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Harris County will file a lawsuit challenging two Republican-backed election bills headed to Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk, County Attorney Christian Menefee announced Wednesday.
At issue are two measures that apply only to Harris County, including one that abolishes the elections administrators office.
Menefee said the lawsuit would be filed after the bills are signed into law by the governor.
"The Texas Constitution is clear: the Legislature can't pass laws that target one specific city or one specific county," Menefee said. "And that constitutional ban makes a whole lot of sense. We don't want our lawmakers going to Austin, taking their personal vendettas with them and passing laws that target local governments instead of doing what's in the best interest of Texans."
Both bills originally were written to apply more broadly.
Senate Bill 1750, the measure eliminating Harris County's elections administrator post, initially applied to counties with at least 1 million residents, before it was narrowed to include only Harris.
More than half of Texas' 254 counties have appointed elections administrators, including several of the most populous, such as Bexar, Tarrant, Dallas and Collin.
The bill returns election responsibilities to the elected county clerk and tax assessor-collector, ending Harris County's three-year run with an appointed elections administrator.
The second bill the county plans to challenge, Senate Bill 1933, increases state oversight and requires Harris County election officials — upon being placed under "administrative oversight" — to clear all election policies and procedures with the Secretary of State. The bill also gives the Secretary of State, currently former state senator Jane Nelson, authority to send employees from her office to observe any activities in a county’s election office.
A last-minute amendment to that bill narrowed the scope to only Harris County.
"I think we were all completely blindsided," Menefee said.
While the first bill transfers election administration duties to two elected officials, the second bill creates an expedited process to remove those two officials, Menefee said.
"Under Senate Bill 1933, the Secretary of State is able to initiate lawsuits to remove only two elected officials from office in the entire state of Texas, and that's the Harris County Clerk and the Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector," Menefee said.
The author of both bills, state Sen. Paul Bettencourt, R-Houston, told the Chronicle last week the legislation was driven by the Harris County elections administrator office's lack of performance, not partisan politics.
Isabel Longoria, the first person appointed to lead the Harris County elections office, resigned in March 2022, days after a slow vote count in the primary elections and the failure to include about 10,000 ballots in its Election Night tally. Those ballots were included in the final count.
The current election administrator, Cliff Tatum, has faced extensive scrutiny after around 20 polling places ran out of ballot paper on Election Day last November, some for just 15 minutes and others for up to three hours. The shortage impacted a fraction of the 782 polling places across the sprawling county but has sparked lawsuits from 20 losing Republican candidates challenging the results.
Harris County uses a countywide voting system that allows voters to cast their ballots at any poll location. As a result, it is impossible to know if or how many voters were unable to vote because of the paper shortage.
Rice University political science Professor Bob Stein disputed Bettencourt's "performance not politics" rationale for the bills.
"This was red meat," Stein said. "They needed to do this the same way they did voter ID laws in many states, to convince the base that they were doing something about a problem that they claimed existed but did not exist."
Expect much more....
