Longoria at hearing on Harris County elections: 'We have to choose accuracy over speed'

Harris County Elections Administrator Isabel Longoria appeared before the Texas House Committee on Elections in Austin on Wednesday (May 11) to discuss a new state rule that requires counties to meet a 24-hour deadline for counting ballots, Houston CBS affiliate KHOU reported. 

Longoria, who was at the center of her office's controversial handling of the ballot counts in March's Texas primary elections, asserted to committee members that counties such as Harris are likely to experience problems with the rule, according to KHOU. 

"This paper ballot system we're moving to, I think has paper challenges," Longoria explained to the panel, the station reported. "We have to choose accuracy over speed."

Beth Stevens, the county's chief director of voting, joined Longoria in fielding questions from the committee, KHOU reported.

In response to a query on the approximately 10,000 votes that were left out of the tally, Stevens insisted the ballots "were not missing."

"They were scanned in, on camera, they are physically in the room," she said, according to the station. "They did not get transferred into the other computer system."

Stevens added that a staff member failed to record the ballot data on a second computer system and the mistake was discovered a couple of days following the primary, according to KHOU.

Longoria, who tendered her resignation effective July 1, told state legislators that counting votes is a meticulous process.

"Those paper ballots to record them appropriately, to get them back into our central warehouse," she said, KHOU reported. "That takes time to do properly, to record that chain of custody and then to record the central count committee, Democrats and Republicans both, replicating those ballots and making sure that the intent of the voters recorded appropriately."

The Houston Daily reported that Harris County commenced a nationwide search for a new elections administrator last month.

Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo expressed hopes that the successor to Longoria, who was appointed to the position before the 2020 presidential election, could be on the job by the end of June, according to the publication.

When quizzed about the debacle by county leaders, Longoria said, "I didn't meet my own standards, nor the standards set by commissioners court."