County elections officials feel like they can’t trust him or his office right now. That’s a big deal.
Still the only voter ID anyone should need
As the Texas secretary of state’s office rolled out its botched effort to review the citizenship of nearly 100,000 voters, Betsy Schonhoff was local election officials’ main point of contact.
Seven years into her post as the state’s voter registration manager, she was largely responsible for the training provided to county officials ahead of the review. Schonhoff and her team fielded calls from election officials across the state as they began to sift through their lists. And she was the person who reached out to many of them when her agency discovered that thousands of voters’ names had been mistakenly flagged.
But a week and half into the convoluted review efforts, Schonhoff — voter registrars’ main contact within the agency — disappeared.
County election officials who called the secretary of state’s office asking for her were informed she was not available. A county worker who traveled to Austin last week to meet with Schonhoff was told she was out that day.
By then, Schonhoff had been gone from the secretary of state’s office for several days. She abruptly resigned on Feb. 6. But the county workers who relied on her experience overseeing the state’s voter rolls were kept in the dark.
A spokesman for the secretary of state denied that county officials were misled, saying those who called in were “directed to appropriate staff.” But during a call to Schonhoff’s office a week after she tendered her resignation and completed an exit interview, The Texas Tribune was told “Betsy’s not in.”
“It’s extremely odd, ” said John Oldham, Fort Bend County’s elections administrator, complaining at the time that “we don’t know what’s going on.”
The secretary of state’s office has since acknowledged that Schonhoff left. But the maelstrom surrounding her exit highlights the breakdown in communication and frustrations that have emerged between the state’s top election officials and county election offices since the citizenship review effort launched four weeks ago.
I believe the term of art for this is that the SOS office is “in disarray”. Let us continue:
Sharing responsibilities for maintaining the state’s voter rolls, the secretary of state’s office and county election officials regularly review the list of 15.8 million people and counting who are registered to vote in Texas. List maintenance is largely a routine process and typically occurs without incident.
But the state’s latest stab at reviewing the rolls has felt anything but ordinary, according to county officials across the state.
It started with Whitley’s announcement of the new list maintenance process on Jan. 25. For the better part of last year, the secretary of state’s office had been quietly working with the Texas Department of Public Safety to match the state’s voter rolls with data kept on Texans who indicated they were not citizens when they obtained their driver’s licenses or ID cards.
His office had offered trainings for local county officials ahead of sharing the data, and the secretary of state’s advised them earlier in the day that the data would soon be released. But they had no warning about the press release Whitley sent out announcing the review, nor were they aware that Whitley had provided data of the approximately 95,000 voters who were initially flagged to the state’s top prosecutors even before county officials would have access to it.
Oldham said he was tipped off about the announcement by a former local candidate who had seen a draft of the press release the attorney general’s office would send soon after Whitley’s announcement landed.
But others were caught flat-footed.
“Most of the time, it’s just very routine. [The state and counties] work together very well and then every once in a while something like this comes out,” said Douglas Ray, a special assistant county attorney in Harris County. “They characterized it as list maintenance, but it didn’t look or feel anything like ordinary list maintenance.”
And from there it got worse. The data was quickly shown to be disastrously inaccurate, with the SOS office at first quietly admitting as much to county officials. The lawsuits started coming, with county officials themselves being named in some of them for taking action upon receipt of the SOS advisory. And then the crown jewel, in which Keith Ingram threw county officials under the bus in a mealy-mouthed defense of his office’s incompetence. I’m sure this marriage of state and local elections officials can still be saved, but it’s time to get some counseling.
In the meantime, we’re still waiting for Betsy Schonhoff to tell her story in court, and for the reality to sink in on the Republican side that David Whitley’s days in office are numbered. And all of this began because of a zealous and fanatical pursuit of “illegal voters”, a problem that is very small and usually the result of misunderstanding than any bad intent, where all of the proposed “solutions” cause far more damage than they can ever hope to mitigate. All happening against the backdrop of the biggest election scandal I can recall, in which a Republican candidate for Congress and a shady campaign consultant used absentee ballots to actually steal an election, just last year, which now has to be done over. Just curious here, I don’t follow Ken Paxton on Twitter, but has he had anything to say about that? There are indeed lessons to be learned about election fraud. Our state leadership refuses to try.
I will be interested to see if any….ANY…Republican Senators vote against this worthless person for SOS.
Me too. But given that they’d have to put country, fair play, the civil rights of people who likely aren’t their voters, and the rule of law above party, don’t hold your breath. Yeah, they finally relented in NC09, but it look a son willing to testify against his father to expose perjury.
It won’t come to a vote. They haven’t even advanced the nomination out of committee. They will not go through a vote that they know will fail.
So do they persuade him behind closed doors to resign? Or do they think they have something to gain by having him stay until the current session ends? Seems to me that he’s a great lightning rod for Dem fundraising/ voter outreach, the poster child for “The GOP doesn’t give a $&@# about your civil rights.”
Looking at this as a casual observer, the way to tamp down the outrage machine is to start coming up with people who are actually registered illegally and have actually voted illegally. If it turns out that all 95,000 people named have indeed been naturalized BEFORE they signed up to vote, that doesn’t mean there was no fraud, that just means they weren’t able to prove it, and the investigation should continue. I learned that from the spygate/Mueller show.
OK, snark aside, if they can’t show that some of those 95,000 voters registered or voted illegally, then yes, he should go. If they start coming up with illegal voters, though, then he definitely needs to stay.
I am in no way shocked that you favor the kill the mosquito with the RPG approach. You probably also would go with jail ten innocents rather than let one guilty go free. This list targeted thousands of LEGAL voters, and it was 100% avoidable. No excuses, no mercy. He is unfit for the office.
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