, a “Stop the Steal” aficionado who has amplified baseless claims of widespread voter fraud.

Carew was Hood County’s elections administrator during the 2020 presidential election, during which Trump got more than 80 percent of the vote in the county. But conservative activists complained she was not sufficiently committed to cracking down on voter fraud and auditing elections, and tried to oust her, with Lang’s support. (The elections administrator in Hood County is a position appointed by other county officials, including the clerk).

Carew eventually resigned and then chose to confront Lang directly in the Republican primary. While the county clerk in Hood County does not run elections, they have a say in who is appointed to do so, and Carew made a direct appeal against Big Lie politics, warning that her experience was shared by many other elections administrators who also felt harassed and endangered.

“The constant questioning of the 2020 election and the constant spread of lies foster an environment that encourages attacks against election officials,” Carew wrote in The Washington Post last fall, shortly after her resignation. “It’s important for everyone—especially those in positions of authority—to expose outright lies, resist phony suspicions and encourage support for trustworthy local officials who have been put in an impossible position.”

But Carew’s appeal did not resonate with Republican primary voters. Lang easily prevailed, with 60 percent of the vote compared to 20 percent for Carew. 

Lang may acquire more power in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election. Some local Republicans have called for eliminating Hood County’s elections administrator office altogether and transferring its duties to the county clerk. But Lang recently signaled that she has already gotten her way without needing to take on running elections directly, thanks to Carew’s ouster and the appointment of Stephanie Cooper, whom Lang supported.

“I think that we’ve done a wonderful job with our latest election administrator,” Lang told a local talk show last month. “She’s working out great.”

The article has been updated in the afternoon of March 2 to reflect the news that Van Taylor dropped out of the runoff, hours after he learned that he would need to face one.

The post Big Wins for Big Lie Politics in Texas’s Republican Primaries appeared first on Bolts.

Paxton, who achieved hero status among conservatives for aiding in the legal efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential race, has long fixated on baseless accusations of widespread fraud. He beefed up the voter fraud unit of the attorney general’s office to hunt for election-related crimes that GOP lawmakers can then cite when passing new voting restrictions. The court’s 8-1 ruling complicates that effort, keeping the power to prosecute in the hands of local district attorneys, and it prompted howls from all corners of the Texas GOP. Governor Greg Abbott urged the court to reconsider while Paxton fanned the controversy with help from Big Lie evangelists like Steve Bannon and Donald Trump loyalist Mike Lindell. During an appearance on LindellTV, Paxton solicited help pressuring the judges to reverse their ruling, asking viewers to “call them out by name.” 

The barrage that followed ranged from angry to outright threatening, according to emails sent to the court that were obtained by the Austin American-Statesman. “Your court now is on my list to go after in The Patriot hunt for Communists,” said one message. “We are armed at all times so do not cross the line.”

Anger against the all-Republican court is now spilling into the GOP’s March 1 primary. Conservative activists have rallied against Scott Walker, one of the CCA judges who signed the opinion limiting Paxton’s power and the only member of the court who faces a primary challenger. Clint Morgan, a Houston-area prosecutor running to unseat Walker, has racked up support from conservative groups across the state, including some of the state’s most rabid purveyors of the Big Lie. 

A down-ballot reckoning in Paxton’s name fueled by “Stop the Steal” conspiracies might signal just how deep their influence runs. 

During his campaign, Morgan has touted endorsements from right-wing activists who have made it clear that voting issues are why they care about ousting the incumbent judge. He has not publicly shared his views on the 2020 presidential race, and he did not respond to numerous requests for comment from Bolts. But last month, he cheered a slate of endorsements that included Conservative Republicans of Texas, a group led by Houston doctor and hard-right activist Steve Hotze. 

Hotze has been fueling the anger against the CCA judges over their decision limiting Paxton’s power. According to the Houston Chronicle, his group placed a robocall last month to tens of thousands of conservatives across the state asking them to contact the court, with a pre-recorded message of Hotze warning, “If this decision isn’t reversed, then the Democrats will steal the elections in November and turn Texas blue.” 

Hotze has been a central player in Republican efforts to restrict voting rights in Texas far before the December ruling. Largely known for stirring up hatred against LGBTQ people, Hotze has in recent years focused on groundless fears of widespread fraud. He helped lead the Texas GOP’s fight to limit safe voting options during the pandemic and filed lawsuits attempting to invalidate more than 100,000 votes cast at drive-thru polling sites in Houston during the 2020 election. He also hired a team of investigators, purportedly to root out fraud in the state—including a former Houston police captain who was later criminally charged with detaining an air conditioning repairman at gunpoint in October 2020 and accusing him of “using Hispanic children” to steal the election from Trump.

Morgan also features on his website the support of the True Texas Project, an influential group in North Texas Republican circles that has helped fuel conservative infighting in the state in recent years. The group pushed for a state audit of election results despite assurances from the Republican-appointed secretary of state that voting in the state was “smooth and secure” (that official was later replaced by a former Trump lawyer who had challenged the 2020 results). The True Texas Project now recommends that voters fire Walker because of his December vote in the court’s election prosecution case. 

“This is Texas’s chance to undo a silly vote for Scott Walker, who only won because he has the same name as someone famous!” the True Texas Project says, a reference to the former Republican governor of Wisconsin. 

But Walker is himself not willing to shut the door on Trump’s false claims. Reached over the phone, he wouldn’t say whether he thought Trump lost in 2020. “I’m not qualified to say to what extent voter fraud has played in any particular election,” he said. 

Walker also would not talk about the recent ruling impacting Paxton’s authority to prosecute elections crimes, saying state rules governing conduct for judges bar him from discussing it. “I think it would be best for me to stay away from that completely,” he told Bolts. 

That has not stopped the campaign against Walker, which dovetails with a larger backlash by GOP officials against judges who issue rulings they disagree with in election-related cases. 

While baseless conspiracies about voter fraud have long animated the Texas GOP, they now drive right-wing politics in the state. Paxton, whose office has been the tip of the spear in these efforts, faces indictments and investigations over criminal and ethical lapses, and he faces several seemingly formidable challengers in the March 1 primary, including a scion of the Bush dynasty. But he has channeled his fixation on voter fraud, and his accusations that Democratic prosecutors in the state are closing their eyes to election-related crimes, into conservative support. He landed Trump’s endorsement last year. 

The issue is now casting unusual attention on CCA judges whose elections rarely take center-stage in the state’s politics. “There’s no money, nobody fundraises, they’re just backwater races,” said Scott Henson, a longtime advocate for criminal justice reform in the state. He says voters may not even know the state has two different high courts, since civil appeals land at the Texas Supreme Court. (Oklahoma is the only other state with separate high courts). 

“Voters not only don’t know who the candidates are, they for the most part don’t even know that the court exists,” Henson told Bolts. “Those endorsements can matter a lot.” 

The winner of the Republican primary between Morgan and Walker will face a general election against Dana Huffman, who is the only candidate running in the Democratic primary for this seat. Democrats have not won a statewide election in Texas in decades, though they came closer than usual in 2018.

Two other CCA judges are also running for re-election right now, but neither faces an opponent in the Republican primary. The filing deadline passed days before they issued their ruling against Paxton, and conservatives lamented the missed opportunity to recruit more challengers against them.

Morgan was already running against Walker at the time of the decision, espousing rhetoric traditionally associated with elected positions inside the criminal justice system. He currently works as a staff prosecutor in the Harris County District Attorney’s Office, and he is largely running on a tough-on-crime platform, with endorsements from state and local police unions. 

Walker has not stood out during his time on the court as especially sympathetic to defendants’ rights, though he is a former defense lawyer. But Morgan was still a blast from the past during a candidate forum last month. “I believe we have a crisis of crime in our state, and I believe that we need to confront it the way that Republicans confronted the last wave of crime in the 1990s—with law and order,” Morgan told the crowd.

The post “Stop the Steal” Activists Target a Texas Judge appeared first on Bolts.

Kurt Lockhart says the actions taken by Houston’s elections officials prompted him to run for the same job at home in Austin this year. Lockhart, one of two candidates in next month’s Democratic primary for Travis County Clerk, which oversees elections in the state’s left-leaning capital city, argues the office should have done more in 2020 to help voters. 

“I was really inspired to run because of what happened in Harris County and the innovative things they did, like 24-hour voting and drive-thru voting, that frankly we should have done here in Travis County,” Lockhart told Bolts. “I think we missed out on that opportunity to enfranchise more folks.” 

Local elections offices have become a hotly-disputed battleground in the longstanding fight over voting rights in Texas. After fighting to uphold restrictions on mail ballots and suing to block expanded voting options ahead of the 2020 election, last year Republicans passed Senate Bill 1, a sweeping new set of voting restrictions. Among other provisions, SB 1 bans local elections officials from implementing drive-thru or around-the-clock voting. It also threatens local officials and elections administrators with a felony if they encourage eligible voters to cast mail ballots, with a mandatory minimum punishment of six months imprisonment.

Republicans followed up their success with a special legislative session where they churned out new gerrymandered maps that safeguard their legislative majorities for years to come by continuing to dilute the political power of the state’s fast-growing Black, Hispanic and Asian communities. 

Advocates for voting rights say local elections officials in Texas still have a critical role to play in the face of new barriers to voting. 

“Because of gerrymandering, it’s going to be challenging to get to legislative majorities for visions we have on the progressive side about how we can run elections better—things like automatic voter registration, online voter registration, allowing student IDs for voter ID and mandatory campus polling locations,” said Alex Birnel, advocacy director with the progressive group MOVE Texas, which has pushed to boost voter participation in a state with historically low turnout. 

“The other option is to go local and explore where there is still room in the election code,” he added. 

Birnel points to the success of innovations spearheaded in 2020 by Harris County election officials. “These sorts of small policy tweaks are super consequential in diversifying the electorate,” Birnel told Bolts. He points to stories of “welders being able to vote without cutting into their work schedule, moms being able to vote without having to worry about wrangling their kids out of the back seat of the van.” Even though SB 1 narrowed options for election administrators, Birnel hopes that sympathetic local officials will keep innovating and working with voter outreach groups to help boost turnout.

Dyana Limon-Mercado, the other Democrat running for Travis County Clerk, says local elections officials in Texas must push back against state barriers while expanding access to the ballot. “Our local elected officials are having to fight against state officials to guarantee people’s constitutional right to vote in an easy and accessible way,” she told Bolts. “The fight for voting rights is as critical as ever at this moment.” 

Lockhart echoes her assessment. “Senate Bill 1 may ban great ideas like 24-hour voting, but there’s no law banning an elections information app to send folks updates about upcoming elections,” he said. “There’s no law banning us from adding additional languages to our election materials, there’s nothing banning us from increasing our social media presence for community outreach,” he said. “There’s still so much that can be done.” 

Both Limon-Mercado and Lockhart have vowed to expand voting options, including by extending polling to 10 p.m., the new legal limit set by SB 1. Whoever wins could also face pressure to address barriers to voting imposed by mass incarceration. As pretrial detention has ballooned, people who are eligible to vote but stuck in jail during an election period are often unable to cast a ballot. After facing years of organizing, Harris County officials were the first in the state to put a polling place in the local jail last year.

Lockhart commits to pushing for a similar polling place at Travis County jail if elected. “As County Clerk, my job will be to expand access to ensure that every eligible voter can exercise their right to vote simply, safely, and securely,” he told Bolts. “That means making sure the Travis County Jail has a polling location available for eligible voters in every election.” Asked about a voting location at the jail, Limon-Mercado replied, “I am definitely open to talking to our county sheriff to find a way for that to happen, I am definitely in support of it.” 

The winner of the March 1 primary between Limon-Mercado and Lockhart will be heavily favored in the general election, and will probably be responsible for administering the 2024 elections in Texas’ most Democratic county.

Like much of the rest of the country, elections in Texas are run by a dizzying patchwork of offices that take different forms across counties. In some counties, such as Travis, voters directly elect clerks who administer elections in addition to other responsibilities, such as overseeing misdemeanor court records, while an elected tax collector-assessor handles voter registration. Elsewhere in the state, county commissioners have created independent election administrators who are appointed by a board of local officials, rather than elected themselves. Last year, Harris County abandoned the clerk model in favor of setting up an appointed election administrator, who has since joined civil rights groups and the U.S. Justice Department in suing to stop parts of SB 1, including the provision that criminalizes officials who promote mail voting.

Harris County commissioners pointed to the racist roots of the old system to justify the change. Tax collectors were given control of voter registration during a time when poll taxes were used to suppress Black voters. 

Birnel says Texas counties should also shift toward unified and appointed election administrators, calling the old model “a residue of Jim Crow.” Elected clerks who directly oversee elections may be more vulnerable to the kind of polarizing political swings that have turned some election offices into bright red targets for conservative activists pushing Donald Trump’s lies about a stolen election. 

Travis County splits election administration between its county clerk and its tax assessor-collector, who oversees voter registration. The sitting tax assessor-collector, Bruce Elfant, is a Democrat last elected in 2020 who is appreciated by voting rights advocates for helping ease voter registration in Travis County, where nearly all eligible voters registered ahead of the 2020 election.

Lockhart says that, if elected, he’d lobby for Travis County officials to follow the same path as Harris County and create a unified and appointed office; Limon-Mercado hasn’t committed either way. 

Limon-Mercado frames the clerk’s office as part of a larger fight for political change in Texas. She recalls feeling so distraught by her first government job fresh out of college, a court clerk inside a detention center in downtown Austin, that she quit and turned to the state legislature, where she interned with a lawmaker who helped pass criminal justice reforms. She eventually went on to other jobs at the intersection of politics and policy—including working for a disability rights group and most recently as executive director for Planned Parenthood Texas Votes. 

She says election administration and voting rights are a cornerstone for all those issues she cares about. “We can’t change the policies unless we have the elected officials, and we can’t have the elected officials if we don’t have fair access to the ballot,” she told Bolts. 

The post Voting Rights Advocates Search for Openings to “Go Local” in Texas appeared first on Bolts.