If the March 6 primary taught us anything, it’s that the politicians who run our elections don’t want people to vote. That’s a big problem.

As Texans vote in the primary runoffs — Tuesday is Election Day — voters need to be aware of barriers that stand in their way.

The 2018 midterm election in Texas could be one of the highest turnout elections ever, especially for Democrats. Turnout for the March 6 primary was the highest in 16 years, with more than 370,000 Democrats voting early in the primaries (only 282,000 Republicans voted early). This level of Democratic primary turnout is unprecedented, with approximately twice as many Democrats voting early in comparison to the 2014 midterm elections. Democrats turned out at a higher rate for this year’s primary than they did during the 2016 presidential election.

Typically, voters supporting the party not in power are more motivated to turn out in a midterm. As the last two midterms have shown at the national level, if enough opposition candidates defeat incumbents, it could reduce a president’s power to little more than a veto pen for the remainder of his term. Given the astonishing turnout for the March 6 primary, Texas may no longer be the solid red bastion Republicans have counted on for the bulk of the 21st century.

Given these statistics, it should be infuriating that the people administering elections in Texas’ bluest areas seem to be actively working to prevent Democrats’ votes from being counted.

On the morning of the primary, the Associated Press reported that at least two precincts in Harris County — where Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump by more than 160,000 votes — didn’t have Democratic ballots. An elections official with the Harris County Clerk’s Office told the AP that some polling locations were only for one party’s voters, meaning voters who weren’t aware of that had to get back in their cars and try to find the precinct location with ballots corresponding to their registered party. At least one polling site reportedly opened more than an hour late, causing some voters to leave without being able to cast ballots.

The AP also reported that densely populated urban centers which tend to lean Democratic, such as Austin, had lines that were hours long. Civil rights groups found other unspecified problems at eight different polling sites.

Aside from the actual problems with voters not being to obtain the proper ballot or having to miss work in order to vote due to poorly managed polling sites, the websites where results are tabulated are also problematic. The election results website for the Harris County Clerk’s Office is in severe need of updating, with users having to download a PDF document or an HTML file to see who won an election (the PDF isn’t even available if you don’t have an updated version of Adobe Reader installed on your machine).

By comparison, the website for Fort Bend County election results is much easier to navigate, with each election neatly categorized with bar charts showing exactly who won and how many votes they received. This should be an embarrassment to Harris County’s election officials, given that Harris County is Texas’ most populous county.

While it’s important for Democrats to vote in the U.S. Senate election between Beto O’Rourke and Ted Cruz, Democrats also should take an interest in county clerk elections. Harris County Clerk Stan Stanart, for example, is a Republican managing elections in a majority-Democrat county. He’s up for re-election this fall, and given the poor management of county elections, he’s ripe for replacement.

National election watchers, for example, may remember the debacle that was the 2016 Democratic primary in Arizona, in which Maricopa County Recorder Helen Purcell (the recorder is Arizona’s equivalent of a clerk) reduced the number of polling sites from as many as 400 in 2008 to just 60 in 2016. Some voters stood in line for more than 3 hours to vote, even after polls officially closed. Purcell, a Republican who had held the office since 1989, was finally defeated in 2016 by Democrat Adrian Fontes.

Harris County should take a page from Maricopa County’s book and clean house this year if we want a fair midterm election.

Gibson is the co-publisher of GritPost.com.