The results of Harris County’s highly scrutinized November 2022 election were upheld Thursday evening by a judge, who threw out all but one remaining election contest out of 21 related lawsuits.
Republican candidate Erin Lunceford filed her suit in December, asking a judge to order a new election in the 189th Judicial District court race she lost to Democrat Tamika Craft by 2,743 votes. Lunceford argued that thousands of residents were unable to vote because of a ballot paper shortage that impacted around 20 polls on Election Day.
Lunceford’s case later expanded as her team went on to flag thousands of ballots they said should not have been counted.
However, after an eight-day trial in which Lunceford’s legal team did not provide testimony from any disenfranchised voters, Judge David Peeples, a visiting judge from Bexar County, ruled that the results of the race were legitimate.
In a 36-page ruling, Peeples said he found Harris County had made “many mistakes and violations of the Election Code.”
“But the court holds that not enough votes were put in doubt to justify voiding the election for the 189th District Court and ordering a new one,” Peeples concluded.
The ruling was not a clear win for Harris County, as Peeples did find merit with many of Lunceford’s arguments. By his estimate, a total of 2,891 votes were affected by various problems — larger than the margin in the race. However, Peeples determined that the outcome would not have changed because many of those voters likely would have skipped the 189th judicial race on the ballot and many of those who did vote in the race would have voted for Craft…..
Lunceford’s allegations of disenfranchised voters, deliberate sabotage and illegal ballots likely will have a lasting impact despite the judge’s ruling. The accusations have spread widely and were even cemented in new state laws passed in the spring.
After a KHOU story in January determined that 121 voting locations initially did not receive enough ballot paper on Election Day, Russ Long, a member of the Harris County GOP, created a “heat map” purportedly demonstrating that virtually all of those polls were located in what he deemed to be Republican stronghold neighborhoods. The map does not include information about where Democrats live and depicts Harris County as covered in red blobs designating Republican areas.
When state GOP lawmakers abolished Harris County’s elections office this spring, Long’s heat map was their key piece of evidence aiming to prove the ballot paper shortage was intentional.
“We’ll leave it up to the courts to decide, but when you look at a map like this, there’s literally 110 out of 121 precincts that are in the Republican areas of the county and only 11 that are not,” state Sen. Paul Bettencourt, R-Houston, said at a hearing in March. “It seems to be a rather concentrated pattern.”
However, a Houston Chronicle investigation found that roughly half of those 121 polling locations were in precincts that voted for former President Donald Trump in 2020, indicating the map may have greatly overstated the pattern. And in its investigation, the Chronicle identified only some 20 Harris County polling locations that ran out of paper on Election Day for brief periods.
In August, the court decided on the matter: Peeples ruled that the heat map was inadmissible as evidence in the Lunceford trial.
Still, the narrative continues to persist.