Harris County Clerk Diane Trautman on Wednesday said a last-minute directive from the Texas secretary of state caused significant delays in reporting results on Election Night and suggested the move was politically motivated.

The first-term county clerk said the directive came as a surprise and forced election workers to adopt a back-up counting plan meant only for use in natural disasters or widespread power outages. As a result, Trautman said the county needed nearly 12 hours to complete an unofficial tally of election results, far longer than previous elections with higher turnouts.

“If the secretary of state would have worked with us to let us do our original plan, we would have had those results out much quicker,” Trautman said.

Keith Ingram, director of elections for the secretary of state, directed a reporter to an agency spokesman and hung up.

Ingram later shared an email he sent Wednesday evening to Houston Democratic State Sen. Carol Alvarado, in which he said Harris County ignored state law that prohibits counties from connecting voting systems to external networks such as an intranet. Alvarado on Monday asked for clarification of the election advisory.

“The clerk was planning to use this risky method of results reporting even though they were fully aware it was illegal to do so, and with apparent disregard to the fact that the intelligence community has repeatedly warned election officials since 2016 of the continuing desire of nation states to interfere with our election process,” Ingram wrote. He also told Alvarado he had explained the state’s rules about vote counting systems to a Harris County Clerk’s representative on Oct. 2.

Trautman, whose said her staff had yet to sleep since Election Day, addressed reporters for 40 minutes Wednesday afternoon. She said she understood why many residents were upset election results were unavailable until after dawn Wednesday.

The clerk reported unofficial results at a slower pace than the November 2018 general election, in which nearly four times as many Harris County voters participated. At midnight Tuesday, only 8 percent of Election Day votes had been tallied.

The clerk announced that each of the 757 voting centers results had been counted at 6:39 a.m., nearly 12 hours after polls closed. Voter turnout was 16.7 percent.

Trautman said the Oct. 23 election advisory from the secretary of state, issued after early voting had begun, required the county to change its counting process. The clerk’s office, she said, originally had planned to tally results at 10 sites across Harris County, and transmit them to a central counting headquarters via a secure intranet connection.

Trautman said the county used that reporting system in the May election, with the blessing of the secretary of state.

The advisory, she said, forced the county to abandon that plan and instead count results from each of the 757 voting centers at the clerk’s downtown Houston office. The county had three devices to process about 2,000 voting machine memory cards, a process she called “painstakingly slow.”

Trautman said Michael Winn, the county’s elections director, unsuccessfully lobbied the secretary of state’s office for a waiver to use its 10-site counting plan. Why the state issued the directive remains unclear as it did not name Harris County. Trautman suggested “some kind of political pressure” had been put on the secretary of state, but declined to elaborate.

Many Democratic elected officials in large urban areas like Houston long have suspected the Republicans who control state government regularly scheme to limit the power of city and county governments.

That worry was heightened last month when House Speaker Dennis Bonnen, in a secretly recorded conversation, said he wished the legislative session would be “the worst in history” for cities and counties.

Republicans were skeptical of Trautman’s explanation for the delay in reporting results. State Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a frequent critic of local Democrats, said on Twitter that the pace of Harris County’s count was “preposterously bad.” He noted Kentucky tallied 1.5 million votes in statewide elections Tuesday before Harris County counted its 389,000.

Former Republican County Clerk Stan Stanart also disputed Trautman’s claim that her office planned to use an identical vote counting system to the one his staff used in the November 2018 election. Stanart said his office used phone modems at four sites around the county to relay results to the downtown counting headquarters.

Even if the county had to drive each site’s memory card downtown for tallying, Stanart said the clerk’s office should have completed its unofficial count far sooner.

“By the 10 p.m. news report, we’d be over 80 percent for a mayor’s race, and you’d have a good sense of what was going on,” Stanart said.

The Harris County Republican Party Ballot Security Committee said in a statement that Trautman should have known her vote count plan was prohibited by state law, which bars counties from connecting voting systems to external networks. The county clerk, however, insisted her system is secure and has no connection to the internet.

This was the highest-turnout election to date in which Harris County used its new countywide voting system, where residents can visit any polling station on Election Day, instead of an assigned precinct. The county first used the countywide system in May after receiving approval from the secretary of state.

Voting appeared to go smoothly across the county on Tuesday, with the exception of some voters receiving incorrect ballots at three polling stations. The clerk’s office said election workers were to blame for the errors.

zach.despart@chron.com