Harris County voting locations will stay open until 8 p.m., an extra hour

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A state district judge has ordered Harris County to extend voting hours across the entire county until 8 p.m. following delayed polling place openings this morning, a county official said.

The order to keep polls open an extra hour at nearly 800 polling places came after the Texas Organizing Project sued the state’s most populous county, citing issues at numerous polling locations that opened more than one hour late Tuesday. Many Harris County voting locations also experienced voting machine malfunctions that caused delays and temporary closures throughout the day.

“These delays have forced countless voters to leave polling places without being able to vote,” the lawsuit read.

The county did not oppose the request, according to a spokesperson for the Harris County attorney’s office.

The delayed openings violate the Texas Election Code because polling locations that opened after 7 a.m. would not remain open to voters for 12 hours on Election Day as required by state law. The county has been forced to extend voting hours in the past for failure to open on time. In 2018, a judge similarly ordered the county to keep nine polling locations open for an extra hour.

Voters who get in line after 7 p.m. must cast a provisional ballot, which will not be added to the vote count until after election night because they must be manually processed.

Harris County — home to nearly 2.6 million voters — allows voters to cast their ballots at any polling place in the county.

“We went to court because these closures and errors, especially in communities of color across Harris County, robbed voters of the opportunity to cast their ballot,” said Hani Mirza, the voting rights program director at the Texas Civil Rights Project, which filed the lawsuit. “These folks got to the polls early, wanting to do their civic duty, and they would have were it not for these issues.”

Earlier in the day, a state district judge also ordered polling places to remain open an extra hour in Bell County in Central Texas.

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