Elections Office answers 2020 election concerns
The Hays County Elections Office has officially addressed citizen queries into the 2020 election.
Hays County commissioners received Elections Administrator Jennifer Doinoff’s explanations for voter roll anomalies in the November 2020 General Election during Tuesday’s regular meeting.
The first anomaly Doinoff addressed was “what appears to be 57,829 voters who voted in 2020 that have the same Eligible and Effective date.”
According to Doinoff, Votec, the national voter registration vendor Hays County contracts with, uses the terms Eligible and Effective in a way that “is not reflective of what those terms are defined as in the Texas Election Code.”
“Votec’s explanation of their formatting is that both dates stay the same for all new registered voters, until which time the voter makes a change to their voter registration account, and then the ‘Effective Date’ will be amended to reflect the change,” she explained, adding, “To help make this clear, Hays County intends to add a column for ‘Original Registration Date’ to help make the list easier to navigate.”
Another concern raised by citizens was the 459 voters registered in counties other than Hays County.
According to Doinoff, those 459 voters were provisional, which means their votes were received but not accepted and counted.
View the full list of concerns and responses under the Oct. 25 Commissioners Court agenda on the Hays County website.
Commissioner Lon Shell, Pct. 3, said he believes “It was made clear [in earlier discussions] that this system is creating this confusion.”
“That’s the way the system is presenting this information based on what was entered,” Shell said. “But that causes confusion obviously, so one of my asks was, ‘Let’s fix that.’” Questions over elections and voting procedures in Hays County have come up at nearly every Commissioners Court meeting for the past 17 weeks.
Several public commenters, including Laura Nunn, who spoke at Tuesday’s meeting, have presented their findings to the court and urged commissioners to abolish voting machines in favor of paper, sequentially numbered ballots.
Nunn, who previously alleged Hays County’s voting machine contractor, Hart InnerCivic, was advising elections administrators to turn off the recording function on voting machines, implored the court to take voter issues more seriously.
“Ladies and gentlemen, when I announced to you in August that investigating elections now drives my retirement, I am not the only one, and I am not going away,” said Nunn. “We will be here waiting for answers to the questions that no one seems interested in answering.
Secretary of State’s Office released a video series called “SOS 101” that lays out voter registration, voting systems, voting by mail and casting and counting ballots, according to Assistant Secretary of State for Communications Sam Taylor. Visit sos.state.tx.us. for more information.