Dozens of protesters allege, without evidence, widespread fraud in Harris County elections
Dozens of protesters joined high-profile election deniers Steven Hotze and Weston Martinez Tuesday outside Harris County Commissioners Court where they alleged, without citing evidence, that there was widespread fraud in last week’s local elections.
Addressing fellow protesters from the Black anti-violence group called the Enough is Enough Crew, Martinez, a San Antonio Republican, who lost the primary for Texas Land Commissioner in March and is not Black, likened the election to a “modern day slave trade.”
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And then he launched into a diatribe that veered afield of the election.
“We are not slaves in their plantation anymore,” Martinez said. “They don’t care about one person, they don’t care about one family. They care about taking your vote, raping your children and taking your tax dollars and doing whatever they want.”
Election monitors from the Texas Secretary of State’s Office and the Justice Department were present at polling sites across the county on Election Day; and though the election was rife with problems ranging from paper shortages to understaffed polling places, officials have not found evidence of widespread fraud. Gov. Greg Abbott on Monday ordered an investigation into “allegations of improprieties in the way that the 2022 elections were conducted in Harris County…which may result from anything ranging from malfeasance to blatant criminal conduct.”
Clifford Tatum, the county’s new elections administrator, told Commissioners Court Tuesday the problems with the election resulted from an overworked and underresourced staff. (Tatum took the position in July after former administrator Isabel Longoria resigned following a similarly messy primary.) He remained adamant in his comments to county officials that no fraud occurred, citing a diverse team of civilian election judges, poll watchers and law enforcement who oversaw polling places and the transportation of ballots.
“We are a transparent organization, there is nothing for us to hide. We have an elections plan, we followed the plan, some of the plan didn’t go as anticipated,” Tatum said. “We will review what did not work well, we will build upon those things that did work well and we will correct the things that did not work well.”
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Tatum said his team is still counting provisional ballots and will conduct an assessment after the tabulation is completed. He has also said the county is already participating in a state audit of the election.
At the protest outside court, neither of the Enough is Enough Crew’s founders, Art Smith or his wife, Koffey El-Bey, could identify any barriers to voting they’d experienced, besides the long lines and faulty machines that were reported at polling places across the county and resulted in long wait times for many voters. Still, the pair said “corruption,” rather than mismanagement, was to blame.
“We know this is by design, as far as oppression of voters, due to the fact that the early vote went on for two weeks without a problem,” Smith said.
Odus Evbagharu, chair of the Harris County Democrats, said he thought there were serious issues with the election, but said Hotze was a sore loser with a record of spreading misinformation. He said he suspected that Hotze — a wealthy GOP activist who was charged this year with funding a private voter fraud investigation that ended with a air conditioning worker being held at gunpoint — had hired Enough is Enough protesters to show up.
“Steve Hotze probably paid them, he pays everybody else…It’s just sad,” Evbagharu said. “You see Republicans across the country accepting election results, even some election deniers, saying, ‘Hey, I lost,’ and Democrats saying, ‘Hey, I lost.’ That’s democracy — it’s a competition, and there’s going to be winners and there’s going to be losers. And they lost.”
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Aubrey Taylor, who runs a right wing blog called “Houston Business Connections Newspaper,” also spoke at the protest. Taylor said he connected Hotze with the Enough is Enough Crew, and pointed to a case where a Houston woman on the voter rolls was found to be dead as evidence of a broader conspiracy.
Hotze, claiming ideological kinship with the NAACP and Martin Luther King Jr., said he opposed “voter suppression” and said they “don’t want people to steal votes.”
An attorney for Hotze did not respond to a request for further comment. Several protesters denied being paid to attend, though El-Bey and other members of the Enough is Enough Crew discouraged many from speaking to the Houston Chronicle. At least one protester, though, said he didn’t try to vote on Election Day because he “didn’t know how.”
El-Bey, who had no specific examples of fraud or corruption, adamantly denied being paid to protest.
“These people are against corruption in Harris County, and I don’t think you need to pay anybody to understand corruption, because I’m pretty sure everybody out here has been affected by corruption,” El-Bey said.
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