News Clips

“If a poll site has a long line, and there are shorter lines at a nearby site, that is information our volunteer poll monitors will now be trained to provide to people as they arrive, before the voter gets in line,” Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of Common Cause Texas, said after meeting with Harris County election officials. “We’ll also be running a public awareness campaign leading up to the election encouraging Texans to vote early or, if they are eligible, by mail. We’ll also be encouraging people to fill out sample ballots before heading to the polls to minimize the increase in wait times we are expecting to come as a result of Texans no longer having the option of straight-ticket voting.”

"Long lines in any single county can happen for any number of reasons but multi-hour wait times all over the state point to a bigger systemic problem," Common Cause Texas executive director Anthony Gutierrez said in a statement Wednesday. "That problem, to put it bluntly, is that the people in power in state government have no interest in making it easier for Texans to vote."

In some cities, purchases of new voting machines slowed the balloting as voters labored to apply the new technology to the state’s notoriously long ballot. “All over the state, we saw a lot of late openings attributed to technology issues,” said Anthony Gutierrez, the executive director of Common Cause Texas, which helped run a hotline that flagged voting problems. “People were used to voting on the same machine for two decades, and there was going to be some training time required.”