OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
The Harris County, Texas elections administrator has announced her resignation after a scandal involving the vote count that included around 10,000 mail-in ballots not being counted on Election Day.
Harris County Elections Administrator Isabel Longoria will resign on July 1, she announced during a meeting of county commissioners, CNN reported.
Longoria’s resignation comes amid backlash over issues with the March 1 primary in her county, Texas’ most populous, which included damaged ballots that delayed the reporting of results and a voting discrepancy that has left thousands of ballots out of the unofficial primary results.
Before Longoria announced her departure, Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, who supported the creation of the elections administrator role and had praised Longoria as the best person for the role in October 2020, had alluded to a possible replacement earlier on Tuesday, saying she had “spoken with administrator Longoria and I’ve expressed my desire for a change in leadership.”
Hidalgo said that she, along with the Elections Commission, the county clerk and the district clerk, would find new leadership “only after a thorough search.”
“Today I am submitting my resignation effective July 1,” she said. “I think this date ensures that there is a presiding officer during the May and June elections and allows the election commission the time they need to find a replacement.
"Today I am submitting my resignation effective July 1," Harris County Elections Administrator @LongoriaTx pic.twitter.com/pKkVJ6Z7vm
— Urban Reform (@urbanreformorg) March 8, 2022
But that did not impress one State representative, who said she is still being rewarded for being incompetent.
“Longoria makes $190,000 a year,” Republican State. Rep. Briscoe Cain said to Fox News. “By making her resignation effective on July 1, her incompetence is rewarded at the taxpayers’ expense.”
“If she was so incompetent why are they going to keep her around for the primary and other elections that are coming between now and July?” he said.
The resignation also came after one Republican state senator who spoke with ABC13 called for her to resign.
“This isn’t trivial, because the election administrator was swearing in front of a judge that she had counted all the votes. and then all of a sudden over the weekend, here comes 10,000 more,” State Sen. Paul Bettencourt argued.
The Harris County Republican Party also filed looking to “collect Republican Party General Primary Election precinct election records, supervise the completion of count for the Republican Party, and order Longoria to appear in court regarding the status of the election count,” Click2Houston reported.
“On noon on Friday, I went to look at the cameras and they were off, and they haven’t come on since,” Alan D. Vera, of the Republican Party Ballot Security Committee, said. “All three camera feeds have been off since Friday.”
“The reason why the cameras are there is because of SB1,” Bettencourt argued. “Same thing because there’s a reconciliation form. Those cameras in [the] central count were to have transparency.”
“Yes, we had rules in SB1 to prevent this,” he said. “The reason why the 10,000 votes were found was because of the reconciliation language that forced the administrator here [to see] that she was 10,000 ballots short.”
And even Harris County Democratic Party Chair Odus Evbagharu said that SB1 played a role in what happened on election night.
“From my understanding, these 10,000 votes and some change was human error. Now imagine trying to catch it, do all these things. These folks hadn’t had rest, these are paid volunteers. You had an election administrator’s office who had no rest,” he said.
“We’ve got to tell the whole story about this reconciliation form. It’s signed at a time when all the votes haven’t been counted,” he argued. “There’s a reason we have the 10-day canvassing period. Now, they’re saying there are provisions of the bill that helped find these errors. Come on, these things have always happened.”
