That’s 10,000 votes that were fumbled. From the Texas Tribune:
With counting holdups and missed ballots marring what amounted to a low-turnout election,Harris County’s election administrator has announced she is resigning amid pressure from local leaders of both political parties to explain what went wrong in last week’s primary.
Houston-area voters saw relatively few issues on election day, but days later the state’s largest county faced a 10,000 vote-sized problem.
Over the weekend, Harris County election officials announced that thousands of mail-in ballots — 6,000 Democratic and 4,000 Republican — had been mistakenly left off the county’s vote tally. This came after unofficial results were significantly delayed in part because more than a thousand ballot sheets were damaged as voters tried out the county’s new voting machines.
On Tuesday afternoon, the Houston Chronicle reported that Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, a Democrat, said she wanted a change in leadership and intended to replace election administrator Isabel Longoria. Shortly after, Longoria announced she would step down on July 1.
Her resignation came afterHarris County Democrats called for a comprehensive post-election review, while Republicans — regular adversaries of the county’s Democratic leadership — simultaneously sued the county and demanded Longoria’s resignation.
The Texas secretary of state’s office noted the 10,000-vote discrepancy Friday when it began reviewing reconciliation forms and reached out to Harris County election officials, a spokesperson for the office said. The next day, Harris County announced the missed votes.
The votes were scanned into the county’s “tabulation computer” but were not properly transferred so they would be reflected in the county’s original election night returns, officials said in a statement late Saturday in which they acknowledged “the seriousness of this error.” The “oversight” was traced to tabulating work in the early morning hours when election workers were still reviewing ballots.
“The 10,000 mail ballots were scanned into our central scanning system within the 24-hour period after Election Night,” Shah said in the Tuesday email. “Unfortunately, due to the late hour and miscommunication between staff members, the transfer of these votes to our tally system did not occur within the 24-hour period.”
The missed votes will be transferred and accounted for in Harris’ final count on Tuesday when its vote tabulating panel next meets Tuesday afternoon, Shah said.