With just a few hours of not-so-restful sleep, Hudspeth was up at 4:30 a.m. on Saturday Dec. 9, monitoring some 450 polling locations from her central command center at NRG Arena. She wouldn’t be off the clock again until Sunday morning. Not only were polling places stuffed with stacks of ballots but her team was out in the field, waiting with vans and trucks full of backup ballots, scanners and other equipment, ready to deploy at any moment.
Hudspeth, who is a Democrat, knew all eyes would be on her. Even a mild repeat of the 2022 election fiasco, when some county polling locations ran out of paper, could have triggered new state laws leading to a heavy-handed intervention into Harris County elections by the Republican secretary of state.
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Even a few embarrassing hiccups wouldn’t have been surprising. For years, Harris County voting officials have provided ample opportunities for critics to pile on. In 2016, the social media campaign #FireStanStanart took aim at the slow tally of results under the Republican county clerk. His successor, Democrat Diane Trautman, struggled to deliver timely results as well. After she resigned for personal reasons, Chris Hollins, who was appointed to temporarily fill the position, drew ire not for mismanagement of the 2020 elections but for increasing turnout by introducing 24-hour and drive-thru voting, and for sending out unsolicited mail-in ballot applications to eligible voters.
Though the Republican-led state Legislature banned these innovations under the false banner of “election integrity,” the Democratic majority on Harris County Commissioners Court moved forward with a plan to reassign management from the elected county clerk to a hired elections administrator. The aim was to professionalize how elections are run. But the results were anything but professional. In March 2022, under Isabel Longoria, 10,000 ballots went temporarily missing and she eventually resigned. In November 2022, under Clifford Tatum, those paper ballot shortages stirred up voter frustration and conspiracies at a time when election workers were facing increased scrutiny and even threats across the country. Harris County’s elections administrator experiment didn’t stand a chance.
Legislators seized on the opportunity to put the county in its place. Two bills filed by Republican state Sen. Paul Bettencourt who represents much of the west side of Houston, helped to not only abolish the county’s elections office, restoring management to the elected clerk’s office once more, but also made it far easier for complaints to trigger an investigation, state oversight and possibly even the ouster of the clerk. Local Republicans seized on the chaos as well, filing several lawsuits alleging a conspiracy by Democrats to suppress Republican voters by withholding ballot paper. They didn’t get far. Though more than 20 Republican candidates challenged their election losses, all but one suit was dismissed last month.
Turned out, though, there was a saving grace amid the back and forth. Bettencourt’s bill officially put Hudspeth in charge of elections starting Sept. 1. With just weeks to go before early voting began, some suspected the Democrat was being set up by the Republicans to fail. After all, a professional with more lead time couldn’t get it right. How could she?
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Hudspeth didn’t appear to be intimidated by the pressure. Working at the county clerk’s office for 15 years in different capacities, she had helped oversee dozens of elections. This time, she had one clear mission:
“I knew we had to build the trust of the public,” Hudspeth told the editorial board this week.
After two elections — the general and the runoffs — that by all anecdotal accounts, went well, Hudspeth can claim victory. Maybe even Bettencourt, too — as he was quick to do.
“This is what I had hoped for when I filed the bills,” he told us. “The whole purpose of the bills was to trust but verify.”
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Democrats may beg to differ, but Hudspeth embraced the challenge.
“The first thing I did was call up the secretary of state and ask them to be here as much as they possibly could to review and walk through every process we were planning,” she told us. “I wanted them to see how invested I was in the process.”
Seemingly acing a couple of off-cycle elections with relatively low voter turnout is one thing but Harris County will need all that trust and then some when it comes to 2024, for which the county clerk is already preparing.
“It is one of the things that keeps me up at night,” admits Hudspeth, knowing that her job is still very much on the line. But the way she sees it: it keeps her honest, too.
Bettencourt acknowledges that complaints will likely come with the presidential election because of the “frothy nature of politics.”
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It’s also possible the race will feature the Election-Denier-In-Chief at the top of the ticket. But Bettencourt insisted the new law doesn’t escalate state intervention “from zero to 60 in a nanosecond.” There’s still an involved review process.
“The important point here is that everyone wants the system to work well.”
Not everyone, of course. Bettencourt may indeed be speaking from the heart but there are others in his party who would like nothing better than another election fiasco that paves the way for a takeover of elections in the biggest blue county in Texas.
Hudspeth had a mission not just to restore voter trust but to protect the very autonomy of Harris County elections. She’s done that so far. Our cherished right to vote appears to be in capable hands. Let’s hope it stays there.
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December 15, 2023 at 07:07PM
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Wait, did Harris County just have a smooth election? Thank Teneshia Hudspeth. (Editorial) - Houston Chronicle
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