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August, 2012:

Friday random ten: To the moon

In honor of Neil Armstrong, for whom Texas Liberal has a nice roundup of obituaries, here are ten songs about the moon:

1. Fly Me To The Moon – Trinity University Jazz Band
2. Yellow Moon – Neville Brothers
3. Blue Moon Revisited – Cowboy Junkies
4. How High The Moon – The Manhattan Transfer
5. Bad Moon Rising – Thea Gilmore
6. Walking On The Moon – The Police
7. There’s A Moon In The Sky (Called The Moon) – The B-52’s
8. Rising Of The Moon – Maggie Drennon
9. Man On The Moon – Ferraby Lionheart
10. The Man In The Moon – Andy M. Stewart

I have many more moon songs – it’s quite a popular theme for musicians – but I thought these were a fair representation. What are your moon songs?

Challenging the interim maps

One of the questions that came out of Tuesday’s redistricting preclearance ruling was whether or not it would affect the interim maps for this year. Some of the intervenors have asked the San Antonio judges about that.

Several key minority and Democratic groups took a first step Wednesday toward challenging Texas’ interim redistricting maps, put in place for the 2012 election, by filing a request for a preliminary hearing in federal court.

The motion came a day after a federal judge panel in Washington, D.C., struck down redistricting maps passed by the Texas Legislature, citing evidence that the maps were crafted with a discriminatory intent and would illegally reduce the ability of minority communities to select their representation.

While those maps never took effect, the interim maps that were drawn by a panel of three federal judges in San Antonio for the 2012 election had to be based on the Legislature’s now-rejected maps.

“Over 90 percent of the map is the legislative map, that has been found to be illegal,” said Luis Vera, an attorney with the League of United Latin American Citizens. “You can’t have an election with an illegal map.”

He added: “That’s our objective — to get lines drawn that are legal, that are constitutional and that comply with the D.C. order.”

The filing asks the panel of three federal judges that drew the interim maps to convene for a status conference at the earliest practicable date.

The three-judge panel in San Antonio has set a status conference for this afternoon, but it doesn’t sound like they’re inclined to take action. I suppose it’s theoretically possible to do something for a couple of the districts, and Lord knows it’s galling to have to hold even one election under a map that was based on that illegal, discriminatory mess that the Lege produced, but it sure seems like a high hurdle to overcome. We’ll what the judges say, but I’m not expecting anything.

UPDATE: According to the Chron, the judges have ruled that the interim maps will remain in place for November.

Don’t forget Joaquin

You can’t have a story about one twin and not have one about the other, am I right?

Joaquin Castro

When his minute-older brother gives the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention, Joaquín Castro will be nearby, as he always is and has been for big moments in their 37 years as identical twins.

On Sept. 4, Castro is likely to share the spotlight if plans proceed to have him introduce his brother, San Antonio Mayor Julián Castro, for the prime-time speech that follows Michelle Obama’s remarks.

“We’ve been very supportive of each other, best friends, since we were young. We were competitive growing up, but as you get older, you mature and mellow a bit,” said Castro, the Democratic candidate for U.S. House District 20 and a five-term Texas House member representing Northwest San Antonio.

[…]

If elected, Castro would fill the seat of retiring U.S. Rep. Charles Gonzalez, D-San Antonio, who replaced his father, the late Henry B. Gonzalez, in the solidly Democratic district.

“I realize I have big shoes to fill,” Castro said. “We’ve tried to take nothing for granted. That’s why we’re still running a full-fledged campaign,” he said.

If he makes it to Congress, Castro could be one of the best-known freshmen and one of its youngest members.

“He’s already out of the crowd,” said Austin political consultant Bill Miller. “He could go far and he could go fast,” Miller said.

“If his brother enjoys greater success than he already has, that will only help Joaquín. It’s like the roads get paved ahead of you,” Miller said.

The consultant said the identical-twin novelty factor is important nationally.

“It’s a unique circumstance where you have two very talented political figures who are identical twins. Seriously,” Miller said. “Because of that, it offers a fun opportunity which they can make good use of.”

And occasionally some not so good use, though I rather doubt that will ever happen again. Here’s the interview I did with Joaquin Castro. I expect he’ll make a fine Congressman. I also expect that he will have his sights set on something higher down the line. With Julian Castro, you have to figure that 2018 is a target year for something statewide, since he will be term-limited out as Mayor of San Antonio in 2017. With Joaquin Castro, it will be more a matter of the right opportunity at the right time. But let’s get him to Congress first and worry about all that later.

Margins tax back before Supreme Court

Yet another challenge to that unloved tax.

The Texas Supreme Court [Friday] accepted a case that will decide whether the state improperly administers its business tax.

Nestle USA argues that the tax violates the Texas Constitution’s requirement that taxes be levied in an “equal and uniform” manner, as well as the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection and due process protections.

The court dismissed a similar claim earlier this year, ruling that Nestle lacked standing because it had not yet paid its taxes. Nestle recently renewed its challenge after paying its taxes under protest.

With the legislative session set to begin in January, the Supreme Court set an accelerated schedule for the case, with oral arguments to be heard Sept. 18 – a day previously set aside for a court conference, or private meeting with the nine justices.

Last year the court upheld the margins tax as constitutional in a separate case filed by Allcat Claims Service LP. Assuming this is on the same mandated 120-day schedule as that case was, we ought to have a ruling by the opening weeks of the 2013 legislative session. That will be right around the same time as we get an initial decision in the school finance lawsuits, though those will still have to be appealed to the Supreme Court afterward. My head hurts already thinking about what next year is going to be like.

Focusing on reading

This sounds promising.

When HISD Superintendent Terry Grier took charge three years ago, he quickly latched onto a troubling statistic: roughly 70,000 of the district’s students were not reading at grade level.

Students who should have learned reading basics by third grade continue to enter middle and high school stumbling over words and struggling with comprehension.

As Houston Independent School District students return to class Monday, some of them – the weakest readers in sixth and ninth grades – will prepare for a crash course to catch them up. The students will take a newly designed reading class daily or every other day in addition to their regular language arts course.

“These children dropped through the cracks during their experience with us or with other school districts,” Grier said.

HISD’s approach, if it works, could serve as a national model for districts trying to help older students who don’t read well, said Marybeth Flachbart, president of the Neuhaus Education Center, a Houston nonprofit that specializes in reading instruction.

HISD has contracted with Neuhaus to train teachers for the new reading classes – refreshing them on phonics and other fundamentals, plus giving them tips for teaching basic skills to teenagers.

[…]

Grier and the school board began focusing on improving literacy last year, sending elementary school teachers to training at Neuhaus to try to keep future students from entering sixth grade with reading problems. Since January 2011, the district has paid Neuhaus more than $3.6 million – money Grier said is well spent.

I certainly agree with the emphasis on improving reading scores. As the story notes, students from lower income families, and there are many within HISD, tend to start school knowing fewer words than students from more affluent households. That puts them behind from the beginning, and presents increasing challenges every year. I look forward to seeing what effect this program has on the standardized test scores. I’d also like to hear from anyone who’s had experience with this particular program. Leave a comment and let us know what you think of it. Thanks!

Federal court refuses to preclear Texas voter ID bill

Another bad day in court for Texas Republicans.

Still the only voter ID anyone should need

A federal three-judge panel on Thursday blocked the Texas voter ID law passed by the Republican Legislature, saying the new restrictions would place an unfair burden on Latinos, racial minorities and the poor.

The ruling by the federal panel is the second blow to Texas in as many days. Another federal panel threw out a Texas redistricting plan earlier this week, saying the Republican leadership failed to show the maps did not discriminate against minorities.

In blocking the Texas voter ID law, the judges said the state enacted a law that would be “the most stringent in the country.”

“It imposes strict, unforgiving burdens on the poor, and racial minorities in Texas,” the judges said.

You can read the full opinion here. I’m a bit pressed for time today, so I’ll just point out the following excerpts from the opinion that to my mind sum this all up as well as can be done. First, via Meteor Blades, there’s this:

To sum everything up: section 5 prohibits covered states from implementing voting laws that will have a retrogressive effect on racial minorities. See Beer, 425 U.S. at 141. Texas, seeking to implement its voter ID law, bears the burden of proof and must therefore show that SB 14 lacks retrogressive effect. Georgia, 411 U.S. at 538. But as we have found, everything Texas has submitted as affirmative evidence is unpersuasive, invalid, or both. Moreover, uncontested record evidence conclusively shows that the implicit costs of obtaining SB 14-qualifying ID will fall most heavily on the poor and that a disproportionately high percentage of African Americans and Hispanics in Texas live in poverty. We therefore conclude that SB 14 is likely to lead to “retrogression in the position of racial minorities with respect to their effectiveexercise of the electoral franchise.” Beer, 425 U.S. at 141. Given this, and given that Texas must show that SB 14 lacks both discriminatory purpose and effect, we have no need to examine whether the law was enacted with discriminatory purpose. Accordingly, we shall deny Texas’s request for declaratory relief.

In reaching this conclusion, we emphasize the narrowness of this opinion. Specifically,
we have decided nothing more than that, in this particular litigation and on this particular record, Texas has failed to demonstrate that its particular voter ID law lacks retrogressive effect. Nothing in this opinion remotely suggests that section 5 bars all covered jurisdictions from implementing photo ID laws. To the contrary, under our reasoning today, such laws might well be precleared if they ensure (1) that all prospective voters can easily obtain free photo ID, and (2) that any underlying documents required to obtain that ID are truly free of charge.

And there’s this from Rick Hasen:

This is a careful, unanimous opinion from a three-judge court which rejects most of the social science evidence submitted by both sides on whether Texas’s voter id law imposes greater burdens on minority voters. Instead, the court bases its analysis on three basically uncontested facts: (1) Minority voters are at least proportionately as likely as white voters in Texas to lack the documents needed for Texas’s new id law (which the Court calls perhaps the most “stringent” in the nation; (2) the new i.d. law will put high burdens on poor people who lack id (many of whom would have to travel up to 200 or 250 miles at their own expense to get the i.d. as well as pay at least $22 for the documents needed to get the i.d.; and (3) minority voters in Texas are more likely to be poor. Using this simple structure, the court concludes that Texas, which bears the burden of proof in a section 5 case, cannot prove its law won’t make the position of protected minorities worse off. And the court suggests this was a problem of its own making: Texas could have made the i.d. law less onerous (as in Georgia, which the court suggests DOJ was probably right to preclear) and Texas could have done more to produce evidence supporting its side at trial, but it engaged in bad trial tactics.

And finally, BOR notes the critical testimony given by two Democratic elected officials.

Reinforcing this proposition, Texas Representative Trey Martinez Fischer, who represents a district which includes the city of San Antonio and its outskirts, testified that “you will not find a DPS office from downtown San Antonio to the western boundary, which is heavily concentrated with African-Americans, and particularly Hispanics.” Trial Tr. 7/10/2012 (AM) 119:23-25. State Senator Carlos Uresti echoed this concern, testifying that in his district-which is “70 percent Hispanic, about 5 percent African American”-“[t]here are some towns . . . where the nearest DPS office is about a 100 to 125 mile[] one way” trip away. Trial Tr. 7/12/2012 (AM) 7:16-8:1. And far from disputing the long travel times imposed by the dearth of DPS offices, Texas’s counsel told us that “I don’t think that the facts of the geographic distances [between DPS offices] are necessarily contested.” Trial Tr. 7/13/2012 52:4-5.

I’ve said multiple times in this space that there were many things the Republicans who pushed this completely needless law could have done to make it less distasteful, less onerous, and ultimately less discriminatory. They did exactly none of those things – indeed, it was a badge of honor to them that the law was as restrictive as it was – and the court called them out on it. The state will appeal to the Supreme Court for an emergency injunction, and there’s still the matter of Section 5 constitutionality, for which there will be a status conference in the next two weeks, but once again, this is a ringing, resounding rejection of an aggressive attempt by Texas Republicans to tilt the field in their favor, as well as another heck of a job by AG Greg Abbott. There are many statements and reactions out there to this ruling, with this one from MALC, the NAACP, and the Brennan Center being the most comprehensive.

Julian Castro is ready for his closeup

Here’s your primer on the rising star, San Antonio Mayor, and DNC keynoter Julian Castro. I’ll let you take it in in all its hagiographic glory, but I’d like to highlight my favorite part, where the authors manage to find someone who Does Not Like Him Very Much and Thinks He Really Isn’t All That:

Mayor Julian Castro

But as Castro’s national stature grows, so does his pool of critics.

“His record of accomplishment is somewhat light,” said Matt Mackowiak, an Austin-based GOP political consultant.

Mackowiak, who worked for Hutchison, said Castro’s speaking role is primarily about identity politics.

“It’s more about Latinos than it is about Castro,” he said. “It will be the largest thing he has ever done, and it could be the biggest thing he will ever do.”

Castro also runs the risk, Mackowiak said, of giving a red-meat speech to the Democratic base that could alienate moderate Texas voters in a future gubernatorial run – not that Castro has said he’d seek the seat.

The consultant accuses Castro of being an Obama surrogate rather than someone who focuses on some of San Antonio’s pressing issues.

“He seems to be someone who is extraordinarily focused on politics and ambition and not problem-solving,” said Mackowiak.

Castro shrugs off the accusation.

“I’ve spent about 95 percent of my time during these last couple of months on the city budget and Pre-K 4 SA,” he said. “That’s just boilerplate junk from a political party.”

Castro’s calendar supports his statement.

Several months’ worth of entries show he’s focused on city business. It’s business as usual: His days are typically packed with meetings – both private and public. He’s also spent – and is scheduled to continue spending – a lot of time meeting with community leaders about the Pre-K 4 SA initiative, on which he’s staked his mayoral tenure.

Yes, hard as it may be to believe, a professional Republican isn’t terribly impressed with Mayor Julian Castro, and he’s willing to say things that perhaps aren’t exactly aligned with the facts to show his lack of impression. I know, I never would have expected that, either. I’d have thought that a member or two of San Antonio’s City Council, or a disgruntled local activist, or maybe a legislator or Bexar County official or some other elected type who has to do business with the city of San Antonio would be a better source for the “but some people are critics” bit of the story. Maybe such people are in short supply, I don’t know. Anyway, concern trolling aside, it’s a good read, so check it out.

Courting the Ron Paul voters

Good luck with that.

Libertarian presidential candidate and would-be spoiler Gary Johnson smoked out new campaign cash here this week.

But his hopes are just a pipe dream unless he wins over Republican voters loyal to never-say-quit candidate Ron Paul.

“Hundreds” of Republicans have promised Johnson they will switch his way if the Republican National Convention nominates Mitt Romney on Aug. 30, Johnson said Thursday.

“That’s hundreds telling me personally, which means how many more?” Johnson said during a six-day Texas campaign swing.

He predicted a “gigantic influx” of support after Romney is nominated.

[…]

Yet even before any Paul voters switch, his current 8 to 13 percent of the vote in Western states might be enough to tip pivotal Electoral College votes for or against Romney or President Barack Obama.

If Johnson takes away a swing state Romney badly needs — “then let me be the spoiler,” Johnson said.

This story is actually from two weeks ago. I’d forgotten that I’d drafted something, then had my memory jogged after the Ron Paulrelated kerfuffles this week. To put some context on Johnson’s numbers, there were 174,207 votes cast for Ron Paul in this year’s GOP Presidential primary. That would have represented 2.15% of the 8 million plus votes cast in 2008. That’s not very much, and that’s assuming every known Ron Paul supporter in May did in fact vote for Johnson in November. But even that paltry total towers over the past performances of Libertarian Presidential candidates in Texas:

Year Libertarians Pct =============================== 1992 Marrou/Lord 0.32% 1996 Browne/Jorgenson 0.36% 2000 Browne/Olivier 0.36% 2004 Badnarik/Campagna 0.52% 2008 Barr/Root 0.69%

The Secretary of State data don’t go back any farther than that, but thanks to Dave Liep’s Election Atlas, I can bring you the other two results:

Year Libertarians Pct =============================== 1980 Clark/Koch 0.83% 1988 Paul/Marrou 0.56%

I suppose you can look at Bob Barr’s 2008 performance as having doubled the Libertarian total in only eight years, or as finally getting back towards the high-water mark of 1980. Either way, I’ll bet the under on that 2.15% mark.

The UT admissions lawsuit

I haven’t paid much attention to the latest lawsuit over the University of Texas’ admissions standards and practices – as with school finance lawsuits, I’ve lost count of how many there have been in my lifetime – but there are some interesting issues in this one to be decided.

On its surface, the case of Abigail Noel Fisher v. University of Texas revolves around whether the school’s consideration of race in admissions led to the rejection of a white student.

But as the case nears the Supreme Court’s fall docket, it is also stirring a debate about the impact of affirmative action policies on Asian-American students and casting a spotlight on the stereotype of Asian-Americans as “the model minority.”

On one side, Fisher and her supporters, including the 80-20 National Asian American Educational Foundation, argue that the race-conscious admissions policies discriminate against qualified Asian-American students in favor of less-qualified African-American and Latino students.

On the other side, a coalition of more than 100 Asian-American groups has filed briefs backing the UT-Austin policy, saying it benefits Asian-American students who come from disadvantaged backgrounds.

“UT’s process of individualized review advances its compelling interest in achieving the educational benefits of student diversity, increases the likelihood of admission for those who do not have the same social mobility and capital as others, and has the potential to benefit all Asian-American and Pacific Islander applicants,” a brief filed by the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF) states.

[…]

Asian-American supporters of the UT policy point out that the bulk of students admitted under the holistic criteria are Asian-Americans and whites.

In 2011, 60 percent of incoming freshmen admitted based on the holistic criteria rather than the top 10 percent rule were white and 16 percent were Asian-American.

By comparison, 10 percent were Hispanic and 3 percent were African American, according to UT enrollment statistics.

“It seems to me that the system works,” said Madeline Y. Hsu, director of the Center for Asian American Studies at UT-Austin.

The lawsuit stems from the fact that Fisher was not admitted to UT in 2008 and was instead forced to attend LSU. I can’t honestly say that I see such a fate as being genuinely injurious to her, but we’ll have to leave that up to the Supremes. The “holistic” policy mentioned came about as a result of the last lawsuit, and it seems like a reasonable approach to me, one that I daresay is employed by numerous private universities. We’ll see what SCOTUS thinks.

Texas blog roundup for the week of August 27

The Texas Progressive Alliance is ready for the new school year as it brings you this week’s roundup.

(more…)

Interview with Candace Duval

Candace Duval

Texas is unfortunately full of lousy Congressmen. Lamar Smith of CD21 has been on that list for over 20 years. Candace Duval is running to take him off it. Duval is an entrepreneur and realtor who once worked on the staff of Comptroller Bob Bullock. She now resides in Austin. Here’s what we talked about:

Candace Duval MP3

I now have the Yahoo! audio player enabled as a plugin for my blog (thanks, Greg Wythe!) and it works a little differently. Basically, as long as this is the top audio file on my index page, you ought to see a “Play” control button next to the link above. If not, or later this week when I have another interview published, simply clicking the link ought to play the audio via the player. You can also right-click to save the file to your PC.

You can still find a list of all interviews I did for this primary cycle, plus other related information, on my 2012 Harris County Primary Elections page and my 2012 Texas Primary Elections page, which I now need to update to include fall candidate information. You can also follow this blog by liking its Facebook page.

Federal court denies preclearance on all redistricting maps

The long-awaited ruling in the preclearance lawsuit by the DC Court has been handed down, and it’s a clean sweep for those who claimed that the new maps violated the law.

Texas lawmakers didn’t comply with the Voting Rights Act when they drew new maps for congressional, state Senate and state House districts, a federal court in Washington, D.C., ruled Tuesday.

“Texas … seeks from this court a declaratory judgement that its redistricting plans will neither have ‘the purpose nor will have the effect of denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race or color, or [language minority group]”, the judges wrote. “We conclude that Texas has failed to show that any of the redistricting plans merits preclearance.”

[…]

The court wasn’t ruling on interim maps drawn by federal judges — the maps in use for the current election — but on those drawn by state lawmakers last year. Lawyers are still looking through the opinions for anything that might disrupt the current elections.

Nina Perales, litigation director for MALDEF — the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund — said there might not be time to draw new maps before the November elections even if they’re warranted. One question is whether problems exposed in the plans drawn by legislators “infected” the plans drawn by the federal judges in San Antonio. “I don’t think it’s feasible to change the lines for November,” she said. Perales called the federal court ruling “the final nail in the coffin” for the plans drawn by state lawmakers, especially since the San Antonio judges outlined several other legal problems with those same maps earlier this year.

The outcome of Abbott’s appeal and the analyses being done by the various parties in the redistricting legislation will determine which lines, if any, get redrawn before the 2014 elections.

Some have made up their minds. “The question of whether we’ll go back to the district court and ask for additional relief, the answer is yes,” said Jose Garza, attorney for the Mexican American Legislative Caucus. “Will we ask if this will be implemented for the November elections? We’re still analyzing that.”

[…]

“We conclude that Texas has not met its burden to show that the U.S. Congressional and State House Plans will not have a retrogressive effect, and that the U.S. Congressional and State Senate Plans were not enacted with discriminatory purpose,” the judges said in their opinion. “Accordingly, we deny Texas declaratory relief. Texas has failed to carry its burden that Plans C185, S148, and H283 do not have the purpose or effect of denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race, color, or membership in a language minority group under section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.”

You can read the full opinion here, and I encourage you to do so, at least through the conclusion on page 72. There’s a lot of other analysis out there, and I’ll link to it later in this post, but these are the highlights as I see them:

– The opinion was unanimous on all points except for whether the original CD25 (the districts that were in place for elections through 2010 are referred to as “benchmark” districts, while the ones in the state redistricting plans are “enacted”) qualified as a coalition district, i.e., one in which minorities had the ability to elect a candidate of their choice, and on whether the overall Congressional map was retrogressive. The San Antonio court, by contrast, ruled 2-1 in the suit that led to the creation of the interim districts that were later tossed out.

– The court found evidence of discriminatory intent in the Congressional and Senate maps. The latter is significant because they did not find that SD10, the only district at issue in that map, met the criteria for being a coalition district. Further, note that the Justice Department did not specifically contest the Senate map – the other intervenors did – meaning that in this case the state got a harsher result than the would have by going to the Justice Department for preclearance instead of filing the lawsuit with the DC Court as they chose to do.

– The court did not specifically rule on the issue of discriminatory intent in the House map because they ruled it to be retrogressive. However, they did make the following remarkable comment about the House map and how it was drawn:

First, the process for drawing the House Plan showed little attention to, training on, or concern for the VRA. See, e.g., Trial Tr. 61:1-66:23, Jan. 20, 2012 PM. And despite the dramatic population growth in the State’s Hispanic population that was concentrated primarily in three geographic areas, Texas failed to create any new minority ability districts among 150 relatively small House districts.

These concerns are exacerbated by the evidence we received about the process that led to enacted HD 117. As detailed above, the mapdrawers modified HD 117 so that it would elect the Anglo-preferred candidate yet would look like a Hispanic ability district on paper. They accomplished this by switching high-turnout for low-turnout Hispanic voters, hoping to keep the SSVR level just high enough to pass muster under the VRA while changing the district into one that performed for Anglo voters. This testimony is concerning because it shows a deliberate, race-conscious method to manipulate not simply the Democratic vote but, more specifically, the Hispanic vote.

Finally, the incredible testimony of the lead House mapdrawer reinforces evidence suggesting mapdrawers cracked VTDs along racial lines to dilute minority voting power. Texas made Interiano’s testimony the cornerstone of its case on purpose in the House Plan. Trial Tr. 45:22-25, Jan. 17, 2012 AM (“[O]ur [discriminatory purpose] case rests largely on the credibility of one person. His name is Gerardo Interiano.”). Interiano spent close to a thousand hours — the equivalent of six months of full-time work — training on the computer program Texas used for redistricting, id. at 131:3-5, yet testified that he did not know about the program’s help function, id. at 85:18-25, Jan. 25, 2012 PM, or of its capability to display racial data at the census block level, id. at 93:13-19, Jan. 17, 2012 PM. As unequivocally demonstrated at trial, this information was readily apparent to even a casual user, let alone one as experienced as Interiano. See id. at 93:1-15; id. at 88:5-89:17, Jan. 25, 2012 PM. The implausibility of Interiano’s professed ignorance of these functions suggests that Texas had something to hide in the way it used racial data to draw district lines. The data about which Interiano claimed ignorance could have allowed him to split voting precincts along racial (but not political) lines in precisely the manner the United States and the Intervenors allege occurred.

This and other record evidence may support a finding of discriminatory purpose in enacting the State House Plan. Although we need not reach this issue, at minimum, the full record strongly suggests that the retrogressive effect we have found may not have been accidental.

Ouch. That starts on page 70, if you’re curious. The reason why the rulings on discriminatory intent are important is explained by Rick Hasen:

The evidence of discriminatory intent is important not just for the likelihood that the Supreme Court will affirm this decision even if it disagrees on some aspects of the retrogression standard. It also serves as some evidence which could be used to argue, in the Shelby County case or elsewhere, that covered jurisdictions still discriminate on the basis of race in making voting-related decisions. (If this was not done to Anglo Democrats, the evidence is even stronger than if it could be explained on the basis of pure partisanship.) The Court was careful to note that Texas did not challenge the constitutionality of section 5 in this case. And the Court rejected a number of Texas’s arguments that it should read section 5 narrowly to avoid a constitutional question. Whether the Supreme Court will agree with the district court on this point is anyone’s guess. Indeed, this case could be mooted if the Supreme Court strikes down Section 5 (in the Shelby County case or another) before the Court decides this case on the merits.

No question that the Republicans treated Sen. Wendy Davis shabbily, but they really stuck it to the three African-American members of Congress. Read the excerpt Hasen highlights to see what I mean. Indeed, read the whole opinion, it’s worth your time. The justices really slap around the state’s main expert, Professor John Alford, and they note repeatedly that the state often simply refused to respond to various arguments made by the intervenors and the Justice Department. It’s quite the bravura performance.

So will any of this affect the 2012 election? Michael Li, who has some brief analysis of the opinion, suggests that it could be done.

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott has taken the position that the opinion will not affect the November election, which he says will proceed on the interim maps put into place back in February.

On the other hand, it is certainly possible to see a move to adjust those interim maps in the San Antonio court. For example, CD-23 arguably could be restored to its full benchmark configuration fairly easily. Similar arguments might also be made with respect to HD 117 and 149, which are wholly contained in their respective counties (to the extent redistricting plaintiffs think that not enough changes were made to those districts in the interim maps).

Other changes would seem harder. But with control of Congress potentially on the line, lots of people are going to be looking at the opinion closely over the next few days.

Changes for this year – at least conceptually – are not out of the question. In 1996, for example, the three-judge panel ordered jungle primaries in a number of congressional districts which were held on the date of the November election, with a runoff a month later.

Some of the intervenors are leaning in that direction, as you saw in the Trib story. AG Abbott will appeal to the Supreme Court, which may or may not have an effect on that. He’s also seeking to gut the Voting Rights Act in the process, as Hasen alluded to above. On a side note, we may also get a ruling in the Voter ID preclearance case, since it would need to be precleared by August 31 to be able to be implemented this year.

So that’s where we stand for now. The Trib story has a bunch of reactions, as does Texas Redistricting. Hair Balls, BOR, Stace, PDiddie, DBN, and Socratic Gadfly have more.

UPDATE: Here’s more from SCOTUS Blog, which reminds me that the opinion also repeatedly hammered on Texas’ long history of losing redistricting lawsuits. Texas Redistricting has a roundup of other links.

Dewhurst says he’s running for re-election in 2014

Peggy Fikac was first to report that David Dewhurst is not planning to fade away just yet.

Sad Dewhurst is sad

The last time we asked Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst what he plans to do in 2014, it was soon after he lost the U.S. Senate nomination to Ted Cruz. He asked if reporters minded giving him a couple of days.

It looks like he has thought about it long enough.

Someone shared with me an invitation to a “reception to re-elect Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst” that went out on letterhead that says, “David Dewhurst Lt. Governor 2014.”

The reception is scheduled for Sept. 19 at the Headliners Club.

Its top fund-raising requests are for people to give or raise $50,000 or $25,000 by Dec. 8.

They can also choose to give $10,000, $5,000, $2,500 or the always-popular “other.”

You can see the invitation at that link. The Trib confirms what this means.

Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, after getting a standing ovation by the Texas Republican delegation in Florida, announced Tuesday that he plans to run for re-election.

“I fully expect to be running for re-election in March of 2014,” Dewhurst said. “As long as the people of Texas want me to continue serving to help move this state forward, then I’m honored.”

He wouldn’t be alone. Three statewide elected Republicans — Comptroller Susan Combs, Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson and Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples — have all expressed some interest in running for lieutenant governor. On the evening of the runoff elections last month, Patterson said he will run in 2014 whether Dewhurst is on the ticket or not.

Staples is also now saying that he’s in for Lite Guv; we’ll see about Combs. Dewhurst could of course just be doing this as a show of bravado to help keep the jackals at bay, but as with Rick Perry I think it’s best to assume he means it until proven otherwise. Since we’ve been discussing fantasy candidates for Governor, let me say here that my fantasy candidate for Lite Guv is State Sen. Wendy Davis. Ideally, she’ll win re-election this fall, then win the draw to not have to run for re-election again till 2016, thus allowing her to make a run for something else in 2014 without having to give up her seat. Regardless, she’s my first choice to go against Dewhurst or anyone else in 2014. We’ll see who that winds up being. BOR has more.

On comparing school districts

Easier said than done.

The way the state distributes money to school districts, and how much, will be center stage when a trial begins this fall involving more than half of the state’s districts serving the majority of its students, along with Texas charter schools and a group of parents and business leaders asking for a more efficient system. Because of the complexity of school finance, it’s tempting to turn to per-student spending to understand how well — or how poorly — a district is spending its money. But the circumstances of the two districts above illustrate the potential perils of that approach.

“A straight-up comparison of the dollars spent per student in District A and dollars spent per student in District B can be grossly misleading,” said Lori Taylor, a government professor and education researcher at Texas A&M University who has helped the state analyze school district efficiency. Such a comparison, she said, could give people the idea that their district is “wasting their money when it is actually enormously frugal but facing enormous challenges.”

After the state changed the way it finances schools in 2006, most Texas districts do not receive money based on what it costs to educate a student there. Instead, the state bases what districts receive largely on how much they raised through property taxes that year. Intended to help districts transition after the Legislature reduced property taxes, the “target revenue” system has become permanent, though schools are also financed based on a formula that takes into account factors like regional cost-of-living expenses and a district’s number of bilingual, low-income and special-education students. But because of the same political pressures that have already landed school finance in the courts several times since the 1970s — even before target revenue came around — the formula is based on estimates that in many cases have not been updated in almost three decades.

[…]

Last year, the state comptroller’s office released a study analyzing districts’ spending compared with their academic performance, attempting to control for factors like demographics, size and regional costs. Although some education finance experts have questioned whether it adequately did that, it does rank Canyon as more efficient than Sheldon — but neither of them are the outliers they would be based on their per-student spending.

Cypress-Fairbanks, a district in the Houston suburbs that the study regarded as one of the state’s most efficient, achieved that distinction not by design but because of a confluence of circumstances, said Stuart Snow, the district’s associate superintendent of business and financial services.

The district — the third-largest in the state with nearly 104,000 — like Canyon, is among those that receive the least in target revenue financing. That happened because of various factors, said Snow, including the rapid influx of students which he said outpaced property tax values when target revenue levels were set in 2006.

Since then, the district has shaved almost $107 million from its budget to make ends meet, largely through increasing class sizes because it could not hire the staff to keep up with the yearly increase in students. It also saved about $20 million in last year’s budget by reducing the district’s share of employees’ health benefit premiums by about 25 percent.

“It’s been hard, and it’s been a big sacrifice,” Snow said. “It’s hard to measure the impact of that on student learning. Our student performance hasn’t suffered yet, but when you get larger classrooms, at some point in time you expect to see student performance to decline.”

Cy-Fair always comes up in these discussions. It’s one of those places that people have moved to, and still move to, for the schools. That requires them to have schools worth moving for, of course, and the state has been doing its best in recent years to make that a lot harder for them. I keep thinking that sooner or later, the parents will demand better from the Lege. It can’t happen soon enough, that’s for sure. Anyway, file this as another story about the complexities of school finance and the difficulty of finding a solution that works for all, or even most, of the thousands of school districts in Texas.

Houston Tomorrow versus Metro

David Crossley:

On November 6, you will be asked to vote on whether to stop expansion of light rail transit service in Houston.

If you think that’s a terrible idea, you must vote No.

If you do, you will be going up against some very powerful people and institutions.

But that’s what voters do, isn’t it? Be the deciders?

You’d be saying you’re opposed to elected officials and developers replacing 1,200 square miles of Houston farms and wilderness with sprawl.

But you’d be for a thriving, livable Houston region that people from around the world would want to live in to work, learn, and play in a healthy, happy, prosperous environment.

In the end, we citizens will decide this.

No Means More Transit. Vote No For More Transit.

They’re not alone in opposing the referendum.

Houston Tomorrow, along with the Citizens Transportation Coalition and Better Houston are starting a social media-driven campaign to get people to vote No to the METRO referendum. A no vote, they say, would allow METRO to keep all of its sales tax money and use it however they want.

METRO Chairman Gilbert Garcia says it’s true that right now there’s no money for light rail. But he says the referendum will allow METRO to pay its current debt, which would allow them to borrow money for an additional light rail line.

“If we did not have this referendum and it did not pass, it would just be even longer before we could take on another rail project because we would need to do these two items — increase the ridership and pay down the debt to have greater capacity.”

I agree with what Chairman Garcia says. I’m going to vote for Metro’s referendum.

I do agree that this isn’t the best possible deal Metro could have gotten. Garcia’s original proposal to freeze the GMP payments at 2014 levels would have been better, but it got no support on the Board. The Houston Tomorrow story about the Board’s vote for the revised plan shows what Metro did in fact get.

The Metro Board on Aug. 3 had approved a rough draft for a referendum asking voters directly to approve allowing Metro to keep all of its sale tax revenue.

Board member Christof Spieler said he voted against the referendum language because it does not give enough money to transit, but admitted “this is probably the best deal we can get in the political climate of 2012.”

Not the best possible deal, but the best deal possible. The question you have to ask is whether this deal is better than the alternative of voting it down and thus ending the GMP. If it were to actually happen that the GMP would expire and Metro would get the full penny of sales tax, then clearly the answer is No. But what are the odds that will be the case? Chairman Garcia said after the original referendum that merely re-apportioned the GMP among member entities was proposed that the Board would create a new GMP, thus ensuring that the member entities would continue to get those funds in some form. From the KUHF story:

Houston Mayor Annise Parker, who appoints five of METRO’s nine board members, says even if people vote against the referendum, METRO will likely continue sharing its sales tax revenue in a less formal way.

“If the referendum fails, the METRO board can decide anything they want to do with that money and I would fully expect them to commit, going forward, to continuing the general mobility payments in some form. It is naive and, frankly, foolish to simply assume that if it were voted down suddenly 100 percent of that money is spent exclusively on building rail in Houston.”

If that happens, David Crossley wonders why METRO is holding the referendum in the first place.

“They could just say to the voters here’s mud in your eye, just forget it, we don’t agree with your vote and we’re going to do what we want. But if the voters firmly say no, it’s a little hard for me to see how METRO says never mind that vote.”

Metro is required to have the vote, as Crossley knows. If the GMP as is ends, then the money goes to Metro, and the Board is presumably free to do with it as it sees fit. All of the member entities will be interested in spending some of that money on road-related projects. Maybe it’ll be ad hoc, maybe it’ll be some designated portion of the budget, who knows? Maybe that would turn out to be better for transit than Metro eventually getting about 82% of the sales tax revenue, as would be the case under the revised GMP, but it’s far from guaranteed. The bird in hand here is worth quite a bit. The contention that if the voters reject this deal it means they must have wanted more money to go to Metro is a bit of a stretch, too. All we can say for sure it that they didn’t like this particular deal. Maybe they would have preferred to keep the GMP exactly as it is now. Maybe enough people will have voted No because they don’t like Metro and didn’t pay any attention to the details. I wish I felt confident that the public would vote to give Metro more money, but as I said before, I don’t. Given that, I think this is a decent deal.

OK, but what about the restriction that Metro can only use the new funds for non-rail projects? For one thing, that’s only applicable to the extra funds Metro would be getting from revenue growth above what it would gotten under the current setup. Every other dollar Metro gets in it would still be free to use as it saw fit. Having more money available from one source to spend on bus service may well enable it to spend a bit less from the other, which could then be used on rail. But even if it doesn’t do that, the fact remains that Metro does need to spend more on bus service. It has taken money from bus service to spend on rail. Reversing that would allow Metro to fulfill the promise of improved bus service that was also in the 2003 referendum while taking a key talking point away from its critics. Chairman Garcia notes that by increasing overall system ridership via better bus service, that increases public support for Metro as it works towards getting the University and Uptown lines built. All of these are good things.

Finally, one cannot overlook crass political calculations. It was easy to see a path to defeating the original referendum, as the only entity that was likely to be happy with it was the city of Houston. Harris County, the small cities, and transit advocates were all unhappy with it, and I believe that would have been a big enough coalition to defeat the measure. I was prepared to vote against it. Here, it’s just transit advocates that are unhappy. It’s far from clear to me that they can muster up enough support to defeat this version of the referendum, especially if there’s a concerted effort in favor of it. One could argue that instead of working to defeat the referendum, it would be better to work on Metro to spend the extra money it will get, and the extra money it will have from its unrestricted sources as debt service gets addressed, in a way that transit advocates think is best. I’m sure they’ll be doing that anyway after the referendum, regardless of the outcome, but my way would probably be less awkward.

Basically, I don’t see the upside to voting against this referendum. I see the case for it, but not the case against it. I wish the referendum would have been better, but that fight is over. This is what we have to work with, and it’s good enough for me.

Draft Cecile?

Nonsequiteuse looks ahead.

Cecile Richards

I hereby kick-off (or join, because maybe others have beat me to it since I’ve been in a deep wormhole this summer) THE DRAFT CECILE RICHARDS TO RUN FOR GOVERNOR OF TEXAS MOVEMENT.

She’s going to be speaking at the DNC, and we all know that spot at the podium sets people up for a pretty sweet trajectory. She’s tough, smart, and must be at least a full foot taller than Goodhair. She could send him into hiding with a single side-eye.

More than that, she’s a clear win on the compassion front. She understands what it takes to take care of the least among us. She gets that strong, healthy women mean strong, healthy families, and that translates directly into a strong, healthy economy and community.

And, in this time of legitimate rape and vaginal probes and kamikaze Komen, she knows how to capitalize on the zeitgeist and rake in the big bucks. I’m nothing if not practical: serious green is what it will take to turn Texas blue.

Planned Parenthood might not be ready to let her go, but consider what it would mean to accelerate the demographic shift in Texas politics. I know great women are standing in the wings who could carry on the proud tradition Cecile has become a part of, leading that institution.

I believe federal law now mandates that all such movements begin with a Facebook page. I personally have hopped on the Draft Henry bandwagon so I’ll leave that task to someone else, but I’ll be happy to give the page a Like once it’s up.

That said, I’d be delighted to see this happen. I’d suggest that the second thing to do, after the Facebook page, is to convince Ms. Richards and her family to move back to Texas, since she currently resides in New York, according to her Wikipedia page. Her roots are deep enough here to overcome that, but better sooner than later, you know?

One more thing I’d point out is this: In addition to the “serious green” that Nonsequiteuse mentions will be needed to run and win a gubernatorial campaign, the other thing that we really ought to be looking for is a candidate with some personality. The last Democratic candidate for Governor for whom the word “charismatic” would be on the short list of accurate adjectives was Cecile’s mother, Ann Richards, in 1994. That’s a long time to go without pizzazz. Henry Cisneros has it, Cecile Richards has it, Julian Castro has it if he ever decides to move up his time frame (2018 is such a long way off), maybe someone else besides them who could mount a campaign will have it. I’m hardly the first person to suggest such a quality – McBlogger, call your office – but after so many elections without it, it’s hard to see why we’d not want to be looking for it this time around. Surely having a bit of Elvis in our candidate would help with the green-raising as well. That’s the argument, now it’s time for some drafting. Who’s on board with this? See Sarah Killf’s well-timed post for more on Ms. Richards.

Perry gives another middle finger to public education

It’s a twofer, actually. Here’s one.

Gov. Rick Perry named Michael Williams the new commissioner of the Texas Education Agency Monday.

A fixture of Texas Republican politics — and a former general counsel to the Republican Party of Texas — Williams resigned from the Texas Railroad Commission in 2011 after serving more than a decade on the regulatory body that oversees the state’s oil and natural gas industry.

His appointment comes at a trying time for the agency, which lost a third of its workforce after budget cuts last year. Amid anxiety from parents, educators and administrators — and backlash from lawmakers — over its transition to a rigorous new assessment and accountability system, the state is facing six lawsuits over the way it funds public schools. More than half of Texas public schools failed to meet yearly benchmarks under the No Child Left Behind Act, but the state remains one of the handful that have yet to seek a waiver from the requirements from the federal government. The agency will also begin the Sunset Review process in October.

Williams, who began his career as an assistant district attorney in Midland, has recently been known as a political candidate. After showing early interest in replacing Kay Bailey Hutchison in the U.S. Senate, he campaigned for the congressional district now held by U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Austin. Williams lost the Republican primary to Wes Riddle and fellow onetime U.S. Senate candidate Roger Williams, who ultimately prevailed in a runoff.

When then-Gov. George W. Bush named Williams to the commission in 1999, he became the first African-American to hold a statewide elected position. The Midland native’s career in GOP politics began during the Ronald Reagan administration, when he served as a prosecutor at the U.S. Department of Justice. In 1990, President George H.W. Bush appointed him to the civil rights division at the U.S. Department of Education, a legal position that is his only official previous experience in the realm of education policy.

So Williams has no education experience, but he is severely conservative and he needed a job, so Perry was there to lend him a hand. I guess just because one hates government doesn’t mean one wants to leave it and find a job in that private free-enterprise system we’ve all heard about. Williams is also a proponent of vouchers, but I’m sure he’ll put aside his long-held political beliefs and do his very best to help make public schools the best they can be. What else would we expect from a Rick Perry appointee, after all?

And here’s two:

Perry simultaneously named Lizzette Reynolds, a veteran of the agency who is currently a deputy commissioner, as Williams’ second in command. Reynolds attracted controversy in 2007 when she allegedly pushed to fire the agency’s then-science director Chris Comer for forwarding an email critical of intelligent design in violation of an internal neutrality policy. After Comer was forced to resign, the agency drew national scrutiny that included an editorial in The New York Times.

Forrest Wilder digs up some news from the time on this contretemps, and I blogged about it here, here, here, and here. Being a teacher or other employee of the public schools who supports Rick Perry is like being a chicken who supports Colonel Sanders. EoW and BOR have more, and a statement from Rep. Jessica Farrar is beneath the fold.

(more…)

What would you do with 136 acres near downtown?

Something urban, mixed-use, and transit-oriented, one hopes.

A rare opportunity lies in 136 acres just east of downtown Houston.

The Buffalo Bayou-front parcel, a longtime industrial and office complex, went on the market earlier this summer – a move bayou enthusiasts, East End residents and real estate developers had been anticipating for years.

Some of them say the expansive property – even larger than the former AstroWorld site off the South Loop – offers a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” to create a multiuse development incorporating the cultural influences of downtown, the East End and other surrounding historic neighborhoods.

Architect and urban planner Peter Brown envisions a “town center” where a mix of housing types, offices, shops and cultural attractions encircle a central green space.

Those most familiar with the area cite a lengthy wish list, from groceries to book stores to new recreational facilities. City Councilman James Rodriguez, who represents that part of town, would like to see “shops, rooftops and various other amenities for our East End community.”

And he is hardly alone in taking note of the nearly mile-long stretch of bayou frontage. That combination of proximity to water, combined with skyline views, ups the ante.

“People are drawn to cities that offer urban vitality in a natural setting – New York and its harbor, Chicago and its lakefront, Denver and its mountains, Austin and Lady Bird Lake,” said Guy Hagstette, project manager of Buffalo Bayou Park and ex-director of Discovery Green.

I can’t tell exactly where this is, as no street information is given in the story, but give the description, the photo above, and the suggestion made later in the article by Christof Spieler of a streetcar connection to the EaDo/Stadium light rail station, I can sort of guess; I’d say it’s more or less north of that station, looking at the East Line rail map. It’s clear that a development like this, when it happens, will have a transformative effect on the area. Whether that’s good or bad will depend entirely on what ultimately gets built. The Chron solicited a lot of good feedback from a variety of people – former CM Peter Brown had so much to say they wrote a separate article to capture it all – but in the end I don’t know how much effect anything but what the people who buy the land want to do with it will have. We better hope they get it right.

Couple things to add. One, don’t underestimate the value of abutting the Buffalo Bayou. It’s a great natural resource, and many of Houston’s best neighborhoods are built around bayous. If my estimate of where this is and my reading of this Houston Bikeways map is correct, there’s already a bike trail along the bayou in place for the future residents, employees, and shoppers of this location. That would be a nice, convenient way to get into downtown without having to pay to park. Similarly, a streetcar connection to the Harrisburg and Southeast light rail lines would be an excellent addition and would make the development much more transit-accessible. A short streetcar line could be put in for a fairly small amount of money – the 3-mile-long line that Fort Worth eventually decided not to install had a price tag of $88 million. A line from this development to the EaDo/Stadium station would be not nearly that long and would probably only require one car. It could be paid for by the city, Metro, and the developer – I can’t think of a better use of a 380 agreement than that.

Finally, something I’ve said before but cannot be said too often is that Houston has a lot of empty spaces and underpopulated areas in it that can and really should be pushed for development as residential or mixed-used properties. Many of them can use existing infrastructure, though improvements will need to be made. Many already have access or proximity to transit, which would allow for denser development. There are a lot of places that can be developed that are close in to downtown or other employment hubs like the Medical Center or Greenspoint. The city has advantages that the increasingly far-flung reaches of unincorporated Harris County do not, and it really needs to prioritize making affordable housing available inside its boundaries for people who would prefer to live closer in, and to make it an attractive alternative to those who might not have thought about it otherwise. Population is power, and if the city isn’t growing it’s going to be losing out. There’s plenty going on for the high-end buyer and that’s good, but it’s a small piece of the market. The KBR site is a great opportunity, but it’s far from the only one. The city needs to find ways to get as many of those other opportunities going as it can.

Interview with Max Martin

Max Martin

The one new Congressional district to reach into Harris County is CD36, which stretches from Clear Lake and eastern Harris County up to Polk, Tyler, Jasper, and Newton Counties. Max Martin is the Democratic candidate running in this new district against retread wacko Steve Stockman. Martin is a retired pilot who started out as a baggage handler with Continental in the 60s. He later founded and remains the CEO of an educational software company. Here’s the interview:

Max Martin MP3

I now have the Yahoo! audio player enabled as a plugin for my blog (thanks, Greg Wythe!) and it works a little differently. Basically, as long as this is the top audio file on my index page, you ought to see a “Play” control button next to the link above. If not, or later this week when I have another interview published, simply clicking the link ought to play the audio via the player. You can also right-click to save the file to your PC.

You can still find a list of all interviews I did for this primary cycle, plus other related information, on my 2012 Harris County Primary Elections page and my 2012 Texas Primary Elections page, which I now need to update to include fall candidate information. You can also follow this blog by liking its Facebook page.

Response from County Clerk to Wallach testimony about recounts

The following was sent to me in email by Hector DeLeon, the Director of Communications and Voter Outreach for Harris County Clerk Stan Stanart:

I read Dan Wallach’s report of the recount in your blog titled Diaz Still Leads After Recount. In his report he states:

There was no attempt to audit the original electronic systems, perhaps looking for unusual behavior in the original tallying systems’ logs, or perhaps comparing the in-person poll books or absentee envelopes against the number of cast votes.

What Wallach does not mention is that a reconcilation process is conducted between Election Day and the day the results are canvassed to ensure that the number of access codes printed from the JBCs at each poll match the number of signatures on a pollbook.

He also states: “So far as I could tell, the boxes that hold the JBCs have no security seals, which could have at least provided some evidence of chain-of-custody maintenance.”

Here he also fails to explain that there is a chain of custody in place from the moment that the equipment leaves the County Clerk’s possession. Additionally, he fails to say that security seals are placed on the JBC boxes when they are picked up by the presiding election judges. For Election Day equipment set up purposes, the security seals on the JBC boxes are broken in the presence of the Republican and Democratic presiding and alternate election judges at the poll. There is a form which has to be completed and signed by the presiding and alernate election judges attesting that this occurred.
 
On Election Day, after all votes are cast, in the process of closing the poll, a security seal is placed on JBC boxes before leaving the poll. Again, there is a form that needs to be completed and signed by both the presiding and atlternate election judges attesting that this ocurred.

Additionally, the slot where the mobile ballot box (MBB) is located on the JBC has a security seal. the JBCs’ MBB security seals are only broken to extract the MBB after the presiding election judges return the JBCs at the end of Election Day. At the time of delivery, each JBC is inspected to make sure the security seals are in place. Once the equipment is returned the MBB must be removed from the JBC to enable the reading of the votes. All these procedures are documented on forms which most be completed by the PJ and AJ in the conduct of adminsitering the election at each poll.

All security seals have an ID number. Those numbers are reviewed to ensure the number match on all approriate chain of custody forms.

In short, there are procedures in place to ensure the integrity of the equipment and the veracity of the number of ballots cast at each poll.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve found this to be quite educational. My thanks to Hector DeLeon for the feedback.

Three for E

There will probably be more when all is said and done, but at this time there are three candidates running for District E this November.

The candidates are:

Lonnie Allsbrooks – Former owner of Beer Island bar in the Heights. Ran for At-Large Position 1 council seat in 2009. Moved to Kingwood earlier this year. Wants to promote restaurant/hospitality industry issues.

Dave Martin — Humble Independent School District trustee, Harris County-Houston Sports Authority board member. Clear favorite of Sullivan, who served with him on the Humble board. Managing partner at Marsh McLennan, a professional services and insurance brokerage firm.

Elizabeth Perez – self-employed accountant who lives near Hobby Airport, plaintiff in unsuccessful suit to overturn the city’s drainage fee. Ran for At-Large Position 2 council seat last year.

Sullivan submitted his resignation last month. I presume the filing deadline for this will be in September sometime. Candidates from Kingwood have won the last two times the seat was open. We’ll see if that streak continues.

UPDATE: As noted by outgoing CM Sullivan in the comments, the filing deadline for District E has passed, and these three candidates are it. I guess I thought it would be later than this because that’s usually how it is for city elections; the filing deadline in 2011 was September 7. Be that as it may, this is your lineup. My thanks to CM Sullivan for the correction.

More on carless commuting in Houston

Greg adds on to my recent post about getting to work in Houston if you didn’t have a car.

In the comments of this Kuff post, Robert Nagle actually beats me to the punch in answering the central question. Yes, you can live quite comfortably in Houston without a car. As long as you base where you live as a function of that and are comfortable with all the other accoutrements of your daily routine being dictated by a mostly generous METRO bus schedule.

As suggested by Robert, I choose to live in an area where there are four different routes that intersect my neighborhood. Rush hour options for getting to work downtown have never been an issue for me. I generally have had the luxury of picking the one route that is a) closest to the start of the route to ensure good seating; and b) among the faster options for getting downtown. Since I’ve been stationed elsewhere for the recent political unpleasantness known as Election 2012, I’m limited to one and a half routes, with the “half” being the 402 Bellaire Quickline that drops off at Campaign HQ, but not at home. It’s a half option for me if I choose to stop for breakfast in the AM or make a grocery run in the PM. I just basically transfer from another bus to the 402 in the morning or hop on the 402 to the store and take another bus from there to home (or just walk from the store).

Caveats are everywhere with this, of course. I basically walk half a mile to and from the bus stop. Right about this time of year, that’s more than a little discomforting. And there are rain days that either make the situation modestly discomforting, brutal beyond despair, or worth calling in to inform the boss that my street is flooded. My local retail options are a mile away and I’m about as likely to walk that as I am to take another bus for it. Dining options are either a fairly expensive Pappa’s BBQ within way-too-easy walking distance or cheaper fare in extended walking distance. Weekend runs to church have been either very or fairly bus-friendly regardless of which church I’ve attended in recent years. And making a big monthly run at the grocery store often has me breaking down to pay a few bucks in cab fare for some lucky cabby camped out in the Fiesta parking lot.

Both Greg and Robert are completely car-free, so their concerns are broader than mine. Personally, if I were planning to ditch my autos, I’d look for someplace either in Midtown or the Museum District/Third Ward area, both of which contain plenty of housing options and other amenities near the Main Street line. Tiffany and I have actually talked about doing something like that after the kids are grown and gone. I hope there will be more such options by then, but there are some good ones now.

There’s one more factor to consider that can increase one’s range of options and that’s a bicycle, with which you can live farther away from your transit stop. The number of people biking to the bus stop has been steadily increasing; I know I’ve been regularly seeing bikes on the buses’ racks lately. I talked about biking as part of a transit commute in my initial post, that starting in 2014 I could ride from the Quitman station on the North Line to my office if I could get there easily enough after dropping off the kids at school. If I can ride my bike there after parking my car near school, it would be a snap. Unfortunately, the guidelines for bringing a bike on a Metro train make that completely impractical now. Given how crowded the trains are (*) during rush hour, the only way this is going to change is if Metro starts running more trains during the busy times. I have no idea what if any plans Metro may have about this, so let me address these words to anyone with Metro now reading this: Please make it a goal to allow bikes on trains during all hours. I’d really appreciate it, and I promise I’d take advantage of it. Thanks.

(*) Yes, I said “crowded”. Frankly, I’ve never been on an empty train, but during peak hours it’s not just standing room only, it’s packed cheek to jowl. I feel like the people who denigrate and dismiss rail in Houston must never actually use the service, because I don’t know how you can see it as anything other than useful and heavily used if you had ever ridden on it. Par for the course with some of these guys, I guess.

Weekend link dump for August 26

School starts tomorrow. I swear, the older I get, the shorter summer seems to be.

It’s a lot easier to find a bus stop these days.

That sounds you hear is Tiffany demanding to know how she can be chosen to participate in a study like this.

There’s a simpler explanation for Democratic apostates like these guys: They’re all huge jerks.

Three words: Presidential slash fiction. Yeah, now I need to go wash my brain out with bleach, too.

Cable TV is still hanging in there despite predictions of its doom.

“Sister Wives” lawsuit allowed to go forward.

Bullies really hate it when people fight back.

If you wonder why some of us keep referring to a war on women, it’s largely because people like Todd Akin are in positions of power. But it’s not just Todd Akin, and that’s the real problem. And with one more vote on the Supreme Court, they could impose their will on the country.

And I really hope someone reads this to Todd Akin. Not that I expect him to understand it, of course.

Death of Silicon Valley predicted. Film at 11.

Evangelism that’s meant to alienate and exclude is completely alien to what Jesus actually taught.

“The British Empire is over, Niall. It had its day.”

RIP, Phyllis Diller.

Men like this just make me cringe.

Skinny-dipping is not a sin, even when Congressmen do it.

Hugh Hefner is pro-marriage equality.

The Tesla Museum in New York will become a reality thanks to The Oatmeal.

“That, I think, is often one attraction of moralism: the false promise of safety from calamity and capricious suffering.”

Hey, it’s that guy! 25 actors who were on “Law and Order” before they were famous.

Wolverine! And this is pretty much par for the course.

Also, as an FYI for any non-Texas writer who comments about this: A “County Judge” is not a person who wears a robe and conducts trials, though they do have the authority to do so in courts that don’t hear the major felony or civil cases. A “County Judge” presides over the “Commissioners Court”, which is the governing body for counties in Texas. It’s a little like being the Mayor of a county.

Once again, the GOP Presidential ticket gets its hand slapped for using music without permission. File a DMCA suit, Dee!

RIP, Jerry Nelson, Muppeteer extraordinaire.

More cities need outlaw monkey mascots.

Conservatives are only saying they want a truce on social issues because they’re losing the argument on them.

This is indeed the stupidest story you’ll read this week.

“Pennsylvania’s “Voter Hall of Fame,” organized by the Department of State, is a list of 21,000 inductees who have voted in 50 consecutive general elections. Of the 5,923 of them who are currently registered voters, 1,384 of them either have no valid state ID or have an ID which expired before Nov. 6, 2011, which would make it invalid at the polls under the state’s voter ID law.”

RIP, Neil Armstrong.

Congratulations and Mazel Tov, Roy and Kia!

Oliver sues to stay on ballot

We’ll find out who’s right soon enough.

On Friday, Houston attorney Lloyd Oliver filed a lawsuit seeking to prevent the Harris County Democratic Party’s attempts to oust him from the ticket.

“They’re not going to put any candidate on the ballot. They just shut the whole thing down,” Oliver said.

The lawyer called the move an attempt by party officials to disenfranchise voters.

[…]

Earlier this week, a spokeswoman for the Texas secretary of state said there was no provision in state law for removing a political candidate accused of violating party rules.

Harris County Democratic Party officials say they have federal law on their side.

“Political parties get to determine who their nominees are going to be,” said Chad Dunn, the party’s attorney.

He said the Constitution prevents government officials from compelling a political party – a private association – to select a particular candidate.

Dunn said Oliver could run as an independent or a write-in candidate.

“But, if you want to run as a Democrat, then the Democratic Party gets to decide if you are its nominee,” Dunn said.

The irony of all this is that filing the lawsuit is the first proactive step Lloyd Oliver has ever taken to be elected to something. I wasn’t sure he’d even bother, given that his goal was never to actually get elected, but merely to get publicity. Well, now he gets to keep his name in the papers for a few more days.

I’ll say again what I said originally. I don’t see what leg the HCDP has to stand on. I hope I’m wrong and that they really do have chapter and verse of federal law on their side, because they’re going to look like a bunch of idiots if they lose. I just have a bad feeling about this.

As for Dunn’s statement about who gets to decide who the nominees are, well, not to belabor the obvious, but that’s what primary elections are for. The fact that the voters made a poor choice this time is certainly unfortunate and a failure of the process that I believe the party needs to address for the future, but that’s a separate issue. It’s true that Oliver could have run as an independent or as a write-in, but to do so would have required filing paperwork that was due at the same time as the paperwork to be on the primary ballot. Unlike, say, Connecticut, where you can form your own party to run in after losing in the primary of another party, you only get one shot at this in Texas. Oliver chose to file as a Democrat for his own inscrutable reasons. He won the primary, and that means he’s earned the right to run in November, much as I dislike the idea of him winning. I’ll wait to see what the judge has to say, but I really don’t understand this. Tactically speaking, it’s hard to see how Oliver was going to be more trouble on the ballot than he is now trying to get him off of it.

More Green woes

Maybe it’s the name.

CM Larry Green

A 28-year-old nonprofit workforce training organization is teetering on the brink of extinction after four years under the leadership of Houston City Councilman Larry Green.

Green left HoustonWorks USA in May by what he and board president Howard Lederer called a mutual agreement so Green could dedicate himself to his $55,770-a-year job as a city councilman. Green was elected to his first term last November. He was paid $179,369 by HoustonWorks in 2010, according to the organization’s most recent available tax forms.

Audits of the organization have revealed $1.7 million in unpaid bills, including repayment of a $665,000 cash advance due next month to a grantor, a $490,000 bank loan due this month and $629,000 in other bills that include overdue rent on its corporate headquarters. The Houston-Galveston Area Council, a regional planning agency that funnels federal money to HoustonWorks for job training, decided early this month to discontinue the $16.7 million annual allotment to the organization. That represents more than 90 percent of HoustonWorks’ total budget.

HoustonWorks was in fiscal distress before Green came aboard. The organization’s financial problems have their roots in an $800,000 loss on a failed ice cream store on Main Street downtown. Lederer said he continues to think highly of Green.

Nonetheless, Lederer said, “If somebody gives you a job and you’re the top guy and you’re there for four years, it’s pretty hard to say you don’t have anything to do with the net result.”

Green said he is proud of the job he did at HoustonWorks, and that he brought in $7 million in new revenue.

“I was the guy that brought fundraising to the organization,” he said.

This largely appears to boil down to a business dispute, and the facts laid out in the story don’t make either side look particularly good. Hard to say if there’s anything more to it than that. Perhaps if there’s a lawsuit we’ll learn something interesting in the discovery process. Should CM Green face more serious opposition in his subsequent elections, I’m sure this will come up again.

The bid is in for the NCAA Champions game

We are officially bidding on the new Champions Bowl, the 2014 replacement for the BCS Championship Bowl, for Reliant Stadium. We heard about this in July, and it makes sense that Houston was solicited for a bid and that we’d go through with it. Mostly I’m noting this because I was amused by the following in the story:

The bid for the Champions Bowl is for 12 years and includes being a semifinal site four times, said Heather Houston, executive director of the Meineke Car Care Bowl of Texas.

Houston declined to disclose the terms of the bid – a joint effort between the city of Houston, the Harris County-Houston Sports Authority and Lone Star Sports & Entertainment – but said “it’s really competitive.”

“We’re really honored and very proud of the bid that we’ve put forth,” Houston said. “We feel like it’ll stack up against any other market.”

Part of the reason for submitting a bid, Houston said, is the city’s “proven track record” of hosting a postseason bowl game and major sporting events. Reliant Stadium was the site of the 2004 Super Bowl and the 2011 NCAA men’s Final Four. A bowl game, currently the Meineke Car Care Bowl of Texas, has been played at the stadium since 2006.

“We felt like we have just as strong a chance as anyone else,” Houston said. “The only thing we don’t have going for us is the history, but we have a lot of other things that make up for that.”

Am I the only one who read that and had a brief moment where it seemed like the city of Houston had come to life and begun speaking for itself? I’m thinking this is one of those time when the Chron should have adopted the NY Times style guide and referred to the spokesperson as “Ms. Houston”, which might have made the whole thing seem a bit less surreal. Be that as it may, I hope the bid is well-received.

Electric cars and the power grid

Fascinating.

Pecan Street Project

It doesn’t take too long for visitors of Mueller, a 700-acre master-planned community in Austin, to realize that the neighborhood is peculiar.

The planned community, built on the site of the former Mueller airport, boasts almost too-perfect rows of homes with cheery pastel exteriors and quaint front porches. And then there are the neighborhood’s green flourishes—solar panels that adorn every other rooftop and the eco-friendly hybrid cars that roll almost silently through the development’s tidy streets.

Mueller isn’t just a subdivision—it’s a life-size green energy research test site. The New Urbanist, a mixed-use development, is home to a five-year “smart-grid demonstration project” led by Pecan Street, Inc., a nonprofit research and development organization focusing on green energy, and Austin Energy.

In late July, General Motors announced that it is partnering with Pecan Street, making 100 Chevy Volts available to Mueller residents to buy or lease. Since February, Pecan Street has been providing financial incentives for residents to join, matching the $7,500 federal tax credit extended to owners of electric vehicles with their own $7,500 rebate. Those who opt to lease will receive a $3,000 rebate.

Mueller’s 600 residents are currently using about sixty electric vehicles, according to Colin Rowan, Pecan Street’s director of communications, and 52 of those vehicles are Volts.

Now, the recent influx of electric cars in Mueller has allowed Pecan Street to test the impact that high concentrations of electric cars might have on the area’s smart energy grid.

“We’re interested in how the grid performs when you have a lot of electric vehicles pulling power in one area, and how people use them and charge them,” Rowan said. “That sounds kind of basic, but it actually puts some interesting stress on the grid. We’re very interested in finding out how that can be optimized so that it is actually a benefit to the grid and not a liability.”

The Statesman adds on.

For 16 years, OnStar has been communicating with GM customers in their cars, usually in times of emergencies. But now the company is re-imagining itself to also be an energy manager for a fleet of electric vehicles.

The electric vehicle market is minuscule today, but some day, they could potentially serve as a fleet of mobile batteries that could store power until it is needed by a homeowner or grid operators during peak power demands.

Until now, OnStar’s experiments have been limited to small demonstration projects or work in the lab. Now they want to begin test-driving their theories with Austinites.

“This partnership provides us with a unique opportunity to observe charging details with many real customers in a concentrated setting,” said Nick Pudar, OnStar vice president for strategy and business development. “We are moving our lab demonstrations into the real world.”

Among the possibilities are taking advantage of different rates for different times of day for cheaper charging, and using the stored energy in car batteries to help power one’s house or give back to the grid in times of high usage. This real-world experiment is set to run through the end of 2014. Very, very cool.

Saturday video break: My Back Pages

Song #55 on the Popdose Top 100 Covers list is “My Back Pages”, originally by Bob Dylan and covered by The Byrds. For the first time in this series I can’t find a YouTube video of a song, in this case Dylan’s original, so all I have for you is the Byrds’ version:

This is another one of those songs where the title didn’t mean anything to me but I recognized the song as I heard it. I’m pretty sure the Dylan version isn’t really different, it just has that unique Dylan voice. Here’s a question to ponder: Do you think there are more Dylan songs that are better known as his or better known as someone else’s cover version? I’d like to see an expert on Dylanology do an accounting of that.

Armstrong gives up the fight against USADA

Wow.

Lance Armstrong

With stunning swiftness, the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency said Thursday night it will strip Lance Armstrong of his unprecedented seven Tour de France titles after he dropped his fight against drug charges that threatened his legacy as one of the greatest cyclists of all time.

Travis Tygart, USADA’s chief executive, said Armstrong would also be hit with a lifetime ban on Friday. Under the World Anti-Doping Code, he could lose other awards, event titles and cash earnings while the International Olympic Committee might look at the bronze medal he won in the 2000 Games.

Armstrong, who retired last year, effectively dropped his fight by declining to enter USADA’s arbitration process — his last option — because he said he was weary of fighting accusations that have dogged him for years. He has consistently pointed to the hundreds of drug tests he passed as proof of his innocence while piling up Tour titles from 1999 to 2005.

“There comes a point in every man’s life when he has to say, ‘Enough is enough.’ For me, that time is now,” Armstrong said. He called the USADA investigation an “unconstitutional witch hunt.”

“I have been dealing with claims that I cheated and had an unfair advantage in winning my seven Tours since 1999,” he said. “The toll this has taken on my family and my work for our foundation and on me leads me to where I am today — finished with this nonsense.”

USADA reacted quickly and treated Armstrong’s decision as an admission of guilt, hanging the label of drug cheat on an athlete who was a hero to thousands for overcoming life-threatening testicular cancer and for his foundation’s support for cancer research.

“It is a sad day for all of us who love sport and athletes,” Tygart said. “It’s a heartbreaking example of win at all costs overtaking the fair and safe option. There’s no success in cheating to win.”

Tygart said the agency had the power to strip the Tour titles, though Armstrong disputed that.

You can read Armstrong’s statement here, and his lawyer’s letter to the USADA here. The funny thing about this is that if USADA does strip Armstrong of his titles, there may be no one else who can be awarded them.

The Tour has taken away titles from two riders: Floyd Landis in 2006 and Alberto Contador in 2010. Each tested positive for a banned substance while riding to his Tour victory.

Landis, a former teammate of Armstrong, iniataed USADA’s investigation of Armstrong.

If Armstrong’s titles are taken away it is unclear who would be declared the winner. Most of the cyclists behind Armstrong on the podium were suspended for using drugs including Jan Ullrich, Ivan Basso and Alexander Vinokourov.

Here’s a radical idea: Why even bother testing? If they’re all doping anyway, then no one is really getting an advantage, and they playing field is sufficiently level. Well, it would have been level for everyone except Armstrong himself, who has passed every drug test given to him, and he managed to win anyway. I don’t really follow cycling, and I never paid that much attention to the Tour de France, even when Armstrong was dominating it. I have at best a surface-level knowledge of the history here. From that perspective, I have no idea why the USADA has been going after Armstrong so hard. I don’t get it. Be that as it may, it looks like the USADA will finally get what it’s been after for all these years. Mission accomplished, I guess.

Rick Perry is running for Governor again in 2014

He is until he specifically says he isn’t, anyway. I don’t see any reason to call what we’re seeing otherwise.

These corndogs don't pay for themselves ya know

Gov. Rick Perry has quietly replenished his depleted campaign war chest since he abandoned his presidential bid in January, fueling speculation that the longest-serving governor in Texas history will seek yet another term in 2014.

Perry raised $1.9 million from the start of the year through June — convincing donors to keep writing big checks even after a series of gaffes during his White House run left his political future looking murky.

His political committee, Texans for Rick Perry, now has about $3.3 million cash on-hand. This exceeds the $2.9 million he had midway through 2008, two years before he waged a nasty but successful battle during the Republican gubernatorial primary against U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, then bested Democrat Bill White in the general election.

“He must be raising a lot of money for something,” said Scott Caven, a Houston banker who was finance director for Perry’s gubernatorial campaigns in 2002 and 2006 but later resigned because he didn’t agree with the governor’s decision to seek a third full term.

I admit that he could be raising money just for the hell of it. It is his core competency, after all. He could subsequently convert it into a PAC and continue playing in whatever races he wanted to. But it’s much more fun to do so as Governor, and why would he want to quit? It’s not like he’s being challenged for the post right now.

[AG GReg] Abbott raised $3 million during the first six months of the year, bringing his campaign funds to an impressive $14.5 million. He also has strong statewide name recognition, helping Texas sue the federal government 21 times since Obama took office.

But Eric Bearse, an Abbott spokesman and a former top Perry aide, said the attorney general isn’t worrying about his political future yet.

“The only thing that we’re focused on is maintaining a close, cordial relationship with the governor,” he said.

“They have been friends for a long time. They work closely together and will continue to do so

In the meantime, he won’t even stick his little toe in the water by endorsing his former Solicitor General Ted Cruz in the primary runoff for US Senate against Perry’s boy David Dewhurst. Does this sound like a man who is ready to fight for the right to run for Governor, or one who is waiting for it to be handed to him on a silver platter? Which, I admit, Perry could still do for him. I’m just not going to believe it till I hear it from his own mouth.

UPDATE: Burka suggests Abbott versus Dewhurst for Lite Guv, and George P. Bush to run against Perry; apparently there are some rumors to that effect. I can see the former, but the latter? Color me dubious.

Forget the Alamo

At least, forget about using it in a slogan.

Even if it’s possible to get too drunk to remember the Alamo, the state agency that oversees the shrine says that’s nothing to brag about on a T-shirt or frilly undergarment.

A word play on the slogan “Remember the Alamo” has set off a fight between a local businessman and the Texas General Land Office, which assumed custodianship of the shrine nearly a year ago.

Through his company, Qwercky Ltd., Christopher Erck, owner of Swig Martini Bar and The Worm Tequila and Mescal Bar downtown, is seeking a trademark from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for the phrase, “I Can’t Remember the Alamo.”

The Land Office, in its first formal action to protect a state trademark on the phrase “The Alamo,” has argued the proposal is disparaging.

In a notice of opposition filed Wednesday, the Land Office argued the slogan dilutes the state’s trademark and denigrates the Alamo and men on both sides who died in the 1836 battle.

The “applicant’s mark disparages the deceased combatants of the Battle of the Alamo by communicating that their sacrifice was not worthy of memory or esteem,” the Land Office said in its opposition notice.

I don’t have a strong opinion on this. If we’re going to trademark “The Alamo”, it’s appropriate to protect that trademark. Seems a bit strange to me to have a trademark on “The Alamo”, but maybe that’s just my not-native-Texan-ness not understanding these things.

Friday random ten: The number of the count shall be three

School starts on Monday, which will be the start of third grade for Olivia. As I did in each of the last two years, I’ve got a Friday random ten in celebration of the number 3.

1. Three More Days – Ray LaMontagne
2. The Three Sunrises – U2
3. Three Drunken Maidens – The Mollys
4. Three Cool Cats – The Beatles
5. Three Babies – Sinead O’Connor
6. Two Out Of Three Ain’t Bad – Meatloaf
7. Three Jolly Coachmen – Flying Fish Sailors
8. The Three Fine Daughters Of Farmer Brown – Eddie From Ohio
9. Three To Get Ready – Dave Brubeck Quartet
10. Three Sinners – Austin Lounge Lizards

I’ll have to check again for the number four, but my recollection is that there were not nearly enough songs to do another list. But then, it’ll be first grade for Audrey and I can revisit the number one. Good luck in school this year, kids.

Diaz still leads after recount

No surprise.

Former Jacinto City Mayor Chris Diaz still appears to be the Democratic nominee for Harris County Precinct 2 constable following a Monday recount in his razor-thin runoff with Precinct 2 Sgt. Zerick Guinn.

Diaz’s 17-vote margin is unofficial, county Democratic Party Chairman Lane Lewis said, adding the party plans to finalize the results Saturday.

Diaz actually gained a vote after the recount. Unless Guinn wants to pursue this in the courts, the matter is basically settled. Stace has more.

That’s the basic news about this. Do you know how the county handles a recount like this? I had no idea, until Dan Wallach, who wrote that guest post on Tuesday, sent me the following eyewitness account:

Dan Wallach

I was invited by the Harris County Democratic Party to be an observer of the Guinn-Diaz recount, which ran all day on Monday. This race, in the Democratic primary election, was to select the Democratic candidate for Constable, Precinct 2. There were some procedural errors during the initial tally. At one point, the two candidates were separated by all of 3 votes out of just over 11 thousand cast. By the time they included the absentee ballots, roughly 28% of all the votes in the race, the margin of victory was 16 votes.

I showed up at the recount with my camera, hoping to take lots of great pictures. Several people promptly came running at me saying that it was illegal to take pictures during a recount. (Dear lawyers who are reading this: really?) Instead, I’ll just have to do my best to describe what I did and what I saw.

For starters, Harris County uses the Hart InterCivic eSlate, a paperless electronic voting system, which stands out from other DRE-type systems by having a local network in the polling place. For each group of eSlate terminals, there’s a single controller (a “Judge Booth Controller” or JBC) that connects to the eSlates. Three copies of each vote are recorded: one in the eSlate where it was cast, one in the JBC’s internal memory, and one on a PCMCIA flash card (a “mobile ballot box” or MBB) that’s removable from the JBC. If you want to learn a lot more about the eSlate architecture and its security vulnerabilities, you might enjoy the California “Top to Bottom” report, which I co-authored in 2007.

On election night, the process is that they remove the MBBs from the JBCs and use computers to read them and tabulate the data centrally. Part of this process is for the centrally-tabulated data to then be reported on the Election Day Results webpage, or in this case, misreported. It wasn’t the tabulated results that were wrong, just the reported results. That’s another story, although it would be nice to have a detailed explanation of what went wrong.

If the initial counts were done from the MBBs, how about the recount? For this, they used the JBCs: 115 of them were sequestered for the recount, each connected individually to a single computer that copied their contents. (This computer runs Windows 2000, the only “certified” configuration available; at least there was no network connection.) All of this occurred before the recount itself began. No party or candidate representatives witnessed this part of the process. Johnnie German, the county’s administrator of elections, told me that the process took five hours and needed to be done in advance so the recount could complete on time. More on this below.

The recount was an involved process. There were three and later four tables of counters. Each table had five people. Each table gets a stack of every paper ballot for a given precinct which they then tabulate. In the case of absentee ballots, these were original, hand-marked papers. In the case of eSlate-cast ballots, these were printed on site by a laser printer from the aforementioned computer that collected JBC data. The tabulation process has one person, in the center, who picks up a ballot from the stack and reads out who got the vote. On this person’s side are two people (representing the candidates) who double check this. Across the table are two separate people who keep count. With this many eyeballs on the task, the inevitable errors are caught. When a stack of ballots was completed, everybody at the table would agree on a summary sheet, they signed it, and it came over to where I was sitting.

Our table had four people: myself, the election administrator, and one observer for each candidate. I picked up each stack of ballots and called out the precinct number and totals. The election administrator typed those numbers into an Excel spreadsheet. The observers made sure we got the numbers right.

The results? Unsurprisingly, for all the eSlate-cast votes, the hand tabulation exactly equaled the original machine tabulation. For the absentee ballots, we had one precinct with single absentee ballot that somehow didn’t show up for the recount. The election administrator made a phone call to the downtown site, where absentee ballots are kept in a vault, and arranged for somebody to go dig out that ballot and bring it back to us. (That particular ballot was an undervote, so it didn’t impact the result.) We also discovered a precinct that had an extra absentee ballot that somehow wasn’t tabulated at all in the initial machine-scanned tally. Where did it come from? Why wasn’t it counted beforehand? We don’t know. (This ballot favored Diaz, increasing his lead from 16 to 17 votes.) Otherwise, there were no discrepancies or changes to the election outcome. The process started at 8am and ended at 4pm with a one-hour lunch break.

What’s interesting is what we didn’t do in the recount. There was no attempt to audit the original electronic systems, perhaps looking for unusual behavior in the original tallying systems’ logs, or perhaps comparing the in-person poll books or absentee envelopes against the number of cast votes. We didn’t have access to the scanned ballot images, so there was no opportunity to do any sort of risk limiting audit (comparing the scanned ballot images to the physical ones to make sure they’re the same). Also, the only way to get electronic data out of a Hart InterCivic tallying system is in PDF format (example results). There is no way to get all the raw data in a format that’s convenient to bring back into a computer for subsequent analysis.

As I mentioned above, the JBCs’ data was downloaded in advance, giving us no opportunity to observe this process. So far as I could tell, the boxes that hold the JBCs have no security seals, which could have at least provided some evidence of chain-of-custody maintenance. Absentee ballots, for contrast, are transported in plastic tubs with numbered plastic security seals, and there’s a process for documenting those numbers when the seals are broken. A corresponding process for JBCs would be a good idea to adopt.

I’m also a bit sad that we didn’t have a counting scale that we could use in the recount. In addition to enabling clever audits, we could have used them to simply double check the number of papers in each stack of ballots. Apparently the election warehouse does have one, but we weren’t allowed to use it, even to double check our manual tallies. (Dearest election lawyers: really?)

One lesson from this is that political candidates understand the concept of a recount, and there’s plenty of election code that talks about what a recount entails. What’s less clear is how well the election code can bend to support the idea of audits. Printing sheets of paper corresponding to electronically cast ballot records, then counting them by hand, is both wasteful of resources and unlikely to discover anything valuable. Instead, I’d like to see counties offer a menu of options (at different prices, of course) to the candidate requesting a recount. A candidate might then choose to pay for a full tally of absentee ballots and for various audits to reconcile the totals. If a candidate wanted to double-check a sample of the eSlates, to make sure they had the same votes as in the election night tallies, that should be easy and cheap to do.

Another important lesson is that future voting systems (electronic or otherwise) need to be explicitly engineered with recounts and other sorts of audits at the core of their functionality. Of course, we also want the sorts of voter verifiability security properties that DRE systems like the eSlate lack, but this experience made it clear to me that we have a lot of room to improve basic recounting and auditing procedures. At the end of the day, the goal is to convince the losing candidate that he or she genuinely lost. I don’t know whether this particular candidate was convinced.

So now we know, and I thank Dan for the detailed information. I like the suggestions about enabling audits and giving candidates different choices for how to conduct recounts. What do you think?

City says No to some of CM Brown’s expense reports

It’s always something.

CM Helena Brown

Councilwoman Helena Brown hired a private attorney to sit in on meetings with her publicly paid attorney, then tried to bill taxpayers for it.

Records obtained by the Houston Chronicle reveal that Brown sought reimbursement for $850 she paid lawyer Kevin Colbert for meetings she had with the mayor and City Attorney David Feldman, whose job it is to give council members legal advice. The fee also covered Colbert’s attendance at a budget meeting.

Feldman denied the reimbursement request because the city only pays for outside lawyers for council members when it would be a conflict of interest for his office to handle the case. Brown declined to comment on why she hired Colbert.

Brown also sought $2,108 in gas money for William Park, a volunteer adviser to the councilwoman on fiscal issues. The request was denied. Feldman said such a reimbursement would violate city policy on expenses for non-employees.

[…]

Brown asked the city to reimburse mileage expenses for Park. The $2,000 request exceeds what most full-time paid council staffers accrued in mileage during the same period. The city does not reimburse its volunteers – including more than 1,200 people who sit on boards and commissions – for expenses related to their service, though the mayor or her designee can approve travel-related expenses in individual cases for what city policy calls “unpaid persons.”

“The very essence of being a volunteer is you’re doing it as a free public service,” Feldman said.

Brown said, via email, “Mileage or gasoline use for city purposes should be a reimbursable expense indiscriminate of who actually incurred the expense; the mileage reimbursement request denial was not disputed due to our focus on more pressing matters.”

There are other things in the story, but this is the main item. One can certainly make the case that the city should reimburse volunteers for expenses related to their service. If you’re giving your time and expertise to the city, it’s perfectly reasonable to say that you shouldn’t have to pay for the privilege. But city policy is to not do so, which is also perfectly reasonable given the likely expense and the effort needed to verify the requests made by all these people. Given that, I don’t see what Brown’s beef is. Park is a volunteer, volunteers aren’t eligible for reimbursement, end of story. Either hire him as an employee, or don’t submit his expenses for reimbursement. Putting forward a proposal to change the city’s policy rather than trying to get an exception made for this one person is also a viable option.