Texas county elections administrator resigns after voting mishaps, including 10,000 uncounted mail-in ballots
The resignation will take effect after the upcoming primary runoffs
Fox News
By Andrew Mark Miller
March 8, 2022
The elections administrator in Texas’s most populous county has resigned following voting mishaps including 10,000 mail-in ballots not being tallied on election day.
Harris County Elections Administrator Isabel Longoria announced during a meeting of county commissioners she would resign on July 1.
Longoria said she took responsibility for the problems during last Tuesday’s election in Harris County, where Houston is located.
“Ultimately, the buck stops with me. I didn’t meet my own standards,” she said.
In addition to the uncounted ballots, issues with voting machines and a lack of poll workers were also reported.
Additionally, paper ballots delivered to voting sites were delivered on paper that was the wrong size which caused candidates to be left off the ballot.
Longoria’s resignation came hours after Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo called for a change in leadership and a day after the Harris County Republican Party announced the filing of litigation to remove Longoria from her post.
Longoria was appointed as the county’s first elections administrator at the age of 32 in 2020 by the county commissioner’s court which includes Hidalgo, a progressive Democrat.
Longoria’s July 1 resignation date will come roughly a month after the runoff elections in the primary process are scheduled to take place in Texas in addition to other local races.
“Longoria makes $190,000 a year,” Republican Texas State. Rep. Briscoe Cain told Fox News. “By making her resignation effective on July 1, her incompetence is rewarded at the taxpayers’ expense.”
“If she was so incompetent why are they going to keep her around for the primary and other elections that are coming between now and July?” Briscoe added.
Hidalgo’s office and the office of the elections administrator did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News.