Update on Republican election subversion efforts

Poor Harris County Elections Administrator Isabel Longoria: she resigns  

after being caught in a crapstorm of Republican election crap

This mess comes to us from Texas. I did not mess with Texas. It messed with itself. 

It is starting to look like the Republican push to subvert elections is beginning to bear the toxic fruit it was intended to bear. The Washington Post writes in an article, A Texas county didn’t count 10,000 ballots. Now the parties are at war over who’s to blame:

Advocates say the problems in Harris County reveal that a weakened system can’t be fixed by divided parties. 

Voting machines failed to power up. Poll workers handed out the wrong-size ballots. Optical scanners rejected hundreds of votes.

And then, as if enough hadn’t gone wrong during the March 1 primary in Harris County, Tex., a weary election worker who had been on the job for at least 30 hours neglected to include about 10,000 of the roughly 360,000 total votes in an unofficial tally published a day after polls had closed.

One week later, there’s one thing everyone agrees on: The primary was an error-riddled disaster. Isabel Longoria, the county’s top elections official, tendered her resignation this week and declared, “We lost the faith of the voters.”

What Republicans and Democrats in the nation’s third most-populous county don’t agree on, however, is exactly what went wrong or what to do about it. Republicans are suing and demanding that the state take over the Democratic-controlled elections office. Democrats say the problem is a new law enacted by Republicans that made it harder to vote by mail and criminalized election mistakes.

The result, in Harris County at least, is new evidence of a weakened system too fragile to withstand the everyday glitches and mistakes of running an election in a state where the parties are too deeply divided to fix those problems together. That worries voting advocates, who fear a worst-case scenario in which a majority of Americans simply don’t trust the outcome of elections anymore.

“Politicizing our elections weakens faith in our democracy,” said Chris Hollins, a Democrat who ran elections in Harris County in 2020 and is now running to be Houston mayor. “Instead of saying, ‘Great, the process works,’ the response is, ‘Look what happens when Democrats run a city.’ Or, ‘Look what happens when they change this law.’”

The whole point of  Republican efforts of calling previously free and fair elections fraudulent and illegitimate is to weaken faith in elections and democracy. The ex-president started that Republican Party bullshit train before the 2016 election and ramped it way up after the 2020 election. The Republican argument is simple and easy to understand: The only way a Republican can lose an election is if it was fraudulent and illegitimate.

Looks like disputes over elections are going to get worse and not going to go away. November of 2022 is shaping up to be a 

of conflict and finger pointing, maybe so bad it amounts to a 

where voters, elections and democracy get

 .

Questions: Who gets most of the credit or blame here, Republicans or Democrats, or is this just a Texas kerfuffle of no importance? Do new, complicated Republican laws factor in at all or are they relevant and important?