In Texas, an election supervisor and judge resigned after a video was shared of her yelling at a voter, who was reportedly confused about where to vote.
The incident occurred in the afternoon of Nov. 2 in Williamson County Annex in Round Rock ahead of the Nov. 6 midterm elections. The video shows the election supervisor, Lila Guzman, yelling at the voter.
“Get out, get out, get out. You are rude. You are not following the law. Go, go,” Guzman can be heard yelling.
Another voter witnessed the scene and decided to capture the moment.
“As soon as she started getting louder, I was like, ‘This is getting out of hand.’ So I began to record,” the witness, who did not want to disclose her identity, told local ABC station KVUE.
“[Guzman] did tell her she couldn’t vote there, but she didn’t say where in Travis [County]. The lady did have an accent. She could’ve been new to the country. I don’t know, but she needed some help.”
Confusion
The voter had been registered to vote in Williamson County but lived in Travis County. Therefore, the Travis County poll staff should have sent the voter to the Travis County Elections Division to vote a limited ballot, but the voter presented at the Williamson County Annex instead.
In the video, Guzman was also reportedly heard saying she would call the police on the voter and have her taken out of the building, but the voter reportedly left before police arrived.
Guzman resigned after the incident and did not work on Election Day. But Guzman said that she did not resign because of the video.
Guzman claimed she left because she felt the Williamson County Elections office did not provide backup when she called them to have police remove the confused voter from the building, according to KVUE.
“I regret that that incident happened with that poll worker because that voter was just trying to get answers that weren’t being provided to her in a way that we train our poll workers to give,” Williamson County Elections Administrator Chris Davis said.
‘No Excuse’
”Our supervisor loses her composure in the middle of this, and that’s not something that we ever train our poll workers, supervisors, election judges and clerks to do,” Davis said, referring to Guzman. “We always train them and advise them to maintain control of the situation politely and answer voters’ questions and give voters options so situations like these don’t escalate.”
Guzman acknowledged that she did not deal with the situation well, and said that the 12-hour days of work over nearly two weeks had taken a toll on her, according to KVUE.
“It was the end of the day, and we were seeing steady turnout across all sites, but again, no excuse. It’s our job to get voters answers and help them vote, either at our site or the site where they need to vote,” Davis said.
Davis told KVUE that Guzman is “a very experienced supervisor and judge” and had worked for the county in several past election cycles.
