This Is How Democracy Is Saved

Texas voter had to wait in line for nearly seven hours until he was able to cast his ballot.

He finally managed to vote at 1:30 a.m. and then told reporters that he was heading straight to his night shift at work, which he was already late for. https://t.co/6QKrEjtD77

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) March 4, 2020

The story coming out of Houston was that the state had closed 750 voting precincts and that caused chaos in Texas's largest city yesterday.

Wait a minute.

I grew up voting in precincts, and it was a pain in the ass.  Especially after I moved to Houston, my precinct moved around, as did the voting location for my precinct.  Was that voter suppression, or the fact the polling location was usually in a church (they had the big room people could get into to get at voting machines) and sometimes churches were available that year, sometimes not?  Usually the latter, though nobody suspiciously thought it was the former until after the Roberts Court declared the Year of Jubilee and gutted the Voting Rights Act (and the 15th Amendment) like a fish.

Then Texas started early voting, and that could take place wherever the county (which determines voting locations in Texas) could set one up.  I have consistently voted in the same location for years now, always early (much easier to vote on a weekend than on election day.  Why elections can't happen on weekends is another matter.).  It's wonderful.  And then Texas eliminated precincts (hurray!  Finding out which precinct you were in and where to vote on election day was a pain, even with internet access, which was not the norm for most of the years I had to vote one day only).  Except, as we will see, they didn't.  But they did move to make voting even more convenient; and there the conspiracy theories start.

Rachel Maddow said last night we were robbed; of 750 places to vote.  First, such matters in Texas are organized by county.  There are 256 counties in Texas.  Texas voting is arranged by voting precincts within those counties.  However, Texas now allows countywide voting, if the county chooses, which allows residents in the county to vote anywhere in the county without determining what precinct they live in.  This is a boon to counties like Harris County (Houston, essentially), because you can find a place to vote, instead of being told "YOU CAN'T VOTE HERE!," which used to be quite common.  One year I voted at a primary location where only one party could vote; voters in the other party had to find the other location.  I never did figure out where that was. (This year both parties could vote at the location I went to.  More on that in a moment.)  How many voting precincts are there per county? I honestly can't find that information, because I think it is determined by county.  A populous county like Harris will have hundreds (best guess).  A low population county (Loving, with 152 at last count) probably has only one.  It's unlikely that one was one of the 750 Dr. Maddow cited as no longer available.  But out of 256 counties, that's roughly 3 per county (slightly higher than that for populous counties, obviously).  It isn't really a dent, in other words.

And it didn't really happen.  What happened is the most populous counties (at least) chose to make voting easier, not harder, and went with the countywide voting option.  Now that might have crowded certain polling locations; but that problem is on the local election officials who put machines at various locations, guessing who would show up yesterday to vote.  It was also, in Harris county, a problem of the parties not getting together on how to run their election sites.

The county official here in charge says she tried to get the Democrats and Republicans to agree to combine voting locations and allow all comers access to all machines.  I know when I voted there were some machines not getting much use.  I assume now those were reserved for Republican voters. What should have been done was to set up those machines so all comers could vote at the next one available.  But the local parties wouldn't agree to do that.  Democrats claim they didn't understand what as on offer (!); Republicans claim they didn't want their voters standing in long line with Democrats (of course, the idea was to limit those long lines, but Republicans apparently decided they'd rather see Democrats discouraged).

So there was no conspiracy; just the usual mess of getting people to polls to vote.  And frankly, despite that....