Thread by @TexasTribune

THREAD: Too few voting machines. Technical failures of aging equipment. Insufficient training of election workers. Long lines that only grew.

Here’s how Harris County's election day fumbles disproportionately affected communities of color. #tx2020 bit.ly/2PQyGoG

2/ Excessive wait times for voting in Texas on #SuperTuesday were not limited to one area.

But Texas Southern University, a historically black university in Houston, easily saw the worst of it. bit.ly/2PQyGoG

3/ Wait times for voters in the queue at @texassouthern extended past the four-hour, then five-hour, then six-hour marks.

Some spent nearly an entire workday waiting in line, almost seven hours after polls closed. bit.ly/2PQyGoG

4/ How did this happen?

It was a sort of perfect electoral storm in which state voting policy ran into local political disputes that were met by a surge in Democratic voters during a presidential primary year. bit.ly/2PQyGoG

5/ Months before the primary, the Democratic and Republican county parties had been unable to agree to hold a joint primary, which would have allowed voters to share machines preloaded with ballots for both parties. bit.ly/2PQyGoG

6/ The Harris County Democratic Party had agreed to the setup, but the Harris County GOP refused, citing in part the long lines Republican voters would have to wait through amid increased turnout for the Democratic presidential primary. bit.ly/2PQyGoG

7/ Harris County Clerk Diane Trautman then allocated an equal number of machines for both primaries at each polling site.

Republican voting quickly wrapped up while Democratic lines made for extra hours of voting at multiple polling places. bit.ly/2PQyGoG

8/ Trautman said she’s assessing what the county needs to fix moving forward — including a better method for rerouting voters to nearby voting sites with shorter lines. bit.ly/2PQyGoG

9/ There’s now a sense of urgency that Mimi Marziani, president of @TXCivilRights, said is long overdue. bit.ly/2PQyGoG

10/10 “This was not a race-neutral collapse of the democratic process,” Marziani said.

“This was one that absolutely discriminated against people of color, and we need to be clear-eyed about that.” bit.ly/2PQyGoG