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    Boeing Engine Cover on Southwest Plane Falls Off

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    The plane returned safely to Denver on Sunday after the crew reported that the cover came apart during takeoff and struck a wing flap. No injuries were reported.A Southwest Airlines flight safely returned to Denver International Airport on Sunday after the engine cover of a Boeing 737-800 fell off during takeoff and struck the wing flap, the Federal Aviation Administration said.Flight 3695 was headed to Houston but returned to the Denver airport around 8:15 a.m. after the crew reported the engine cowling, or cover, fell off.The plane, which had 135 passengers and five crew members, was towed back to the gate. The F.A.A. said it would investigate.In a statement, Southwest Airlines said its maintenance teams were reviewing the aircraft. Southwest said the passengers boarded another plane and arrived at William P. Hobby Airport in Houston approximately three hours behind schedule.“We apologize for the inconvenience of their delay, but place our highest priority on ultimate safety for our customers and employees,” the statement said.A video taken from a window near the plane’s wing posted on social media showed a blue cowling peeling off the engine and twisting in the wind as the plane moved down a runway before a large portion of it eventually fell off.“Let’s go ahead and declare an emergency for Southwest 3695 and we’d like an immediate return,” a crew member said, according to radio transmissions with an air traffic controller. “We’ve got a piece of the engine cowling hanging off.”The incident happened during a time of increased scrutiny about other commercial air travel episodes, starting with the harrowing Jan. 5 emergency on Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 in which a panel known as a door plug blew off a new Boeing 737 Max 9, delivered to the airline just months earlier.No one died but it triggered investigations into Boeing’s Max 9 and raised questions about quality control problems in its plane production.Then came a string of eight episodes last month involving United Airlines aircraft in a two-week span.Maintenance issues, loose tires and missing panels were among the issues afflicting six Boeing and two Airbus jets. A safety expert said such cases were typical and were being “falsely conflated with Boeing’s troubles.” More

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      Videos Show Exchange of Gunfire at Houston Megachurch

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      The videos released by the Houston police left open the question of who shot a 7-year-old boy as his mother, armed with an assault-style rifle, exchanged fire with off-duty officers.Just before opening fire with an assault-style rifle in the lobby of a Houston megachurch this month, Genesse Ivonne Moreno walked around the side of her sport utility vehicle and opened a rear passenger door for her 7-year-old son, who got out of the vehicle and followed her into the church.Moments later, as deafening gunfire erupted in the church, the boy stood in an alcove with his hands pressed to his ears, according to surveillance and body-camera videos released on Monday by the Houston Police Department. At one point, the boy appeared to reach up for Ms. Moreno, as if asking to be picked up.Security camera footage shows the shooter entering Lakewood Church with her 7-year-old son.Houston Police DepartmentLater, he could be seen lying motionless on the carpeted hallway floor after being shot in the head.The videos provided a clearer picture of the Feb. 11 shooting in Lakewood Church, one of the nation’s largest megachurches, led by the televangelist Joel Osteen. But they did not provide a complete account of what took place.And they did not show the boy being struck, leaving open the question of who shot him. He remained hospitalized in critical condition with a gunshot wound to the head, officials said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Century Later, 17 Wrongly Executed Black Soldiers Are Honored at Gravesites

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      More than a century ago, 110 Black soldiers were convicted of murder, mutiny and other crimes at three military trials held at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio. Nineteen were hanged, including 13 on a single day, Dec. 11, 1917, in the largest mass execution of American soldiers by the Army.The soldiers’ families spent decades fighting to show that the men had been betrayed by the military. In November, they won a measure of justice when the Army secretary, Christine E. Wormuth, overturned the convictions and acknowledged that the soldiers “were wrongly treated because of their race and were not given fair trials.”On Thursday, several descendants of the soldiers gathered at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery as the Department of Veterans Affairs dedicated new headstones for 17 of the executed servicemen.Just before he was executed, Private Hawkins wrote a letter to his parents, telling them: “Although I am not guilty of the crime that I’m accused of Mother, it’s God’s will that I go now and in this way.”Michael A. McCoy for The New York TimesThe new headstones acknowledge each soldier’s rank, unit and home state — a simple honor accorded to every other veteran buried in the cemetery. They replaced the previous headstones that noted only their name and date of death.(The families of the other two who were hanged reclaimed their remains for private burial.)The headstones were unveiled after an honor guard fired a three-volley rifle salute, a bugler played “Taps” and officials presented the descendants with folded American flags and certificates declaring that the executed soldiers had been honorably discharged.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Sheriff’s Deputies Shoot Woman Inside Friend’s Home in Houston, Authorities Say

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      Body camera footage released on Saturday showed the two Harris County deputies repeatedly firing through the apartment’s window after a report of a break-in.A Houston woman was shot in her friend’s apartment this month by sheriff’s deputies who responded to a report of a break-in and fired repeatedly into the home, according to a statement and body camera footage released by the Harris County Sheriff’s Office.Early on Feb. 3, the woman, Eboni Pouncy, and her friend smashed a window to get inside after forgetting the house key, according to a statement released last week by the civil rights lawyer Ben Crump, who is representing Ms. Pouncy.The women were startled when, after 2 a.m., the deputies began pounding on the door, according Mr. Crump. Fearing an intruder, Ms. Pouncy picked up her legally registered firearm and, shortly after, was struck by five bullets, he said.Emergency medical workers took Ms. Pouncy to a hospital for treatment, the sheriff’s office said. While the nature of her injuries was unclear, Mr. Crump said in his statement that she was recovering.According to the Harris County Sheriff’s Office, the two deputies responded to a report of an intruder at an apartment on the city’s east side at around 2:10 a.m. but found no one inside. Shortly afterward, a resident of a neighboring apartment told the deputies that someone had broken into another second-floor apartment, the sheriff’s office said. When deputies went to investigate the break-in, they found the front window screen removed, broken glass and the blinds raised near the front door, the sheriff’s office said.The footage, retrieved from deputies’ body-worn cameras and released on Saturday, shows the two deputies, who appear to be women, climbing the apartment staircase, knocking on the front door and then retreating a few feet away. One of the deputies says she sees someone coming and shouts, and then both deputies begin firing repeatedly through the glass windows. Both reload their guns and continue to fire several times.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      John Whitmire, a Moderate Democrat, Wins Runoff for Houston Mayor

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      Mr. Whitmire, a state senator, prevailed over U.S. Representative Sheila Jackson Lee to lead the nation’s fourth-largest city.John Whitmire, a moderate Democrat who has served in the Texas State Senate since 1983, won a runoff election on Saturday to become mayor of Houston, according to The Associated Press, defeating Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, a prominent congressional Democrat, in the nonpartisan race.Mr. Whitmire had been considered a front-runner from the moment he entered the race last year, prevailing in a city known for its diversity by creating a coalition that included Republicans and moderate white Democrats as well as Hispanic and Asian voters.He made public safety the focus of his messaging, following a strategy that has proved successful for moderate Democrats in recent big city mayoral races around the country.Ms. Jackson Lee, 73, a veteran legislator first elected to Congress in the 1990s, entered the race in March with strong backing from many Democrats and Black voters but struggled to establish a message and expand her base of support.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Republican Voters May Decide Mayor’s Race in Democratic Houston

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      The nonpartisan race to lead the nation’s fourth-largest city ends Saturday in a runoff between two longtime Democrats who have sparred over public safety.Leonard Wickers, a 73-year-old carpenter, took a break from building a new house in South Houston to cast a ballot during early voting this week for the city’s mayoral runoff election.Like most at the polling site in a largely Black neighborhood, Mr. Wickers, who is Black, said he backed Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, a fixture of Democratic politics and the Black community in Houston who has the support of the outgoing mayor, Sylvester Turner, as well as party luminaries like Bill and Hillary Clinton.But Mr. Wickers had little enthusiasm for his vote. And, if he was being honest, he would not mind if her opponent, John Whitmire, a white politician and another longtime Democrat, prevailed. “That’s all for show,” Mr. Wickers said of the race. “Nothing’s getting done. The streets are still raggedy.”His sentiments appear to be broadly shared. Houstonians may have many complaints about their city — crime and traffic, housing costs and garbage collection and the difficulty of getting a permit to do anything — but in contrast to the roiling divides and bitter clashes that characterized recent municipal elections in Los Angeles and Chicago, the race to lead the nation’s fourth-largest city has produced scant fireworks or fanfare.“What if we held a mayor election and nobody came?” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston. “That’s effectively where we are.”The mayoral candidate John Whitmire, 74, has been in the State Senate since 1983. Karen Warren/Houston Chronicle, via Associated PressIn part that is because, for the first time in years, a nonpartisan mayoral race in Houston will end in a runoff, on Saturday, featuring two prominent politicians who are both Democrats: Ms. Jackson Lee, 73, in Congress since 1995, and Mr. Whitmire, 74, who has been in the State Senate since 1983.It may also be because no single issue has galvanized the electorate or motivated turnout. Even crime, which voters cite as a top concern, is on the decline, according to police statistics.“The economy is good in Houston, housing prices could be a little bit more affordable, but in a general sense, things are going well,” said Gene Wu, a state representative who endorsed Mr. Whitmire. “There are always potholes. But you know what, even the pothole situation has gotten better.”Ms. Jackson Lee came with some baggage: decades of partisan fights, including over the Iraq War and gay rights, a reputation for being tough on staff and frequent grabs at the television spotlight. Large numbers of Houston voters already knew her, and many did not like her. In a University of Houston poll this fall, 43 percent of respondents said they would “never” vote for her, compared with just 15 percent refusing to vote for Mr. Whitmire.In a city whose diversity is a point of civic pride, it is Mr. Whitmire who has been leading in polls. If elected, he would be the first white male mayor to lead Houston since Bill White, more than a decade ago.“Was he the perfect candidate? No,” Michelle Naff, 56, who lives in Ms. Jackson Lee’s district, said after casting a ballot for Mr. Whitmire during the first round of voting in November. “But I do not like her as my congresswoman.”The two Democrats have struggled to draw bright lines between each other on issues. In separate interviews with The New York Times, both stressed the need for effective management in City Hall, a desire to attract new businesses to Houston and a focus on public safety.“If the perception is you are unsafe, that matters,” Mr. Whitmire said, adding that he no longer goes out to shop in stores at night. “It affects our economy.” Mr. Whitmire has promised to work with Gov. Greg Abbott’s administration to bring in state troopers to help patrol, even as a similar approach in Austin, a progressive university town, resulted in pushback over racial profiling concerns.“Houston is not Austin,” he said.Ms. Jackson Lee also stressed the need to provide public safety, but said she would do so using local officers, and in a way that addressed injustices. “I want to make sure that social justice is alongside of a wonderful, strong group of law enforcement and fire fighters,” she said.More than Mr. Whitmire, she talked about affordable housing — a relatively new issue for Houston, a sprawling city long known for its low housing prices — and about improving the city’s image nationally.“I think we have to give Houston a new brand,” she said. “My theme is, let’s make Houston pop.”When Ms. Jackson Lee jumped into the race in March, she appeared to present a stark contrast to, and potentially stiff competition for, Mr. Whitmire, the presumptive front-runner, who was seen by many Democrats as too moderate and too aligned with Republicans.Two young Black Democratic candidates dropped out of the race, leaving Ms. Jackson with a clear shot to challenge Mr. Whitmire.“I think we have to give Houston a new brand,” Representative Sheila Jackson Lee said. “My theme is, let’s make Houston pop.”Kirk Sides/Houston Chronicle, via Associated PressBut her campaign started late and has had stumbles. A recent television ad featured the wrong date for the election. She faced renewed questions about her treatment of staff members after a recording became public of a woman, said to be Ms. Jackson Lee, berating her staff. “I know that I am not perfect,” she said in a statement in response.Mr. Whitmire has had a significant fund-raising advantage, spending millions on television advertisements and mailers. Outside groups, including one run by retired police officers, have also flooded mailboxes attacking Ms. Jackson Lee.Mr. Whitmire has faced scrutiny over past conflicts of interest because of his role as a state legislator and his work as a lawyer for a firm whose clients had interests before the state. And he faced attacks from Mayor Turner, who cannot run again because of term limits, after Mr. Whitmire said during a debate that there was a lack of Asian and Hispanic diversity among municipal leaders, many of whom, like Mr. Turner, are Black.“That’s a dog whistle,” Mr. Turner said at a City Council meeting.The contest has underscored the complicated way race and ethnicity plays into a nonpartisan election in a city where no single group of voters is dominant.While roughly 45 percent of the population is Hispanic, according to census data, the figure overestimates the community’s voting power, said Hector de León, a former local elections official. The average age of voters in a municipal election is around 60, said Mr. de León, who publishes a website analyzing election data. “The overwhelming majority of Hispanic registered voters are way below that age, and it is a challenge to get young people to vote regardless of their race or ethnicity,” he said.The nonpartisan nature of the race also means that, even though Houston generally votes for Democrats in national and statewide races, Republican voters hold immense sway.“To win a nonpartisan race, you have to have some bipartisan appeal,” said Odus Evbagharu, a consultant and the former head of the Democratic Party in Harris County, which includes Houston.From the start, Mr. Whitmire has actively courted Republican support, launching his run with an event last year attended by prominent local Republican donors. He has played up his bipartisan experience while also stressing his identity as a Democrat and his endorsements from groups traditionally aligned with Democrats, like the AFL-CIO.In his interview with The Times, Mr. Whitmire said that he opposed the Republican positions on women’s health care and on border security. At the same time, he presented himself as a moderate on municipal issues. He talked about his experience being held at gunpoint with his wife and young daughter during a robbery in the driveway of their Houston home in the 1990s, stressed his ability to work with Republicans in the State Capitol and voiced his opposition to some of Houston’s new bike lanes, which he said created traffic backups.Ms. Jackson Lee, for her part, said she too could work with Republicans, citing her work with Senator John Cornyn of Texas creating the Juneteenth national holiday. More

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      Black Mayors of 4 Biggest U.S. Cities Draw Strength From One Another

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      The mayors of New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston have banded together as they confront violent crime, homelessness and other similar challenges.As the race for Los Angeles mayor began to tighten late last year, Karen Bass, the presumptive favorite, received some notes of encouragement from a kindred spirit: Lori Lightfoot, the mayor of Chicago.Ms. Lightfoot had successfully navigated a similar political path in 2019, becoming the first Black woman to be elected mayor of her city, much as Ms. Bass was trying to do in Los Angeles.And even though Ms. Bass’s billionaire opponent had poured $100 million into the race and boasted endorsements from celebrities like Kim Kardashian and Katy Perry, Ms. Lightfoot urged her Democratic colleague to keep the faith in a series of personal visits and text messages.“She was up against somebody who was very, very moneyed and was leaning into people’s fears about crime, about homelessness — frankly, very similar to the circumstances that I’m facing now in my city in getting re-elected,” Ms. Lightfoot said in an interview. “I just wanted to make sure that she knew that I was there for her.”Ms. Lightfoot and Ms. Bass belong to an informal alliance of four big-city mayors tackling among the toughest jobs in America. They happen to be of similar mind in how to address their cities’ common problems, like violent crime, homelessness and rising overdose deaths.They also happen to be Black: When Ms. Bass took office in December, the nation’s four largest cities all had Black mayors for the first time.The Democratic mayors — Ms. Bass, Ms. Lightfoot, Eric Adams of New York City and Sylvester Turner of Houston — say their shared experiences and working-class roots as Black Americans give them a different perspective on leading their cities than most of their predecessors.Mr. Adams visited Mayor Lightfoot last year during a fund-raising trip to Chicago.Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere/Chicago Sun-Times, via Associated PressIn interviews, the four mayors discussed how their backgrounds helped shape their successful campaigns, and how they provide a unique prism to view their cities’ problems.“We have to be bold in looking at long entrenched problems, particularly on poverty and systemic inequality,” Ms. Lightfoot said. “We’ve got to look those in the face and we’ve got to fight them, and break down the barriers that have really held many of our residents back from being able to realize their God-given talent.”Politics Across the United StatesFrom the halls of government to the campaign trail, here’s a look at the political landscape in America.Michigan G.O.P.: Michigan Republicans picked Kristina Karamo to lead the party in the battleground state, fully embracing an election-denying Trump acolyte after her failed bid for secretary of state.Dianne Feinstein: The Democratic senator of California will not run for re-election in 2024, clearing the way for what is expected to be a costly and competitive race to succeed the iconic political figure.Lori Lightfoot: As the mayor of Chicago seeks a second term at City Hall, her administration is overseeing the largest experiment in guaranteed basic income in the nation.Union Support: In places like West Virginia, money from three major laws passed by Congress is pouring into the alternative energy industry and other projects. Democrats hope it will lead to increased union strength.To do so can require navigating a delicate balancing act.Ms. Bass was a community organizer who witnessed the riots after the Rodney King verdict; Mr. Adams drew attention to police brutality after being beaten by the police as a teenager.As a congresswoman, Ms. Bass took a leading role in 2020 after George Floyd’s death on legislation that aimed to prevent excessive use of force by police and promoted new officer anti-bias training. It was approved by the House, but stalled in the Senate, and President Biden later approved some of the measures by executive order.In Chicago, Ms. Lightfoot served as head of the Chicago Police Board and was a leader of a task force that issued a scathing report on relations between the Chicago police and Black residents. Mr. Adams founded a group called “100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care” in the 1990s.As mayors, all now in their 60s, they have criticized the “defund the police” movement, yet have also called for systemic policing changes.In Chicago and New York, Ms. Lightfoot and Mr. Adams have pushed for police spending increases and have flooded the subway with officers. That has invited criticism from criminal justice advocates who say they have not moved quickly enough to reform the departments.“As a city, we have to have a police department that is successful,” Ms. Lightfoot said. “And to me, successful is defined by making sure that they’re the best trained police department, that they understand that the legitimacy in the eyes of the public is the most important tool that they have, and that we also support our officers — it’s a really hard and dangerous job.”Mr. Adams agreed. “We can’t have police misconduct, but we also know we must ensure that we support those officers that are doing the right thing and dealing with violence in our cities,” he said.The four mayors have highlighted their backgrounds to show that they understand the importance of addressing inequality. Mr. Adams was raised by a single mother who cleaned homes. Ms. Bass’s father was a postal service letter carrier. Ms. Lightfoot’s mother worked the night shift as a nurse’s aide. Mr. Turner was the son of a painter and a maid.Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the Working Families Party, a prominent left-leaning group, said the mayors’ lived experience was all the more reason for them to “take a more expansive view of Black life that is expressed in their policies and in their budgeting,” and to prioritize schools, libraries, youth jobs and mental health care.“We want our communities invested in, in the way that other communities are invested in and the investment should not simply come through more police,” he said.In December, Ms. Bass became the first Black woman to be elected mayor of Los Angeles.Lauren Justice for The New York TimesThe four serve as only the second elected Black mayors of their respective cities. New York, Los Angeles and Chicago each went more than 30 years between electing their first Black mayor and the second; Houston went nearly two decades.The mayors have worked together through the U.S. Conference of Mayors as well as the African American Mayors Association, which was founded in 2014 and has more than 100 members — giving the four Black mayors an additional pipeline to coordinate with other cities’ leaders.“Because we’re still experiencing firsts in 2023, it’s our obligation that we’re successful,” said Frank Scott Jr., the first elected Black mayor of Little Rock, Ark., who leads the African American Mayors Association. “It’s our obligation that to the best of our ability we’re above reproach, to ensure that we’re not the last and to ensure that it doesn’t take another 20 to 30 years to see another Black mayor.”Of the four, Ms. Bass, a former chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, is perhaps the most left-leaning, characterizing herself as a “pragmatic progressive” who said she saw similarities between Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and herself as a young activist.“That’s who I was — that’s who I still am,” Ms. Bass said. “It’s just that, after a while, you want to begin to make a very concrete difference in people’s lives, as opposed to your positions and educating.” On her first day as mayor, Ms. Bass won praise for declaring a state of emergency on homelessness that gives the city expanded powers to speed up the construction of affordable housing. She also supports legislation by the Los Angeles City Council, known as “just cause” eviction protections, that bars landlords from evicting renters in most cases.A similar law in New York has stalled in the State Legislature, though supporters are hoping to pass it this year and have called on Mr. Adams to do more to help them.All the cities share a homeless crisis, as well as potential solutions. Houston has become a national model during Mr. Turner’s tenure for a “housing first” program that moved 25,000 homeless people directly into apartments and houses over the last decade.Now New York City is starting a pilot program based on Houston’s approach that will move 80 homeless people into permanent supportive housing without having to go through the shelter system.Mr. Turner, a lawyer who became mayor in 2016, said he called Mr. Adams after he won a close primary in New York in 2021 to offer his support. He defended Mr. Adams’s plan to involuntarily remove severely mentally ill people from the streets — a policy that has received pushback in New York.“I applaud him on that,” Mr. Turner said. “Is it controversial or some people will find controversy in it? Yes. But what is the alternative? To keep them where they are?”Mr. Turner, who is in his final year in office because of term limits, said he set out with a goal of making Houston more equitable. “I didn’t want to be the mayor of two cities in one,” he said.“I recognized the fact that there are many neighborhoods that have been overlooked and ignored for decades,” he later added. “I grew up in one of those communities and I still live in that same community.”Mr. Turner has claimed success for a “housing first” program that moved 25,000 homeless people directly into apartments and houses over the last decade in Houston.Go Nakamura for The New York TimesAnxiety among voters about the future of their cities could make it difficult for the mayors to succeed. Ms. Lightfoot, who is seeking a second term, faces eight opponents when Chicago holds its mayoral election on Feb. 28, and her own campaign shows her polling at 25 percent — well below the 50 percent she would need to avoid a runoff.Mr. Adams, a former police officer who was elected on the strength of a public safety message, has seen his support fall to 37 percent as he enters his second year in office, according to a Quinnipiac University poll.Concerns about crime are affecting both mayors. Chicago had nearly 700 murders last year, a major increase from about 500 murders in 2019 before the pandemic. In New York City, there were 438 murders last year, compared with 319 in 2019.In March, Mr. Adams met with Ms. Lightfoot while visiting Chicago for a fund-raiser at the home of Desirée Rogers, the former White House social secretary for President Barack Obama. At a joint news conference with Ms. Lightfoot, Mr. Adams reiterated his position that the communities most affected by policing abuses also tend to need the most protection.“All of these cities are dealing with the same crises, but there’s something else — the victims are Black and brown,” Mr. Adams said.Of the four mayors, Mr. Adams, in particular, has sought to align his colleagues behind an “urban agenda,” and to call in unison for federal help with the migrant crisis.Mr. Adams has also argued that the mayors’ messaging should be a model for Democratic Party leadership to follow, rather than what he called the “woke” left wing that he has quarreled with in New York.“The Democratic message was never to defund police,” he said, adding: “We’re just seeing the real Democratic message emerge from this group of mayors.” More

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      After Election Problems in Houston, Republicans Seek to Overturn Results

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      A growing number of contests to elections in Texas’ Harris County are a broad attempt to cast doubt on an Election Day that officials concede had problems.HOUSTON — Jon Rosenthal has seen some close races, but his re-election to the Texas State House in November, in a Houston district redrawn to be a virtual lock for Democrats, was not one of them. Mr. Rosenthal won by 15 points.So it came as a surprise when his Republican challenger in the race contested the results, petitioning the State Legislature to order a new election.Another surprise came late Thursday when the Republican candidate for the top executive position in Harris County, which includes Houston, announced that she, too, would contest her much narrower loss, by about 18,000 votes, to the progressive Democrat who is the county’s incumbent chief executive, Lina Hidalgo. By Friday, more than a dozen losing Republican candidates had filed suits to contest the results of their races.Election Day in Harris County, Texas’ largest county, saw a range of problems at polling places, including some that opened late and others that ran out of paper for printing voted ballots. A court ordered the polls to stay open an extra hour to compensate; then the Texas Supreme Court stepped in and halted the extra voting.Republicans, who have been watching closely for election issues in races around the country, seized on the difficulties in Harris County, which is becoming a Democratic stronghold. Candidates called into question the reliability of the results in a bitter and expensive campaign that failed to dislodge Ms. Hidalgo and a slate of Democratic judges.“It is inexcusable that after two months, the public is no further along in knowing if, and to what extent, votes were suppressed,” said Alexandra del Moral Mealer in explaining her decision to contest her loss to Ms. Hidalgo, adding that her challenge was “fundamentally about protecting the right to vote in free and fair elections.”Candidates called into question the reliability of the results in a bitter campaign that ended with Republicans failing to oust Lina Hidalgo and a slate of Democratic judges. Annie Mulligan for The New York TimesElection contests are not uncommon in Texas, often involving down-ballot races in small counties where the margins are often notably slim. But the challenges in Harris County appeared to be uniquely broad in their attempt to cast doubt on much of the voting process in an election that involved 1.1 million votes. They followed calls from state leaders, including Gov. Greg Abbott, for an investigation into the county’s handling of the election. The local district attorney opened an inquiry in November.The election contests in Harris County have at times resembled the one mounted in Arizona by the Republican candidate for governor, Kari Lake, who has sought to overturn her loss by claiming that election officials in one major county deliberately disenfranchised her voters. A judge dismissed her claims last month for lack of evidence.But the latest contests in Texas have little precedent, said the Harris County attorney, Christian Menefee, a Democrat. “To my knowledge, this is the first election contest filed in Harris County that is wholly focused on these kinds of process failures,” Mr. Menefee said in an interview.The sprawling Texas county has shifted more decisively in the direction of Democrats in the last few election cycles, following in the direction of other major Texas population centers.For a variety of reasons, it has struggled to conduct elections smoothly, drawing repeated scrutiny from Republican lawmakers in the State Capitol. The county’s size has been a challenge, covering an area nearly the size of Delaware with 2.5 million registered voters and more than 700 polling places. It has struggled with newly mandated voting systems and has not had steady leadership at its elections office, with three different administrators since 2020.An audit of the 2020 election, conducted by the secretary of state, highlighted a range of issues, including instances where Harris County did not handle its electronic records properly, though there was no evidence of widespread fraud.Several steps that the county took during the coronavirus pandemic to make it easier to vote in Houston — such as limited 24-hour voting and drive-through polling places — also drew criticism from Republicans, who argued that the changes had made the election less secure. The Republican-dominated State Legislature, in its last session, took steps to curtail many of the measures.Voters waited in line at Damascus Missionary Baptist Church on Election Day in Houston in November.Annie Mulligan for The New York TimesOn Election Day in November, the county experienced problems at a number of polling places, including several that were significantly delayed in opening and others that reported running out of paper ballots.A judge ordered polling places in the county to remain open for an extra hour after the Texas Organizing Project, a nonprofit, filed suit over the issues, claiming that voters were being prevented from casting ballots. The Texas Supreme Court stepped in and stayed the ruling in response to a challenge from the Republican attorney general, Ken Paxton. The court eventually allowed about 2,000 provisional ballots that were cast during the extra voting time to be added to the official count.The county elections administrator, Clifford Tatum, has defended the election process and said the issues that came up reflected small problems in an otherwise well-run election. “Overall, Election Day was a success,” a postelection report from Mr. Tatum’s office concluded.But the report, released last week, also found that the county’s voting system was in “an immediate need of upgrades or replacements” to correct software issues, simplify voting day setup and create a system for the elections administrator to know in the moment whether problems reported at polling places had been resolved.The Harris County Republican Party has focused on a broad range of issues that arose on Election Day, including not only sites that ran out of paper ballots but also others where poll workers incorrectly fed paper ballots into the voting machines.In its report, the election administrator’s office said that officials at 68 voting centers reported running out of the initial allotment of paper on Election Day, and that only 61 of them said they had received deliveries of more paper.But it remained unclear how many voters were turned away because of the paper shortages, in part because, according to the report, some of the election judges “declined to speak after reportedly being advised not to do so by the Harris County Republican Party.”A spokeswoman for the county Republican Party, Genevieve Carter, denied any such instructions. “We encouraged them to provide their firsthand account of any issues that occurred,” she said. “Our goal is to get to the bottom of what went wrong during this election.”The party’s lawyers and leaders have not claimed that they can prove their candidates should have won. Instead, they have argued that the scope of the problems on Election Day were so great — including, they claimed, allowing some voters to cast ballots who were no longer eligible to do so in the county — that the true results in the election cannot be known; they are demanding that new elections be held. (More than two-thirds of the ballots were cast either during early voting or by mail, not on Election Day.)“We have a systematic cancer that has invaded our election process,” said the chair of the county Republican Party, Cindy Siegel.Democrats have not raised public challenges, but have privately complained that the repeated issues in the election process in Houston were not being adequately addressed, giving Republicans fuel for their efforts to pass new restrictive laws and, now, election contests.Jon Rosenthal said he believed the challenge to his election was frivolous, and that allowing it to go forward in the State House could cause future headaches for lawmakers. Kevin Dietsch/Getty ImagesOnly the candidates themselves can initiate the contests, and so far at least 14 have done so, including Ms. Mealer, a first-time candidate who received millions in campaign contributions from top Houston-area donors; Mr. Rosenthal’s challenger, Michael May; a candidate for county district clerk; and nine Republican judicial candidates.One of the earliest challenges came from a judicial candidate, Erin Lunceford, who lost by 2,743 votes, and filed suit late last year. Ms. Lunceford’s suit includes 19 separate claims of issues with the way votes were handled or counted during the November election and asks the court to void the judicial election and “declare that the true outcome of the election cannot be ascertained.” Ms. Lunceford is represented by Andy Taylor, an election lawyer for the county Republican Party.Ryan MacLeod, a lawyer for the Democrat who won the race, Tamika Craft, described the suit in court papers as a “stunt to make headlines” after an election was lost, and said that “no allegations are supported by facts” and that no evidence had been provided.In the latest challenge on Thursday to the outcome of the race for Harris County judge — effectively the county’s chief executive — Ms. Mealer’s lawyers focused primarily on the paper ballot issues, arguing that they had been concentrated in high-turnout Republican areas and that county officials had “suppressed the voting rights” of residents in those places.Ms. Hidalgo’s office referred questions to the county attorney, Mr. Menefee, who described the challenges as “frivolous attempts to overturn the votes of more than a million residents.”Unlike the other challenges, Mr. May’s contest to his loss against Mr. Rosenthal does not go before a judge, because it involved a State House race. Instead, under Texas law, it will be considered by state legislators, who reconvene this month. The House could decide that the challenge is frivolous and reject it quickly, or choose to investigate the allegations by gathering testimony and evidence before deciding whether the result should be voided and a new election held.Mr. May, in his petition, cited the paper ballot issues and argued that eligible voters were turned away and unable to cast ballots. He has not provided evidence and did not respond to a request for comment.Mr. Rosenthal said he believed the challenge was frivolous and that allowing it to go forward could cause future headaches for lawmakers.“If there is life given to this, and there is no consequence for bringing something this frivolous, you’re setting up for election challenges across the state,” he said. “You could have dozens of challenges per cycle.” More