Vote centers have made it easier to vote. Cleta Mitchell is coming for them
I have been working on voter protection since 2004 when I went to Florida for the Kerry Edwards voter protection team. Prior to 2016, my county had precinct voting where on election day you had to vote in your local precinct. This meant that on election day you could only vote at one location. As a favor to the county election administrator, I was the election judge for the GOP primary and run off in my precinct. I was nice but I was irked to see so many republicans vote using handgun license that we could not electronically check in.
I was on the committee that approved county wide voting in my county and later testified before the Harris County Commissioners Court on the adoption of Countywide voting for Harris County.
The GOP now wants to do away with county wide voting so as to suppress the vote.
Link to tweet
https://www.democracydocket.com/analysis/vote-centers-have-made-it-easier-to-vote-cleta-mitchell-is-coming-for-them/
“We have to change the dynamic of how we conduct elections and return to a time when accuracy and accountability and transparency were the rule of the day,” Mitchell said. “My main mission… is that all voting takes place locally.”
Mitchell and EIN are hoping to change the dynamic of the 2026 midterms by pressuring state and local election officials to only allow voting to take place in small neighborhood precincts, rather than the vote centers — usually large locations where anyone in a county can cast a ballot — that, in recent years, have greatly expanded access to the ballot box.
An EIN paper released January 9 made the case that vote centers have “distinct vulnerabilities” — like the “co‑mingling of ballots from across an entire county” — that could allow for election fraud to flourish......
Abolishing vote centers is part of EIN’s broader election strategy, including a push to end voting machines in favor of paper ballots. Experts fear this is a step for anti-voting activists to achieve their ultimate goal of nixing all early and mail voting in favor of one-day elections as a way for Republicans to hold onto power — even as support for Trump and the GOP continues to fall.
“You’re basically concentrating all of the potential points of failure into a single 12-hour period in a single place,” David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research and a former DOJ voting section attorney, told Democracy Docket. “Imagine if they told everyone grocery stores are going to be open only for 12 hours on one day a month, and you all have to go shopping there. It is a recipe for disaster.”
My youngest child was the election judge for our precinct for the last election where there was only precinct voting on election day. I left the voter protection boiler room to check on her. In Texas if you are in line at the close of voting, you get to vote. I ended up standing at the end of the line to keep other people from getting in line. Voting finished up at after 9 PM and my youngest did not drop off the voting machine and until after 11 PM. Voting at voting centers is usually more efficient and they are done earlier.
I usually vote during early voting which has always had voting centers. I am disappointed in the concept of making voting harder.