Early Voting starts; complaints occur at Crosby voting location

Signs across the line were taken down.

CROSBY – At election time locals become most sensitive to irregularities, Monday – at the start of Early Voting- a voter pointed out that the system could have flaws in detecting school board precincts and the local school board’s election had an incident between a candidate and a precinct judge concerning a sign’s placement.

Not everyone here will have an opportunity to vote in the upcoming school board election. As the Star-Courier pointed out in the August 23 issue, only school precincts 4, 5 and 7 have contested elections. But when voters only hand over their state issued driver’s license (without their voter’s registration card) at least a couple of times the school precinct did not appear at the end of their ballot to reflect the candidates they can choose. If the voter then calls that to the attention of the election officials before the cast vote has been pushed then the voters can be given a chance to vote over within the correct precinct. Precinct 4 is Newport and nearby two Davids are running: David Porter and David Shaver for Sheryl Shaws’ old position.

Precinct 5 is between Carla Mills Windfont (incumbent) and Will Locke that precinct lies pretty much north of FM 2100 in Barrett Station, now out FM 1942 to the Harris County line. Precinct 7 is between Jerald Blankenship (incumbant) and Dr. James Hofmann.

The woman that discovered the precinct problem said, “When you are voting please make sure that if you are in a district to vote for your school board election that it is on the last page of your ballot before you hit the red button to cast a vote… Mine was not on my ballot today because they coded me in a wrong precinct. As luck has it, my husband happened to be in there as I came in to vote and when I noticed my ballot did not have a place for school board I asked him if he was able to vote in which he did. Needless to say once again I stirred something else up. We had to argue the point that we both live in the same house, married but yet had two different ballots. Thank God I did not hit cast vote thinking the school board sheet would follow…

Once you hit cast vote they cannot void your vote. They were able to void mine and allow me to vote again after many calls downtown to get this straight. I also ask that they tell people to make sure of this issue to check their ballots before casting their vote which they didn’t so I did it for them. Nor would they give me the number to the election official for they felt there wasn’t a problem. I do know while I was there this morning apologizing to them for causing problems so early that they told me not to feel bad that this had already happened several times this morning and then I overheard a gentleman complaining that he didn’t not get to vote and that was the reason he was there today. They could not do anything about it because he had already hit -cast vote! Point is I was not the only one this happened to nor do we know how many went through today we not being able to vote for our elected official. Check your district and make sure if you have someone up for election today before you vote. You can go to harrisvotes.org and look at your ballot…”

Sign Incident results in Citation

An incident involving a sign post striking a Precinct Judge resulted in a misdemeanor citation for a school board candidate on Monday.

Monday morning, a precinct judge was setting the distances signs could be from the polling locations and set off a number of signs to be taken down as within that capacity. A Precinct 3 Deputy issued a citation to Gerald Blankenship for assault by contact, a Class C Misdemeanor, like a traffic violation. What had happened, according to Blankenship was that he grabbed his sign when the judge had decided it was too close to the poll location and a post fell and struck the precinct judge on the leg. He apologized and indicates it was nothing intentional.Witnesses indicated it was unintentional but happened as the judge was setting boundries.