News Clips

According to the study, Dallas County had the most poll location closures, 74. The county has a population that is 41% Latino and 22% percent African American, according to the study. Travis County, Harris County, Brazoria County, and Nueces County — all locations with high levels of people who identify as minorities — rounded out the top of the list of locations where polling locations were cut by officials. It wasn't just Texas. Arizona and Georgia also closed hundreds of polling locations. "There's a small percentage of those closures that actually may be a good thing, but by and large it's basically just voter suppression," Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of Common Cause Texas, who called the incident an example of "systemic voter suppression," said. "Poll sites in Black and brown communities that should have been kept open but have been closed."

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.”

Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of the watchdog group Common Cause Texas, laid the overarching blame on state policymakers. "I would frankly chalk up most of the issues we’re seeing (on Election Day) to Texas being a state that doesn’t prioritize voting," he said. "Problems like the Secretary of State website crashing and the widespread voting technology issues could have been easily avoided if the state allocated resources towards election infrastructure.”