‘Complete Nightmare’: Voting Rights Advocates Slam Chaos And Confusion In Texas Primaries

Hundreds of voters in two Texas counties reported being turned away from polling stations and forced to go elsewhere during Tuesday’s primaries. Others experienced major delays, leaving them stuck in long lines for hours. And some are still waiting to see if their ballots will even be counted.

These issues were the byproduct of changes pushed by local Republicans. Previously, voters could cast their ballots at any polling station in both Dallas and Williamson counties, but this year, they had to go to precinct-specific locations to vote in the primaries.

That shift left many people uncertain about where they could vote, and forced them to relocate when they showed up at the wrong place. It also meant that overcrowded polling stations had nowhere to send voters stuck in lengthy queues.

“Voters were expecting to take an hour to vote, and having to leave without casting a ballot because of the absurd wait time. There was confusion about what precinct folks were in, because redistricting shuffled everything,” Emily Eby French, an attorney for Common Cause Texas, told HuffPost. “It was just a complete nightmare.”

In one instance, Eby French said a voter called Common Cause’s primary day hotline and reported being turned away from their first polling station and sent to a second. After waiting at the second location, the voter was then told that the first location was actually the correct one.

The changes were emblematic of broader Republican efforts to increase the hurdles people face at the polls, Eby French said.

“We do get big evil voting changes, right? We get big sweeping voter ID laws,” she noted. “But I would say more than that. More than anything, we just get small inconveniences, small underfundings that make it harder to vote.”

“This is the GOP voter suppression that Dems must come together to overcome in November,” state Rep. Ana-María Rodríguez Ramos (D) said in a Tuesday post on X.

Local Republicans blamed Democrats for the confusion and argued that they were trying to scapegoat the GOP.

“That’s on them. You didn’t see us asking for an injunction. We did a good job of explaining the process to our voters,” Dallas County GOP Chair Allen West told NBC News.

“The Williamson County Democrats threw every barrier in our way to ensure that Republican voters would be disadvantaged by refusing to share polling locations, misrouting voters, and blaming Republicans for the lack of Democrat polling sites,” Williamson County GOP Chair Michelle Evans said in a statement shared with Austin news outlet KXAN.

Due to the confusion, judges extended the hours for some polling stations in both Dallas and Williamson counties. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office contested those rulings and claimed it didn’t receive sufficient notice about them.

As a result, it’s unclear whether ballots that were cast by voters who stood in line after the originally scheduled poll closures will be counted. The Texas Supreme Court suspended the rulings granting the extensions and directed officials to separate those ballots for now.

Voting rights advocates worry about a repeat of Tuesday’s chaos during the state’s runoffs in May. However, this specific issue isn’t expected to affect the midterm elections in Texas because the change in procedure only applied to primaries. The advocates also plan to track any other attempts to curtail voting, such as efforts to require proof of citizenship, deployments of law enforcement to the polls or restrictions on mail-in ballots.

“Tuesday showed what can happen when state and local leaders implement policies that burden voting rights and restrict opportunities to vote,” Miranda van Dijk, a legal fellow with the Texas Civil Rights Project, told HuffPost. “These policies lead to confusion, frustration and often disenfranchisement.”