Why did Tarrant’s Republican voters have to wait in long lines Tuesday, but not Dems?

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Some Republican voters at Tarrant County polling places on Super Tuesday stood in long lines and watched with frustration as Democratic voters zipped in and out to cast their ballots.

This was due to how both parties in Tarrant County run their primaries, forcing voters to use separate machines.

As in most states, political parties in Texas run their own primaries. Some large counties, like Harris, where Houston is located, held joint primaries this year, allowing voters from either party to use all voting machines.

The Tarrant County Republican and Democratic parties did not run their primaries this way. But with a countywide voting system in which voters can choose any polling place to cast their ballots on Election Day, neither poll workers nor voters have an effective way to gauge how busy the polls will be.

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Allowing voters to choose their vote center on Election Day creates a “coordination problem,” according to Mark Jones, a political science professor from Rice University.

“That’s an issue with Election Day vote centers in that it’s difficult for the county to know how many people are going to show up at any given vote center, especially in a party primary,” Jones told the Star-Telegram.

This leads to what Jones called “lopsided participation,” in which some polling places had long lines for one party and no lines for the other.

Long lines for GOP voters in White Settlement

The Star-Telegram observed this lopsided participation at the polls on Super Tuesday.

Republicans lined up on the sidewalk outside the White Settlement Public Library early Tuesday afternoon and watched as Democrats came and went with ease.

A Democratic poll worker told the Star-Telegram that the average wait time was three to five minutes for that party, and that the maximum anyone had waited in their line that day was around 15 minutes.

One couple in the Republican line said they expected to wait about an hour, based on their experience voting in previous elections at the library. They had already tried two other locations in the area on Tuesday and were told the wait could be as long as an hour at those sites.

The woman noted that Democratic voters were walking right in to cast their ballots and said she did not care which machine she used in order to vote.

“Whichever is next is fine with me,” the voter said, declining to give her name.

Another Republican voter said he also didn’t care which machine he used, “as long as my vote gets counted.”

Election workers blame low turnout on split primary

Republican election workers manning a polling place at Morningside Elementary School said the low turnout they had seen by midday Tuesday was partly due to the split primary system.

“Split voting makes people not vote as much,” said election worker Ana Alburquerque. “People don’t want to be treated differently.”

Alburquerque said she had seen many people turn away from the polling place because they did not want their party affiliation to be on display by standing in a designated line.

The latest numbers of ballots cast at Morningside Elementary at the time of the Star-Telegram’s visit were 21 for the Democratic Party and eight for the Republican Party.

She also said that they had to call the Tarrant County Elections Administration to spoil, or cancel out, some votes after people realized they had voted in the wrong party’s primary.

“There has to be a better way. We’re already separated by race, we’re separated by sex, we’re separated by religion, and now by politics,” Alburquerque said. “This is nonsense.”

She and others working the Republican side of the polling station said that previous elections they had worked were not done this way. But Texas primaries have been split by parties for the last century, according to TCU political science professor James Riddlesperger.

“It’s been that way … since the direct primary became the way that we nominated candidates for public office,” he said in a phone interview.

Before the direct primary, people’s party affiliations were even more conspicuous, Riddlsperger said, as candidates were chosen by caucus in which people divided themselves physically into groups to cast their votes.

Still, split primaries likely do deter some voters from going to the ballot box, he said.

“There are people for whom the decision to vote is very difficult, and they’re worried that they will somehow offend friends or be typecast by people if they vote in the wrong primary,” he said. “Anytime you have a situation where your voter identification is revealed, that’s something that can be a barrier to voting.”

Texas, however, is not alone in running primaries this way.

“In something like 47 states there are separate primaries for the Democrats and for the Republicans … so it’s a problem that’s not uncommon nationally, it’s not uncommon at the state level, and it’s not uncommon at the local level,” Riddlesperger said.

Texas runs what are known as open primaries, in which voters can vote in either party’s primary, whether or not they are registered in the party. But they cannot vote in both parties’ primaries.

One way for people who do not want their party affiliation to be known when they vote is to take advantage of early voting dates, Riddlesperger said.

The Tarrant County Republican Party opposed the idea of joint primaries last November.

“We don’t want people that are not on our team involved in our elections,” county GOP chair Bo French told the Star-Telegram at the time. “These are our elections. We’re going to handle them ourselves.”