A8 eZ sU THE WASHINGTON POST.THURSDAy, MARCH 5 , 2020
election 2020
BY ELISE VIEBECKThe lines stretched in the dark
across the plaza at Texas Southern
University, as hundreds of would-
be voters stood for hours Tuesday
to cast ballots in the Democratic
presidential primary.
As t hey waited, students shared
phone chargers, activists sent in
pizza a nd exhausted voters resort-
ed to sitting on the ground.
The voting center at t he histori-
cally black university in Houston
was one of a number of such loca-
tions around Te xas that were
plagued by long delays on Super
Tuesday, raising questions about
the r eadiness of local election offi-
cials and spurring outrage among
voting rights advocates. Many cit-
ed as a factor the closing of hun-
dreds precincts around the state
after a pivotal Supreme Court de-
cision i n 2013.
One of the remaining Demo-
crats in the presidential field —
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) —
seized on the episode, tweeting
that it revealed a “crisis of voter
suppression.”
However, interviews with elec-
tion officials, activists and voters
pointed to a number of complicat-
ed factors that combined to pro-
duce the massive lines in Harris
County.
“There was actually a failure in
the system at multiple junctures,”
said Beth Stevens, the voting
rights program director with the
Te xas Civil Rights Project, in an
interview.
“The effect is that you have
black and brown people on college
campuses standing in line for two
hours, four hours, seven hours to
vote,” s he s aid.
Harris County Clerk Diane
Trautman, a Democrat elected in
2018, t weeted a message o f thanks
to voters Wednesday morning,
saying: “There is no such thing as
a perfect election, but I am com-
mitted to always improving the
voting process and increasing ac-
cess to the polls.”
Election officials noted that
Tuesday was the county’s first pri-
mary using a countywide polling
system, which allows residents to
cast ballots at any polling center,
regardless of w here they live.
In addition to that change, the
primary was shaped by the deci-
sions of the local political parties,
which were responsible for major
issues such as where polling plac-
es were to be l ocated, officials said.
“The Democratic and Republi-
can Party need to agree on every-
thing,” said Roxanne Werner, the
director of community relations
for the Harris County Clerk’s Of-
fice, in an interview. “All of the
polling locations were negotiated
by the Democratic and Republi-
can Party with our assistance.”
Compounding the issue: Turn-
out was higher than e xpected, and
because Tuesday was a primary,
fewer polling locations were open
than will b e in November.
Werner said Harris County
plans to have all of its polling
locations open for the general
election in November — a bout 750polling places compared with 401
on Tuesday. She said the unusual
role of political parties in Te xas
primaries makes it difficult to
compare Super Tuesday to the No-
vember vote, which will be run
entirely by professional election
administrators.
“Primary elections are differ-
ent. People don’t always realize
the f ull scope of how they’re differ-
ent,” Werner said.
Other factors contributed to the
long wait times. Te xas’s Harris
County — which includes Hous-
ton and is the t hird m ost populous
county in the country — relies on
paperless voting machines that
were introduced in 2002. They c an
be difficult t o use and a re prone to
breaking down, according to elec-
tion security experts. Several peo-
ple said in interviews that the
machines at TSU did not function
consistently throughout the day
Tuesday.
The voting exercise was also
complicated by the Harris County
Republican Party’s decision not to
hold a primary jointly with the
Democratic Party, officials said.
This meant that each party had
designated voting machines andthat voters from the other party —
even if they were waiting in long
lines — c ould not cross over to use
the o ther side’s m achines.
Trautman noted in a tweet that
she had proposed a joint primary
but said “one party agreed while
the o ther did not.”
Lillie Schechter, the chair of the
Harris County Democrats, said
that “a joint primary would have
allowed us to use all the machines
at each location for every voter
that came i n.”
“So when we had machines go
down at TSU for a brief period of
time, it wouldn’t have mattered,
because voters would have been
able to use all the machines,” she
added.
Genevieve Carter, the commu-
nications director at the Harris
County Republican Party, argued
that a joint primary would not
have prevented t he l ong lines. She
said that GOP’s d ecision to decline
a joint primary reflected a lack of
confidence in county election ad-
ministrators.
“What this c omes d own to is the
county clerk’s incompetence and
even arrogance,” Carter said in an
interview. “They have chosen topoint fingers rather than fix the
way that they went about elec-
tions.”
To some advocates, the lines
were a sign of the long-term ef-
fects of the Supreme Court’s 2013
decision in Shelby County v. Hold-
er. The ruling blocked federal
oversight of certain regions of the
country that historically had
sought to limit the v oting rights of
minorities.
To restore the oversight, Con-
gress must approve a new formula
to determine which regions merit
scrutiny. The Democratic-led
House passed l egislation l ast year,
but t he Republican-led Senate h as
not taken it up.
That has left large parts of the
country without the robust feder-
al protection of the Voting Rights
Act of 1965.
“What we saw at T SU yesterday
is really voter suppression in
2020,” s aid Vanita Gupta, the pres-
ident and chief executive of the
Leadership Conference on Civil
and Human Rights, in an inter-
view.
“In a lot of ways, I think the
American public thinks it’s just
conspiracy theory when we talk
about t his. But when you see imag-
es like yesterday and hear directly
from impacted people who were
standing in line... I t hink that the
events of last night speak for
themselves.”
In a study released l ast year, the
Leadership Conference found
that Harris County eliminated 52
polling places between 2012 and
2018, the fourth-highest number
by a county i n areas affected by the
Shelby decision. At the state level,
Te xas led the way with 750 polling
places c losed.
Gupta pointed to this finding
and to reports of the voting ma-
chines at TSU breaking down on
Tuesday as “proof points that cry
out for change.”
Trautman vowed after taking
office in February 2019 to “fully
comply with the requirements of
the Voting R ights Act to protect all
of the people of Harris County
from the denial of their right to
vote... particularly concerning
the r ights o f people of color, mem-
bers of language groups and per-sons with disabilities.”
On the TSU campus, freshman
Marleta Haynes, 19, said s he o rigi-
nally went to vote around 4 p.m.
The line seemed long, so she fig-
ured she would come back later
when it had shortened.
By when she r eturned, s he s aid,
she was shocked to see that the
line now snaked across the cam-
pus. She waited for more than five
hours, from 6:50 p.m. until mid-
night.
“On my f eet the w hole time,” s he
said. “I had to set an example for
others, l ike my y ounger brother.”
After four hours of waiting, she
finally stepped into the building
where the voting machines were
and saw that the line zigzagged
farther i nside.
“I was like, ‘Okay, I don’t t hink I
can do this. I do not think I can do
this,’ ” Haynes said. “But I started
texting my friends, and they were
like, ‘You’ve been waiting in line
for too long; you cannot give up
now.’ ”
Haynes said that b y the time she
left, she had missed the last shut-
tle to her off-campus student
housing. Her phone was dying, so
she had a friend call an Uber ride
to take her home. It was not the
first-time voting experience she
had e xpected, but she said she will
not b e deterred. She’ll vote again
in November, she said.
“But much earlier,” Haynes
said. “When they tell us there is
early voting going on, I will most
definitely do that.”
TSU freshman Kim Rivers, 19,
said she got in line when her class
let out at 3 p.m. and waited for two
hours t o vote for f ormer vice presi-
dent Joe Biden.
Rivers t hought it was unreason-
able that there seemed to be the
same number of voting machines
for D emocrats and Republicans.
“Being in an all-black commu-
nity, you know there’s not many
Republicans coming to vote,” Riv-
ers said. “Especially on campus at
an HBCU. So why do y’all have a
whole five voting machines and
only five for t he Democrats?”
[email protected]Brittney Martin in Houston
contributed to this report.Lengthy wait times in Tex. raise question of equal access
Voter suppression came
to mind for some, but the
reality was complicatedJon sHApley/HoUston CHronICle/AssoCIAteD press
A s low-moving line, inspiring people to use chairs, at a polling center at Texas Southern University in
Houston illustrates the delays s ome voters in the Texas Democratic p rimary endured Tuesday.BY NEENA SATIJA,
JOSEPH MARKS
AND ISAAC STANLEY-BECKERA new voting system in Los
Angeles County faced its first big
test on Super Tuesday, the culmi-
nation of a decade of work on
what was envisioned as a model
for the nation. But technical
glitches caused hours-long lines
across the county — the largest in
the country with more than 5 mil-
lion registered voters — a nd harsh
criticism from candidates, voters
and political parties.
About one-fifth of the county’s
touch-screen voting machines did
not work properly and had to be
replaced, county spokesman Mi-
chael Sanchez said late Tuesday,
for reasons he said he could not
specify. He also said that network
problems in multiple locations
interfered with electronic poll
books used to verify voter eligibili-
ty, forcing some voters to cast
provisional ballots. Those will
ta ke longer to count.
“We believed in the technology
and we believed it would work,
because that’s what we were told,”
said Mark Gonzalez, chair of the
county’s Democratic Party. “And
that’s not what happened. Ma-
chines completely went out.
V oting centers completely shut
down.”
Janice Hahn, a member of the
county’s nonpartisan board of su-
pervisors, said she plans to press
for the county registrar’s office to
investigate the failures and ex-
plain w ithin 30 days how they can
be remedied before November’s
general election.
“It was $300 million and a
period of years that we have been
developing this, so it was very
troubling that on the day of the
actual vote there were some big
problems,” Hahn said. “The rea-
son we changed to this system was
to create more access for people
and more flexibility, so I want to
make sure that the problems peo-
ple experienced yesterday didn’t
cause just the opposite of what we
were attempting to do.”
Los Angeles County has w orked
for years to develop its own voting
system, one that was to be accessi-
ble to voters with disabilities and
non-English speakers. As the first
publicly owned voting system in
the United States, it would also
ease the grip that a handful of
private companies have long held
on how Americans vote, support-
ers of the effort said.
The system’s c ustom-made vot-
ing machines feature oversized
buttons and can be adjusted for
people in wheelchairs. Voters can
choose from 13 languages and
listen through earphones if they
have impaired vision or prefer
audio. The machines — called
b allot-marking devices — print
out a paper record that voters can
verify and then feed into a ballot
box.
Dean Logan, the Los Angeles
County registrar of voters who led
the development of the system,
did not respond to calls seeking
comment Wednesday. On Tues-
day, he told the Los Angeles
Times: “This was a challenging
day for a lot of voters in L.A.
County and I certainly apologize
for that.”
The widespread reports of diffi-
culties prompted the campaign of
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) t o ask a
federal judge to extend voting in
the county by two hours, requir-
ing that polling places remain
open for anyone in line by 10 p.m.
In its filing, the campaign wrote
that significant problems — in-
cluding wait times of up to four
hours — were reported at more
than a dozen polling locations.
Court records do not show a
response from the judge, and the
voting hours were not extended.
“Voters should never have to
wait four hours in line to exercise
their constitutional right to cast
their ballot,” said Anna Bahr, a
Sanders campaign spokeswoman.
“Long wait times and malfunc-
tioning machines like the ones w e
saw yesterday disproportionately
affect working-class voters who
can’t afford to take extra hours off
work or pay for child care to stand
in line.”
Voter advocates, election ob-
servers and candidates expressed
frustration that the county was
using a new system for the first
time during such a crucial elec-
tion.
Before Super Tuesday, Logan
told The Washington Post t hat the
system had functioned well dur-Tech glitches, long lines
rile L .A. County voters
Balloting system meant
to boost access made its
debut on Super Tuesdaying a mock election last fall and
that “feedback from those voters
was very positive.”
For voters, the changes were
not limited to new technology. L os
Angeles residents previously vot-
ed at their neighborhood pre-
cincts. In the new system, voters
can cast their ballot anywhere in
the county, but the number of
polling locations dropped from
more than 4,000 to fewer than
1,000.
On Tuesday, Gonzalez, the
county Democratic chair, said he
saw elderly voters and those with
disabilities waiting in line for
hours, despite the county’s ambi-
tions f or a system that would work
best for the most vulnerable.
At the University of California
at Los Angeles’s Ackerman Stu-
dent Center, students and staff
reported waiting in line for up to
two hours. Some simply left, say-
ing they could not miss work or
class. Volunteers held up white-
boards showing o ther voting loca-
tions nearby.
A county poll worker, who
spoke on the condition of ano-
nymity because he had been in-
structed not to talk to the press,said the Internet connection on
campus was too slow to support
the poll books. Provisional ballots
were being handed out instead.
At the same time, many said
they were able to use the voting
machines effectively. “If you live
on a smartphone, it’s not difficult
to use this system,” said voter
Valarie Kaur, 39.
While technical glitches were
reported elsewhere in California,
Los Angeles County’s problems
were widely felt in part because of
its reliance on voting machines.
Many other counties send mail-in
ballots automatically to every reg-
istered voter and offer mostly
hand-marked paper-ballot op-
tions at polling places. Los Ange-
les County sends mail-in ballots
only to those who request them o r
who have voted by mail previously
and expects most voters at p olling
locations to use the machines.
The county’s website showed
that as of Wednesday morning,
with the counting still underway,
about 651,000 voters had cast bal-
lots on the new machines and
about 486,000 had voted by mail.
It is not clear how many voters
had to cast provisional ballots.Advocates, local candidates
and political party staffers criti-
cized county officials and Califor-
nia Secretary of State Alex Padilla
for not doing more to anticipate
such problems, especially follow-
ing the spectacular failure of a
mobile app used in Iowa’s first-in-
the-nation caucuses.
A December report commis-
sioned by Padilla’s office said the
system did not meet several of the
state’s cybersecurity and accessi-
bility standards. Those standards
were to be “woven directly into
the DNA” of the new system, ac-
cording to the county’s contract
with Smartmatic, the private
company t hat built the voting ma-
chines.
The report said several stan-
dards had not been met: The ma-
chines that tally the results could
be started by inserting a flash
drive, creating an opportunity to
infect them with malware, and
the system lacked a security mea-
sure known as “full disk encryp-
tion,” a cybersecurity gold stan-
dard. Padilla in January certified
the system for use in the March
primaries anyway, imposing cer-
tain conditions such as placingtamper-evident seals and protec-
tive covers on some of the equip-
ment.
His office also ordered the
county to address the ballot mis-
feed rate cited in the report, which
found that the rate — essentially,
of paper jams — was five times
higher than the state standard.
It’s not clear if that issue was
addressed during the primaries,
though many voters reported that
issues with paper jams contribut-
ed to long lines Tuesday.
Padilla’s office did not respond
to requests for comment Wednes-
day.
Smartmatic’s chief executive,
Antonio Mugica, congratulated
the county on Twitter on Wednes-
day, writing: “Long lines in some
centers, sure. Areas of improve-
ment, absolutely. — But I don’t
know anyone that could have
pulled this off on the first try!”
[email protected]
[email protected]
isaac.stanley-becker
@washpost.comstanley-Becker reported from los
Angeles. Alice Crites in Washington
contributed to this report.MelInA MArA/tHe WAsHIngton post
Californians wait to cast their votes in the Democratic presidential primary at the Beverly Hills Civic Center on Super Tuesday. About
one-fifth of Los Angeles County’s touch-screen voting machines did not work properly and had to be replaced, a county spokesman said.