Skipped votes could have changed the outcome of many Harris County election contests

Tens of thousands of Harris County residents stopped voting well short of the end of their Nov. 5 ballots, skipping dozens of races and passing up the opportunity to change the outcome of all but one countywide contest.

Known as undervoting, the number of people that left races blank varied by contest, ranging from .6 percent to a little more than 9 percent.

That .6 percent represents 9,822 voters who bypassed the presidential contest between Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Kamala Harris, the first race on the ballot.

The gap generally grew wider as voters moved down the ballot, ending with 144,571 who did not make a selection on the question of whether to raise the property tax rate for the Harris County Flood Control District. The winning margin was 39,198 votes.

All voting results remain unofficial; Commissioners Court is expected to canvass the vote on Friday.

"As you move down the ballot people stop, right? It's something that happens in any election, in any part of the country," said Dr. Jeronimo Cortina, an associate professor of political science at the University of Houston. "Long ballots means that you're going to have a significant number of attrition."

In total, there were more than 250 national, state and local contests playing out on the ballots of Harris County voters. Each voter had between 50 and 70 contests on their individual ballot, according to Harris County Clerk Teneshia Hudspeth.

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Numerous contests were decided by a few thousand votes but skipped by more than 100,000 voters.

For example, in the 177th Judicial District, which flipped from Democratic to Republican control this year, Emily Munoz Detoto won by 5,864 votes. Meanwhile, 110,630 people who cast a ballot left that race blank.

In the contest for Harris County tax assessor-collector, Democrat Annette Ramirez beat Republican Steve Radack by just under 34,100 votes. More than 90,000 voters, however, skipped that race.

"It's part of the life of a politician," Radack said. "If you're further down the ballot, you've got to know there's a certain number of people that don't care or don't know."

Perhaps not surprisingly, the number of undervotes exceeded 600,000 in uncontested races, with voters presumably deciding their support was not needed.

Only the race between Democratic Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez and Republican Mike Knox would have been unaffected by the undervote. Gonzalez won re-election by more than 93,000 votes. The number of people who did not vote in that race was about 82,000.

Both the county's Democratic and Republican party chairs agree on the problem: There are too many races on the ballot for voters to keep track. Their message to their voters is similar too.

"People get frustrated, tired, in a hurry," Harris County GOP Chair Cindy Siegel said. "They feel like they don't know everyone on the ballot. ... Our message is, we believe our candidates are better than the other party's, even if you don't know them."

Her counterpart, Harris County Democratic Party Chair Mike Doyle said he emphasizes the outsized impact of voting in local races compared to national contests.

"Our messaging has been, without exception, is going down the ballot is just as important as starting the ballot," Doyle said.

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This is the second presidential election year in which there is no straight-ticket voting available after the Texas Legislature abolished it in 2020. In 2016, more than three-quarters of Harris County voters used the straight-ticket option, automatically filling out all of the contests down the ballot. This year though, people had to go one by one through dozens of races.

The abolition of straight-ticket voting has worsened undervoting and diminished Democratic voting strength in Harris County, Doyle said.

"The Republicans didn't have a problem with (straight-ticket voting) when they were in power," Doyle said. "It was done by Republicans to make it more difficult, more time consuming, more subject to voter fatigue."

To begin getting people to fill out their ballots completely, Cortina said it is important to work on civic education in middle and high schools.

"We don't have a class about civic education, right? The role of voting, the role of participating in your community. The role of understanding, you know, how the local government works, how or what are the implications for you as a voter?" Cortina said.

Beyond schooling, he suggested people need to set aside time for research.

"When you buy, I don't know, a car or an expensive item, right? You spend a lot of time doing research," he said. "'I'm trying to see if this car is better or that car is better.' That's something that we need to do, especially when thinking about voting."