Texas voters headed to the polls on Tuesday in the first primary contest of the US 2022 midterm elections.
Polls closed at 7 pm local time in most of the state. There was relatively low turnout in the contest so far, and voting proceeded on Tuesday with a few hiccups. In Harris county, home of Houston, some voting machines went down Tuesday morning because of glitches. In Tarrant county, home to Fort Worth, more than a dozen polling locations were closed because one of the parties did not have enough election judges present.
The state attorney general, Ken Paxton, a staunch Donald Trump ally who has the former president’s endorsement, is seeking the Republican nomination for a third term in office.
Paxton, who has been under indictment since 2015 and faces whistleblower accusations of misusing his office, is running against a number of GOP challengers, including George P Bush, the son of Jeb Bush and nephew of George W Bush. Texas governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, notably did not say on Tuesday whether he voted for Paxton.
Bush and Paxton’s other challengers are hoping to push him to a runoff election in May. Races go to a runoff in Texas if no candidate gets more than 50% of the vote.
With 60% of the vote reported Tuesday evening, Paxton had just over 42% of the vote, while Bush and Eva Guzman, a former state supreme court justice, vied for second place in the race. Paxton acknowledged Tuesday that he appeared headed for a runoff. “To the establishment, they got what they wanted: They got me in a runoff,” he said Tuesday night.
Trump has endorsed in 29 races, including Paxton’s. Almost of all the Republicans he endorsed were expected to win their races, according to the New York Times.
Abbott, one of the most conservative Republicans in the country, won his party’s nomination for a third term. Democrats nominated Beto O’Rourke, who narrowly lost a 2018 US Senate bid before his failed presidential campaign in 2020.
On the Democratic side, the most closely watched race is between Henry Cuellar, a longtime conservative Democrat in south Texas, and his progressive challenger, Jessica Cisneros, who is backed by Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. Cisneros narrowly led Cuellar by fewer than 1,000 votes with about 58% of the vote reported late Tuesday.
The race is a rematch of 2020, when Cuellar, whose home and office were raided by FBI investigators in January, narrowly defeated Cisneros. When Republicans redrew the district as part of the redistricting process last year, they excised some of the portions where Cisneros performed the most strongly in 2020.
The races are being watched as an early signal of the political temperature in the US. Texas is one of the fastest-growing states in the country and 95% of the growth over the last decade has been from people of color.
Democrats have not won a statewide election in Texas since 1994, but many see it as increasingly politically competitive.
Whichever candidates ultimately prevail in the congressional primaries are highly likely to win in November. When Republicans redrew Texas’s 38 congressional districts last year, they reduced the number of competitive districts from 12 to just one.
The single remaining competitive district in the general election is the 15th congressional district, which stretches from outside San Antonio to the border city of McAllen in the southeast. Numerous challenges to the congressional map are pending in court.
One of the biggest stories of the primary so far has been the staggering impact of new voting restrictions.
The primary is the first in the state in which new sweeping voting restrictions will be in effect. For weeks, election officials have reported widespread problems with implementing the law’s provisions on mail-in ballots. A new requirement that voters note either their state ID or last four digits of their social security number is causing tens of thousands of ballots to be rejected.
In El Paso county, at the western end of the Texas-Mexico border, officials have rejected 27% of the 3,855 ballots they received so far, almost all because of problems related to the new state law, according to numbers provided by Lisa Wise, the county elections administrator.
In Harris county, the most populous in the state, officials said they had flagged 10,876 ballots – 29% of those returned – for rejection as of Saturday.
Leah Shah, a spokesperson for the election office, said the county planned to call voters whose information they had on file to try to get voters to correct any problems with their ballots.
The rejection numbers are staggeringly high. In the 2020 election, Texas officials reported rejecting less than 1% of ballots statewide.
Two(!) rejected mail ballot apps, no curbside voting option at her polling place, and yet, my 94 yr old mom was undeterred and made it out to cast her ballot and get her coveted "I voted" sticker. #cantsuppresshervote #suretriedthough #shouldntbethishard pic.twitter.com/WqbN9aKs6I
— rick levy (@RickTxAFLCIO) March 1, 2022
John Lengers, a 75-year-old retired gym teacher showed up in Houston on Tuesday to cast his vote. Even though he has trouble seeing and would have preferred to vote by mail, he told the Washington Post he didn’t want to risk having his ballot rejected.
“It would have been a heck of a lot easier to sit at the kitchen table and fill out a ballot,” he told the paper as he struggled to use a touchscreen voting machine on Tuesday.
