The clash is playing out in Harris County, Texas’s largest jurisdiction and home to Houston, where state and local Republicans are deploying monitors to oversee the handling of ballots in the Democratic enclave. Local Democratic officials have said the move is an effort to intimidate voters — and asked the Justice Department to send federal observers in response.
Washington Post: GOP push to monitor voting in Texas’s Harris County spurs outcry
11.1.2022 / By Molly Hennessy-Fiske and Amy Gardner
Washington Post: GOP push to monitor voting in Texas’s Harris County spurs outcry
HOUSTON — With a week to go before Election Day, a showdown is emerging between state and local leaders here over how to protect the security of the vote without intimidating voters and election workers.
The result could be a partisan showdown, in which two different sets of monitors face off on Election Day in this giant metro region. That’s not including the thousands of partisan poll watchers who are expected to fan out at voting locations across Texas.
GOP officials and conservative poll watchers say heightened scrutiny is necessary to prevent election fraud and mismanagement. Voting-rights advocates and local leaders, meanwhile, say the GOP is scaring voters and election workers alike — and undermining faith in the results for a county that Republicans are pushing hard to win control of on Nov. 8. …
Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of the nonpartisan voter education and advocacy group Common Cause Texas, said that while so far there have not been many complaints to his group’s hotline, he is concerned that poll observers could overstep in this year’s tense atmosphere. During a training last week, Gutierrez said volunteers reported seeing people without the required identification circulating at polling locations close to voters.
One Black voter complained to the hotline that when he showed up to vote at a polling location at a southwest Dallas community college, a White man outside told him he had to first surrender his cellphone and smartwatch, Gutierrez said. He said the voter complied, cast his ballot and recovered his items, only to discover the man who seized them “was not a worker at that poll site. They were just trying to be intimidating.”