KHOU Broadcasts False Story about Voting in Harris County
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.
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.