KHOU Broadcasts False Story about Voting in Harris County

March 04, 2020 By: El Jefe Category: 2020 Election, Voter Suppression

Today, KHOU broadcast a demonstrably false story about yesterday’s long lines at polling places in Harris County. In one of their “Verify” segments, they pretended to investigate the extremely long lines for Democratic voters while Republican voters who had NO lines. The truth is that the GOP polling places had no lines because Trump had already sewn up the nomination (because the RNC declined to hold primaries), so turnout for the remaining primary races was meager.
 
KHOU’s conclusion from their “investigation” was that both Democrats and Republicans “agreed in advance” to hold separate primaries. In short, that conclusion is blatantly false; Harris Country Clerk Diane Trautman even tweeted about how Republicans refused to agree to hold a joint primary so both parties could share the same voting machines. Because of this refusal, the county was required to allocate HALF of the voting machines to the Republican primary even though Democratic primary voters outnumbered Republican voters 3 to 1. Combine that with the Republican controlled Texas government shuttering 750 Texas polling places since 2012 and you have a formula for disaster, which is exactly what happened. Democratic voters stood in line yesterday for up to 5 hours just to cast a primary vote. While this was occurring, Republican poll workers sat and twiddled their thumbs as HALF of the county’s voting machines went virtually unused. The HCRP knew that the Democratic primary was contested which would drive a large turnout. They also knew that hoarding half the machines would make lines much longer in the Democratic primary. Here’s the truth: the HCRP was perfectly happy to inconvenience hundreds of thousands of Harris County residents so they could suppress the Democratic vote and generally make life miserable for them. It was shameful.  Just a little common decency would have gone a long way, but that is completely out of character for today’s GOP.
 
The real shame here was that KHOU blew this story badly by falsely reporting that both parties agreed to the split primary when that was simply not true. There are two possibilities here: KHOU was intimidated into lying about the political practices of the HCRP, OR, the reporter here was simply incompetent.  I’ll leave the conclusions to our readers.
In the meantime, I call on KHOU to correct the record and report this story accurately.
Tags: , , , ,

Comments (11)

Had to Wait in a Long Line to Vote? Thank a Republican

March 04, 2020 By: El Jefe Category: 2020 Election

In Harris County yesterday, lines of voters were long and the wait was up to 5 hours.  Why?  There are two primary reasons:

  • Since the 2013 Supreme Court decision that gutted the Voting Rights Act Texas has closed 542 polling places, most in historically black and Latino areas.  If you include 2012 closings, that number rises to 750.
  • In Harris County at least, the Republican party refused to allow a joint primary with Dems.  What that meant was that the voting machines were divided in 2, half for Repubs, half for Dems.  Since Trump essentially had no opponent, turnout in the GOP primary was very low so HALF of voting machines remained essentially unused.

Both of these moves by Republicans made it harder for Texans to vote, which has been their goal for over 20 years as demographics started moving against them.  I got to experience their strategy yesterday since my polling place was one of those closed.  It took me three attempts at two different polling places to finally cast my vote, and I had to drive 15 minutes from one polling place to another to accomplish that.  After discovering my polling place was closed, I drove to my old polling place only to find the line out the door and down the block. I went to have some lunch and returned about an hour later to find the line almost as long.  A nice young poll worker for Ben Rose had information on other polling places, so I drove all the way out to Buffalo Speedway to vote at a church there.  The line there was about half an hour (and it was air-conditioned) so I waited it out.  When I got into the polling place, HALF of the voting machines were being unused while Republican poll workers twiddled their thumbs.  On the other side, Dems were forced to wait in multiple lines to access the other half.  Total time not including lunch was about two hours of waiting and a lot of driving just to vote in a goddam primary.

It’s shameful that the Republican party has been allowed to continuously and increasingly restrict access to the Constitutional right to vote.  Their rationale, of course, is based on lies since their actual goal is voter suppression not “election integrity” which is one of their standard lies.  Texas Republicans are perfectly happy to make the lives of their fellow Texans miserable simply for political gain.  This reason alone should be enough to vote the bastards out.

Tags: , , , ,

Comments (18)