Texas Republicans target elections of the state's bluest county

Texas Republicans passed two bills that would fundamentally change how elections are run — aimed at the largest and bluest part of the state.

The state House passed a bill in the final days of its legislative session that ended Monday that abolishes the county elections administrator position in counties with more than 3.5 million people. The only county that meets that criteria is Harris County. The county tax assessor-collector and county clerk will instead take on the elections administrator’s duties.

The legislature also passed a bill that allows the secretary of state to oversee election administration in certain counties when a complaint is filed and the secretary of state “has good cause to believe that a recurring pattern of problems with election administration or voter registration exists in the county.” Counties with populations of more than 4 million are affected — again, just Harris County.

The moves are just part of the punitive measures Republicans are employing to tamp down on Harris County’s operations — and likely those of other big blue counties down the line.

Local leaders, including Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo and Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner, have denounced the movement of these bills, calling them “a bold-faced power grab” and an attempt to control future elections. Turner announced an upcoming request to the Department of Justice to investigate, alongside incoming legal action.

Harris County, one of the nation’s most populous, has been in the spotlight for months over its election issues. Earlier this year, more than 20 Republicans who lost their races in last year’s midterms sued county officials, citing polling places that ran out of paper and opened late. A report from Harris County’s Elections Administrator Clifford Tatum found that the operational systems behind the county’s elections are in “immediate need of upgrades or replacements.”

Upon Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s signage, the bill the legislature passed will take effect Sept. 1 — a month before voting for Houston’s next mayor begins and six months before the state’s presidential primaries.

Local officials and activists who talked to POLITICO say the election bills are just one part of a larger movement to take direct aim at Houston. Dallas and Austin have been hit with conservative criticism for years, but Harris County has attracted particular interest from Republican state politicians. The county was a target of the Legislature’s sweeping elections bill in 2021 as well.

Republican-dominated legislatures meddling in the affairs of blue urban centers is happening around the country, especially across the South: As these areas attract diverse, more left-leaning residents, Republican state legislatures often try to rein in what they see as runaway liberal actors. Fewer than two dozen of Texas' 254 counties are blue.

“We are going to set a precedent that this can happen to anyone's county in this entire state at any given point,” Democratic state Rep. Christian Manuel said on the floor last week, pointing to the growing populations of other counties like Dallas.

“The state wants to have the ability to seize local election administration, and so they wave Harris County’s name around like a bloody shirt to gin up support for these proposals,” said James Slattery, the senior supervising legislative attorney at the Texas Civil Rights Project, a liberal legal advocacy group.

Republicans supporting the measures say they are only interfering because of issues that popped up with election administration in 2022 — including paper shortages and temporarily missing ballots.

“We never wanted the state to get involved in what we considered local issues,” said Harris County Republican Party Chair Cindy Siegel. “As it relates to election integrity, the only recourse that voters have, candidates have, the party has, is either legislation or litigation.”

But Democrats say they won those races because they performed better, and Republicans in the state are simply retaliating.

“They pulled every trick in the book, and for them to have made no gains, I think they’re just genuinely pissed," Democratic state Rep. Gene Wu, who represents Houston, said in an interview. "They can’t win the seats, they’re going to go and try to find ways to punish the county.”

“Harris County is not too big to fail, but too big to ignore,” said state Sen. Paul Bettencourt, the Houston Republican who has introduced a dozen elections bills, including some of those aimed at his home county. Its population alone would make it the 25th biggest state in the country: “That’s why this legislation has some urgency to it.”

Republican legislatures see seizing back control of the area as a means of stymying larger trends in the state. Tarrant County, helmed by Fort Worth outside of Dallas, is run almost universally by the GOP. But Democrats have made inroads there in recent cycles. In 2022, statewide Democrats like gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke garnered 47 percent of the vote in a county that favored Republicans by 16 points in 2014. O’Rourke also won the county during his 2018 Senate run, as did President Joe Biden in 2020.

Wu, the state's representative, points out that if Tarrant County flips blue, “every single major metro area will be [under] Democratic control, and that will be a sizable portion of the state.”

State Rep. Chris Turner, who represents Tarrant County and formerly chaired the Democratic Caucus, said Republicans are concerned about how much ground they’ve lost, not just in Tarrant County but also in other growing counties like Hays, Williamson and Collin.

“This is not just about one or two counties,” Turner said. “Republicans are losing support in the areas of state where most of the people live, in our urban and rapidly growing suburban areas. It doesn't [bode] well for them.”

Other state legislatures have passed or considered legislation directly reacting to conservative qualms or with tight population brackets in the past few years, including Arizona, Florida, Wisconsin and Kansas.

The Texas state Legislature also passed a measure removing the state from the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, which helps states maintain their voter rolls. A handful of states have left the organization in recent months.

Elsewhere, Republicans in the nonmember states Oklahoma and North Carolina have pushed legislation making it more difficult for their states to join ERIC in the future.