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Administrator- Joined
- May 11, 2013
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(The Guardian) In rural Texas, the climate for polling officials has become so bad the entire election department of a rural county resigned weeks before the midterm elections, the Associated Press reports.
The officials said they’d been threatened and harassed for their work in Gillespie County, which is heavily Republican and overwhelmingly voted for Trump in the 2020 election, and didn’t want to relive the experience. Across the state, voters are struggling to cast valid ballots following the passage of a strict election law last year that led to thousands of mail-in ballot applications being rejected in recent polls.
Here’s more from the AP: Part of why Terry Hamilton says he abruptly left his job running elections deep in Texas wine country is by now a familiar story in America: He became fed up with the harassment that followed the 2020 election. But this was no ordinary exit.
On the brink of November’s midterm elections, it was not just Hamilton who up and quit this month but also the only other full-time election worker in rural Gillespie County. The sudden emptying of an entire local elections department came less than 70 days before voters start casting ballots.
By the middle of last week, no one was left at the darkened and locked elections office in a metal building annex off the main road in Fredericksburg. A “Your Vote Counts” poster hung in a window by the door.
A scramble is now underway to train replacements and ground them in layers of new Texas voting laws that are among the strictest in the U.S. That includes assistance from the Texas Secretary of State, whose spokesperson could not recall a similar instance in which an elections office was racing to start over with a completely new staff. But the headaches don’t stop there.
The resignations have more broadly made the county of roughly 27,000 residents — which overwhelmingly backed former President Donald Trump in 2020 — an extraordinary example of the fallout resulting from threats to election officials. Officials and voting experts worry that a new wave of harassment or worse will return in November, fueled by false claims of widespread fraud.
Hamilton, who has clashed with poll watchers in Gillespie County in past elections, said he didn’t want to go through it again.
“That’s the one thing we can’t understand. Their candidate won, heavily,” Hamilton said. “But there’s fraud here?”
The officials said they’d been threatened and harassed for their work in Gillespie County, which is heavily Republican and overwhelmingly voted for Trump in the 2020 election, and didn’t want to relive the experience. Across the state, voters are struggling to cast valid ballots following the passage of a strict election law last year that led to thousands of mail-in ballot applications being rejected in recent polls.
Here’s more from the AP: Part of why Terry Hamilton says he abruptly left his job running elections deep in Texas wine country is by now a familiar story in America: He became fed up with the harassment that followed the 2020 election. But this was no ordinary exit.
On the brink of November’s midterm elections, it was not just Hamilton who up and quit this month but also the only other full-time election worker in rural Gillespie County. The sudden emptying of an entire local elections department came less than 70 days before voters start casting ballots.
By the middle of last week, no one was left at the darkened and locked elections office in a metal building annex off the main road in Fredericksburg. A “Your Vote Counts” poster hung in a window by the door.
A scramble is now underway to train replacements and ground them in layers of new Texas voting laws that are among the strictest in the U.S. That includes assistance from the Texas Secretary of State, whose spokesperson could not recall a similar instance in which an elections office was racing to start over with a completely new staff. But the headaches don’t stop there.
The resignations have more broadly made the county of roughly 27,000 residents — which overwhelmingly backed former President Donald Trump in 2020 — an extraordinary example of the fallout resulting from threats to election officials. Officials and voting experts worry that a new wave of harassment or worse will return in November, fueled by false claims of widespread fraud.
Hamilton, who has clashed with poll watchers in Gillespie County in past elections, said he didn’t want to go through it again.
“That’s the one thing we can’t understand. Their candidate won, heavily,” Hamilton said. “But there’s fraud here?”
