Hey, Check This Out! Harris County is a battle ground for political maneuvering this election.

Harris County held a lot of weight in the recent presidential election as the nation’s third most populous county and a Democratic stronghold in a predominantly Republican Texas. A large percentage of Houston voters are left-leaning people of color. If that demographic’s turnout was strong throughout the state and Texas turned blue, it could have placed the Democrats at a significant advantage. Great partisan efforts were made to manipulate voter turnout.

After Harris County Clerk Diane Trautman resigned earlier this year, Hollins, vice chairman of the Texas Democratic Party was appointed as an interim replacement. Under Hollins, a 23-point initiative was launched to tackle past election problems and ensure voter turnout despite COVID limitations. Houston Democrats worked to increase voting accessibility by tripling the number of early Election Day polling locations and putting in $33 million in comparison to the $4 million county election budget back in 2016. Fearing a shift, Republican leaders responded by making unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud, particularly against mail-in ballots and curbside voting, in an attempt to minimize voters’ options during the election. The GOP has strategically concentrated efforts to enforce notoriously restrictive Texas voting laws in Houston. Jared Woodfill, former Harris County GOP chairman has argued that the emphasis on these laws is simply to “protect the integrity of the ballot box” and not to undermine the Democratic party. However, the rare instances of documented voter fraud in Texas such as the highly publicized arrests in Gregg County and Carrollton have all been meager tries to manipulate local results.

The Democratic efforts to increase accessibility were apparent when I worked at the Metropolitan Multiservice Center during early voting. Due to the amount of other available locations, we were able to keep the lines moving and the wait time under 5 min, if even that, whereas in previous years the poll workers dealt with lines curving around the building from opening to closing. The Multiservice Center is also a hotspot for electioneering, so the parking lot was always full of activists and a disproportionate amount of Trump 2020 flags.

I think that the cumulation of pressing events: the pandemic, Climate change, Black Lives Matter protests, have encouraged people who don’t usually vote to come to the polls. It is in response to the current climate of events that we saw the raw politics and partisan efforts that we did in Harris County during the election.

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