Approximately 10,000 uncounted primary votes were discovered in Texas late last week, thanks to the new voting laws passed in 2020 and signed into law by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott.
The thousands of mail-in ballots were tabulated but not counted in Texas’ most populous county on the day of last week’s election, officials said, adding to the delay in determining some winners in the nation’s first primary of the 2022 midterms.
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Election officials in Harris County, home to Houston, said late Saturday that an “oversight” led to 10,000 ballots not being counted.
Those votes — reportedly 6,000 Democratic and 4,000 Republican — will be added to the final tallies Tuesday.
“While the votes were scanned into our tabulation computer, they were not transferred and counted as a part of the unofficial final results as they should have been,” the Harris County Elections Office said in a statement.
Isabel Longoria, the official in charge of overseeing elections in Harris County, resigned after the discovery effective July 1.
The Harris County Elections Commission, controlled by the Democratic Party, appointed Longoria in 2020.
Longoria is facing a lawsuit from the Harris County Republican Party, who called the error “the worst election fiasco in Texas history.”
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“I think Isabel Longoria and her management team need to be replaced with someone who knows how to run elections. And I would like the courts to provide an independent oversight of the election process for the remaining part of the year,” Harris County Republican Chairwoman Cindy Siegel told CNN on Monday.
The discrepancy was discovered by the Texas Secretary of State’s Office on Friday night using new reconciliation forms that were mandated by the recent voting law changes.
The reconciliation forms helped the state officials identify a huge difference between the numbers of registered votes and the number of ballots counted Sam Taylor, the communications director for Secretary of State John Scott, told CNN.
The AP will tabulate the additional votes from Harris County and update its vote count.
The March 1 primary was the first statewide election that took place in Texas under new, tighter voting laws.
Thousands of mail-in ballots were rejected statewide for not having the new, required identification.
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“We are reviewing with the Harris County Attorney the lawsuit filed by the Harris County Republican Party,” Harris County’s Elections Division said in a statement. “We will address each allegation in court filings as appropriate.”
The Horn editorial team and the Associated Press contributed to this article