Brazos County struggles to find additional polling locations for new state law

BRYAN, Texas (KBTX) – The clock is ticking down for Brazos County to find additional polling locations to comply with a new state law.

Senate Bill 924 was passed in September and the March 5 primary is the first election that it will impact. It requires counties that use a county-wide voting program to have half as many polling locations as they have voting precincts. Brazos County, which fits that description along with around 90 other counties in the state, normally has around 25 polling locations. Because it has 109 precincts it has to find a total of 55 polling locations. During the last election, the county had 24 open and has only been able to add four before the deadline which is the day of the primary.

Brazos County Elections Administrator Trudy Hancock said the deadline was just not possible and the requirements are a big change from what they’ve been doing.

”In the past if you had voting precincts that didn’t have as many voters or had very few voters you can combine that with another precinct and so that helped us a lot, we have quite a few precincts out in our rural area that don’t have any voters in them, but now we have to use those voting precincts when we calculate the number of locations that we have,” Hancock said.

Since the law was announced Hancock has worked with the local Republican and Democratic parties to find new locations, but the process has remained daunting.

“They’ve been reaching out to everyone in the community also, we’ve reached out to all of the churches, building we thought would be feasible, HOAs,” Handcock said.

Finding a polling location also includes making sure it meets several requirements.

“Most locations are privately owned so the individual has to agree to allow us to use that, it’s not just for election day because we have to drop off before election day and pick up the day after,” Hancock said. “It also has to be ADA accessible. We have to be able to have our disabled voters able to access the polling place, we have to have adequate space, electrical outlets, and parking.”

Adding 32 new polling also presents another challenge for the county which is finding a minimum of 128 election workers.

“If a place ended up being a really good fit and we had a lot of turnout we would need more than the four workers we’d want to put there,” Hancock said. “If we don’t have adequate workers then we have to pull workers from other locations which will cause them to slow down and have longer lines.”

Another problem is cost. The county said it would be over one million dollars to get four voting machines at all of those new polling places. Because the law did not provide counties with any money to deal with the new expense, it all comes out of county funds.

While the county wasn’t expecting to deal with these new costs, Brazos County Judge Duane Peters said some of it has already been covered.

“That is the reason you want to have fund balance because things like that do pop up and do and it seems it’s happening more often and we did have fund balance,” Peters said. “We were able to reach out to Hart and found out they had about a fourth of the number of voting machines that we needed. That’s all we could do to try to comply as best we could.”

With the deadline this close Hancock said there is nothing more the county can do to meet the requirement, but they will aim to meet it by the November Presidential Election.

“We expect a lot larger turnout for the November Presidential. We’re really trying to get out there and do what we can do for the community, and so anyone who has information or a place you think would be feasible please contact us,” Hancock said.

Peters said there are always concerns whenever there’s a big election and the past two have a lot of voters cast their ballot.

“Now that we are on paper, we want to make sure we are on paper we want to make sure we have everything it takes to run an election at those locations and be able to provide more,” Peters said. “It is a stressful process and our election people do a great job.”

When asked if the county could see a penalty for not complying with the new law in time, Hancock said it would have to be citizen-driven since the Secretary of State Office understands many of the counties are struggling to meet the deadline.

“There are quite a few of us having these same problems anywhere from small counties all the way up to Harris County,” Hancock said.