Texas early voting opens with long lines and waits
In Harris County, which includes Houston, 50,000 votes had been cast by noon local time, according to a tweet from the county clerk. Wait times exceeded 40 minutes in several locations in the county, including the Rice University Football Stadium located in Houston.
In total, 122 early voting locations are open in the Houston-metro area, according to the county clerk’s website.
In Tarrant County, which includes Fort Worth, 22,803 votes had been cast as of 2:30 p.m. ET, according to the county officials. Five locations showed wait times of more than an hour on Tuesday afternoon.
The challenges facing voters in Texas echoed what happened a day earlier in Georgia, where some of the more than 126,000 Peach State voters who turned out for that state’s first day of early voting on Monday had to stand in long lines at polling centers across the state.
Along with the lines, Georgians also saw a number of other voting challenges, including glitches that slowed down voting at one supersite in Atlanta and a last-minute court ruling in which a federal judge ruled Sunday that the state should continue using voting machines known as ballot-marking devices, denying a request to require hand-marked paper ballots for all votes, which election integrity activists had pushed for.
Georgia, a presidential battleground state that Democratic nominee Joe Biden hopes to win over from President Donald Trump, has already seen 425,000 ballots cast this year following several weeks of mail-in voting, according to data from Catalist, a company that provides data, analytics and other services to Democrats, academics and nonprofit organizations.
