Dumb decisions led to long Texas voting lines. Here’s what to do next time

For a brief moment Tuesday night, Texas was in the national political spotlight, with huge voter turnout and a pivotal role in the changing direction of the Democratic presidential primary.

But before long, we were the story of the day for the wrong reason — intolerably long lines to vote in several of the state’s big cities.

The most attention went to Houston, where voters waited up to six hours at a polling center at a historically black college. But Tarrant County had its problems, too, with Democratic voters often facing long lines while machines dedicated to the Republican primary sat largely unused.

Blame has flown in all the expected directions for these failures, with finger-pointing at county and state officials, the political parties, and the Supreme Court for weakening federal supervision under the Voting Rights Act. There’s elements of truth to each, and it’s a mistake to judge an entire system on the worst possible anecdotes.

But polls are only going to get busier in November. Elected officials and political players at all levels need a plan of action that’s based in reality before our democracy breaks down right in front of our eyes.

Election administrators and county commissioners in Texas’ biggest counties, including Tarrant, need to be honest about what went wrong and how to fix it. Gov. Greg Abbott and other state leaders, who never hesitate to target local leaders they blame for problems such as homeless encampments, need to make clear that this level of difficulty for voters is unacceptable in Texas.

Tarrant County Judge Glen Whitley correctly traces the root of the problem here to local party leaders’ decisions to insist upon separate machines for Democrats and Republicans, even though voters were casting ballots in the same locations under the county’s new voting-center system.

Democratic leaders say some voters have complained about harassment from Republicans at the polls. Republicans say the parties’ primaries are separate and it’s not up to them to do the county’s job of providing voting machines.

Both are, frankly, mind-numbingly stupid reasons to reduce the available options for voters.

The county’s new voting machines are dumb terminals; they serve up a ballot based on the access code given to a voter. There is no reason, other than perhaps paranoid conspiratorial thinking about the machines, to insist that only Republicans use some machine and only Democrats use others.

Whitley warned in advance that this could be a problem, and he was right.

But after that, the blame falls on county officials. They decided to allocate machines based on 2016 voting patterns. That year, Republicans had a hot presidential primary contest, with a Texan, Ted Cruz, on the ballot. So, in implementing the parties’ dumb decision, county officials gave Republicans 752 more voting machines than Democrats.

We find it surprising that these political creatures apparently pay so little attention to, you know, politics. Democratic turnout has boomed since President Donald Trump took office, and anyone who follows the news expected record interest here in the presidential primary. Republicans, too, have often surged to the polls, amped up by fears of Texas and Tarrant County turning blue.

Failure to plan is one thing. A failure to adjust is another. And here, too, election officials failed. It was clear early on that Democrats needed more voting machines. Harris County officials, for all their problems, recognized that and moved machines around.

Thankfully, November’s election won’t need to be split among the parties. But the turnout will be even heavier.

County officials need to adjust. Figure out how to educate voters about what to expect on the new machines. Promote early voting like you’ve never done before. Advocate for voters to take advantage of the ability to vote anywhere so they don’t feel stuck at a busy site.

And most of all, use technology to help the voter. Tarrant did better this round, with an online map that would show voting centers near an address. But it was hard to use and lacked geo-locating services that are common on every smartphone.

Dallas County’s map offered that feature, along with estimated wait times of nearby voting centers. It pains us to say it, but Dallas had a good idea there, and Tarrant should steal it.

Government officials at all levels need to adjust to the idea that, at least for now, Texas is no longer a low-turnout state. People finally want to vote. Let’s make it easier to do so.