Natalia Contreras, Votebeat Texas

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access. Sign up for Votebeat’s free newsletters here.

In Brazos County, suspicions about elections burst into the open last fall, just weeks after a visit from an out-of-state group calling for ballots to be hand-counted.

“Everything seems great. But if you study this, you’ll find that it’s possible to pre-program electronic voting machines and make it do whatever you want,” one resident said at a commissioners court meeting last November, without evidence to support the claims. ...

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. A version of this post was originally distributed in Votebeat’s free weekly newsletter. Sign up to get future editions, including the latest reporting from Votebeat bureaus and curated news from other publications, delivered to your inbox every Saturday.

When I started working at Votebeat more than a year ago, I knew little about elections. I wasn’t eligible to vote, and for most of my adult life, the election process was confusing and intimidating. I wanted to learn as much as I could about how elections worked so I would feel empowered to one day participate myself. I wrote an essay about all of this when I started.

After months of writing about election administrators’ jobs, paper ballot security and storage, how primary elections work, election funding (or lack thereof), voting machine logic and accuracy tests, and voter roll maintenance, I now feel like I know more about our elections process than most of those around me....

There’s no evidence the machines are insecure, but one Kerr County commissioner is pushing to get rid of them. Two elections administrators have already quit over the commotion.

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Responsibility for running elections in Kerr County has shifted among three different people in the past two months. The first two officials bailed on the job after a monthslong effort by one Republican county official to rid the county of electronic voting equipment and begin hand counting all ballots. The push has divided the overwhelmingly Republican county — a verdant stretch of the Hill Country split by the Guadalupe River — and will cost taxpayers around $250,000 due to the many changeovers....

Harris County has sued to block the law, but unless a judge steps in, the county’s two-year-old elections department — currently headed by Clifford Tatum — will be eliminated on Sept. 1. The office’s duties will revert back to being split between the county clerk and the tax assessor-collector, a historic model for overseeing elections in the state that many counties have moved away from in recent years. Harris County created its elections department in 2020.

The timing of the law means the transition of election duties in the country’s third largest county would happen while election offices across the state are trying to prepare for elections this November and a presidential election in 2024, election administrators told Votebeat.

If one deadline isn’t met, it can have a negative domino effect, said Bruce Sherbet, the elections administrator in Collin County, who warned that each step on the pre-election checklist must be done in sequence for the whole thing to work. ...

Advocates say Abbott’s veto of House Bill 3159 is a blow for voters with disabilities who have for years called for the Legislature to grant them a way to mark their mail-in ballots without having to rely on anyone else.

Co-authored by state Rep. Jeff Leach, R-Plano, and state Rep. John H. Bucy III, D-Austin, the bill would have allowed voters who need help casting a ballot, such as people who are visually impaired or are paralyzed, to do so “privately and securely” by requesting an electronic ballot and using a computer to mark their choices. The bill still would have required those voters to print out, sign and return their ballots by mail.

Similar bills had been filed since 2019 without success. This was the first time a bill of its kind made it to the governor’s desk. ...