Early voting for the Nov. 8 general election ends Friday, with voters making their choices in a number of state and local races.

The election includes candidates for many state offices, including governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, along with other statewide, judicial and legislative races.

Katy-area voters in Fort Bend and Harris County will vote for a county judge, and in Harris and Waller County they will vote for a Pct. 4 commissioner.

Katy ISD voters will decide whether to ratify the district’s tax rate of $1.3517 per $100 property evaluation. District officials said money from that tax rate, if approved, will go towards teacher and staff salaries. Additional money will also go for hiring more Katy ISD police officers.

Royal ISD voters will be selecting members to that district’s board of trustees.

Elizabeth Boggs is branch manager of the Katy library, 5414 Franz Road, which is the only early voting location in the Katy city limits. In an interview Monday, Boggs described the early voter turnout as heavy.

Election workers had a curbside voting issue on Friday. A Katy voter, Rhonda Aldrich, went to the library to vote. In curbside voting, election workers bring a voting machine out to a voter because the voter cannot move, or can only move with difficulty. However, the voting machine had run out of power.

Aldrich said she was told the machine had to be on the charger for three hours to work, but it had been used earlier in the day with other curbside voters. She said she was asked to come back later to curbside vote. But, to complicate things, Aldrich said other curbside voters were waiting behind her.

An election worker at the library, who the Katy Times agreed not to identify, said Friday that this was the first time she had seen such a glitch in her decades of working elections.

A Harris County elections administration office spokesperson said Friday that her office had no way of knowing how many other polling stations around Harris County had the same problems with machines losing power in this fashion. Nor did she have any information about whether polling stations could have more than one such machine.

There was no immediate word on what happened with those voters behind Aldrich on Friday. The election worker at the library said those voters could cast their ballots at other polling locations or they could have returned to the library.

In Aldrich’s case, there was a happy ending. In an interview Tuesday, she said she happened to be driving by the library Sunday and early voting was taking place. The glitch had been fixed and she cast her ballot.

“Everything worked out beautifully for me, and I hope it does for everybody else,” Aldrich said.