Name: Court fight over Harris County drive-thru votes raises alarm
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Court fight over Harris County drive-thru votes raises alarm

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Chuck LindellView CommentsThe Texas Supreme Court drew alarmed attention Friday after directing Harris County to respond to a petition that seeks to invalidate more than 117,000 votes cast in drive-thru lanes.The court’s interest came as an unwelcome surprise to voting advocates and Harris County officials who were banking on a quick dismissal of the petition, filed by two GOP candidates and a Republican member of the Texas House.After all, only one week earlier the same court had that sought to block drive-thru voting — available only in the growing Democratic bastion of Harris County — as illegal.At the time, the court gave no reason for denying separate requests to intervene by the Texas Republican Party and the Harris County GOP, although one member of the all-Republican court disagreed. Justice John Devine said he would have ended drive-thru voting for stretching state election law beyond understanding, but no other justices joined his dissenting opinion.The issue seemed settled — a relief to about 75,000 voters who had by then cast ballots in Harris County’s 10 drive-thru polling sites.Late Tuesday, however, . Unlike the two previous challenges, which only sought to stop drive-thru voting, this one asked the court to void votes “illegally” cast from cars.The petition — filed by state Rep. Steve Toth, R-The Woodlands, GOP activist Steven Hotze and two Republican candidates in Harris County — argued that drive-thru voting is an illegal expansion of curbside voting, which state law reserves for voters who have an illness or disability that could put them at risk if forced to enter a polling place.The court responded by giving Harris County until 4 p.m. Friday to file a legal brief responding to the petition, raising fears that the Supreme Court was giving consideration to tossing out tens of thousands of ballots.However, it takes only one justice on the nine-member court to request a response to a petition, and there is no way of knowing how many justices were interested in Harris County’s response because the court does not disclose that information.In addition, before tossing out the votes, the court would have to acknowledge that 117,000 Harris County voters had visited a drive-thru polling site by Thursday night. That means more than 42,000 drive-thru votes were cast since justices could have stopped the practice a week earlier but did not.In a memo prepared for Harris County on the issue, noted Austin lawyer C. Robert Heath said the bid to void drive-thru votes faces the daunting challenge of overcoming a key legal supposition — that state laws are to be interpreted in favor of preserving the right to vote.“If a court or other authority were to decide to invalidate those votes, it would require ignoring or overruling more than a century of Texas law,” Heath concluded.In the brief requested by the Supreme Court, Harris County lawyers argued that there is nothing illegal about drive-thru voting, nor can votes cast that way be considered illegal.“Uncountable votes are those that resulted from clear fraudulent behavior,” they argued. “There is nothing about an eligible voter casting an in-person vote from their car that renders their vote illegal, fraudulent, or not countable.”The brief argued that drive-thru voting is just another polling choice with a different structure. Vehicles enter the voting area, typically a large individual tent, one at a time. A clerk checks each voter’s photo ID and has them sign a roster before handing over a sanitized voting machine.More importantly, the county said, drive-thru voting was approved by the Texas secretary of state’s office before being adopted and was used, without objection, in the July primary runoff election.Some Harris County Republicans complained, however, saying most of the 10 sites were located in or near heavily Democratic areas.View Comments

Chuck LindellView CommentsThe Texas Supreme Court drew alarmed attention Friday after directing Harris County to respond to a petition that seeks to invalidate more than 117,000 votes cast in drive-thru lanes.The court’s interest came as an unwelcome surprise to voting advocates and Harris County officials who were banking on a quick dismissal of the petition, filed by two GOP candidates and a Republican member of the Texas House.After all, only one week earlier the same court had that sought to block drive-thru voting — available only in the growing Democratic bastion of Harris County — as...

Court fight over Harris County drive-thru votes raises alarm

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