FUBAR

Holy shit. The Texas Senate just passed a bill to give Greg Abbott’s handpicked Sec. of State the power to overturn elections in the 3rd biggest county in the U.S.

Republicans weaponizing 2020 election lies to rig elections. This is a HUGE story. pic.twitter.com/FyTBalEttM

— Sawyer Hackett (@SawyerHackett) May 2, 2023

A few precincts in Harris County (i.e., Houston) ran out of paper for the voting machines. This happened in large part because the State recently required all counties (at county expense, of course) to purchase new voting machines that created a paper ballot. 

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: there are now two voting machines. One is where you vote individually. You feed this with a piece of paper given to you, make your selections, and print your ballot. You then take that to a machine that scans the ballot and says “So long, sucker!”

I’m exaggerating. But you do data entry on one machine, then manually feed that information to another machine. And surprise! surprise! there were glitches the first time the largest county in Texas rolled out the new machines.

So this law applies to only the six largest counties in Texas (all predominantly Democratic).  It would also require those counties abolish the office of elections administrator (chosen by the county) and revert those duties to elected county officials. The election administrators were created to improve elections in the largest counties. They haven’t had a chance to iron out the kinks and already they’re to be abolished.  And we’ll just force re-elections (assuring lower turnout and probably more Republicans at the polls) whenever there’s a problem with paper distribution.

Sure, why not?