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July 27th, 2020:

Interview with Teneshia Hudspeth

Jul 27th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
7 comments

Teneshia Hudspeth

As you know, HCDP precinct chairs will be picking a nominee for Harris County Clerk, to run for Diane Trautman’s unexpired term. The leading candidate for this is Teneshia Hudspeth, who has worked in the Clerk’s office for fifteen years and has been a top lieutenant in the elections division. I’ve interacted with Teneshia multiple times over the years, and I plan to vote for her in my role as precinct chair. With the selection process coming up on August 15, I wanted to take the opportunity to interview her, so my fellow precinct chairs and everyone who’ll get to vote for her in November can get to know her a little better. The job of County Clerk will be different when she takes office thanks to the adoption of an elections administrator by Commissioners Court, and that made this interview a little weird for both of us, since my questions to Clerk candidates have usually been about election matters, and right now we don’t know exactly what that will mean going forward. But we persevered, and you can hear the result here:

You can review the Q&As I did with the HCDE candidates as well:

Jose Rivera
David Brown
Obes Nwabara

How to lose a Congressional seat

Jul 27th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
2 comments

As things stand right now, Texas will gain three Congressional seats in the 2021 reapportionment, as Texas continues to be the fastest-growing state in the country. There is one thing that can stop that, however: Donald Trump.

President Donald Trump opened a new front Tuesday in his effort to keep undocumented immigrants from being counted when lawmakers redraw congressional districts next year, a move that could cost Texas several seats in Congress if it succeeds.

Trump attempted last year to include a citizenship question on the 2020 census, but was shot down by the courts. On Tuesday, he signed a memorandum directing Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross to exclude undocumented immigrants who might be included in the census count from the “apportionment base,” or the base population that’s used to divide up seats in Congress.

The order, which will surely be challenged in court, is Trump’s latest effort to differentiate between citizens and noncitizens when states redraw the boundaries of political districts each decade to account for growth. Recent estimates indicate the size of the undocumented population in Texas has reached nearly 1.8 million. Excluding those residents from population counts to draw up congressional districts would likely lead to a drastic realignment of representation and power throughout the state.

The U.S. Constitution mandates that representation in Congress be divided among states based on a count every 10 years of every person residing in the country. But the Constitution, Trump wrote, does not define “which persons must be included in the apportionment base.”

“Excluding these illegal aliens from the apportionment base is more consonant with the principles of representative democracy underpinning our system of Government,” the memo reads. “Affording congressional representation, and therefore formal political influence, to States on account of the presence within their borders of aliens who have not followed the steps to secure a lawful immigration status under our laws undermines those principles.”

[…]

“The Constitution requires that everyone in the U.S. be counted in the census,” Dale Ho, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, said in a statement. “President Trump can’t pick and choose. He tried to add a citizenship question to the census and lost in the Supreme Court. His latest attempt to weaponize the census for an attack on immigrant communities will be found unconstitutional. We’ll see him in court, and win, again.”

Litigation has indeed been filed, in multiple lawsuits and venues at this point. My interest in pointing this out was the very narrow one of showing what this would mean to Texas.

If unauthorized immigrants were excluded from the apportionment count, California, Florida and Texas would each end up with one less congressional seat than they would have been awarded based on population change alone. California would lose two seats instead of one, Florida would gain one instead of two, and Texas would gain two instead of three, according to analysis based on projections of Census Bureau 2019 population estimates and the Center’s estimates of the unauthorized immigrant population.

Alabama, Minnesota and Ohio would each hold onto a seat that they would have lost if apportionment were based only on total population change. Alabama filed a lawsuit in 2018 seeking to block the Census Bureau from including unauthorized immigrants in its population count.

[…]

The Census Bureau does not regularly publish counts or estimates of unauthorized immigrants, although the Department of Homeland Security has done so. Last year, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against including a question about citizenship on the 2020 census, the president ordered the Census Bureau to assemble a separate database, using other government records, on the citizenship status of every U.S. resident. This has also been challenged in court.

The Center’s analysis relies on assumptions about populations to be counted in the 2020 census and estimates of unauthorized immigrants. The actual figures used for apportionment will be different from these, and so the actual apportionment could differ regardless of whether unauthorized immigrants are excluded from the apportionment totals.

You might think that Texas’ political leaders would be up in arms about this. That Congressional seat belongs to Texas! State’s rights! You know the drill. And sadly, you also know that our Trump-hugging Attorney General would never, ever say or do anything that would contradict his Dear Leader. What’s a Congressional seat (or two, or even three, if our dismal failure to support a complete Census effort causes the official count to be unexpectedly low) compared to a favorable tweet from Donald Trump? That’s a question we should all be asking, loudly and often, in 2022, when they are up for re-election.

One more thing:

Texas House leaders have previously indicated to The Texas Tribune they have no plans to alter the way Texas redraws political districts even if the Legislature obtained more detailed data on citizenship.

“Bottom line, the law for the Texas House and the Senate — and frankly the courts and the State Board of Education — requires it be done by total population, as does the U.S. Constitution with regard to congressional seats,” said state Rep. Phil King, a Republican from Weatherford who chairs the House Redistricting Committee.

That’s good to hear, but my understanding is that while the State House is explicitly mandated to use total population in redistricting, the State Senate is not. That’s why it was the Senate map that was targeted in the Evenwel case. So, while I hope Rep. King means what he says here, the possibility very much exists that the Lege will try a different tack. (Also, it’s usually the House that draws the House map, and the Senate that draws the Senate map. I’d like to know what the relevant Senate committee chair has to say about this.)

UPDATE: From Ross Ramsey at the Trib:

In a letter urging Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to take legal action to stop the proposal, state Rep. Chris Turner, D-Grand Prairie, framed the idea as an attack on Texas.

“Filing suit to block the Presidential Memorandum to the Secretary of Commerce dated July 21 would be wholly consistent with your official biography that explains as Attorney General, you are ‘focused on protecting Texans and upholding Texas laws and the Constitution’ and ‘fighting federal overreach.’ Indeed, if unchallenged, the President’s actions would likely hurt Texas more than any other state.”

The partisan politics here are clear enough. Turner is the chairman of the Texas House Democratic Caucus. Paxton, a Republican, is the newly branded co-chair of the national Lawyers for Trump.

But not all that is political is partisan, even in an election year. Does anyone in elected office here think Texas should have less influence in Washington, D.C.?

Good question. Someone should ask Ken Paxton, and Greg Abbott, and Dan Patrick, and John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, and all of the Republican members of Congress.

The contact tracing debacle

Jul 27th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
6 comments

Let us never forget about this.

Just as coronavirus infections began rising a few weeks ago in Texas, contract workers hired by the state to track down exposed Texans were spending hours doing little or no work, received confusing or erroneous instructions and often could not give people the advice they expected, interviews and records indicate.

Health authorities around Texas also say they are running into technical snags with new contact tracing software the state has deployed, known as Texas Health Trace, saying it isn’t ready for widespread use in their counties.

The chaotic beginning and technical glitches — combined with exploding case counts and widespread testing delays — have undermined the goals of boosting COVID-19 monitoring statewide and the state’s massive deal for a privatized contact tracing workforce.

“I know that a lot of local health departments are still trying to figure out how to utilize that contract and some have decided to do the work on their own,” said David Lakey, chief medical officer at the University of Texas System and former commissioner of the Department of State Health Services (DSHS). “There is concern with local health department individuals I’ve talked to related to how they are going to benefit related to this large investment from the state.”

DSHS said problems identified by the Houston Chronicle have since been fixed and that “every week” more counties are using its software.

Gov. Greg Abbott’s office said months ago that robust contact tracing capacity would help Texas “box in” the coronavirus. But after the state reopened its economy, infections, hospitalizations and deaths skyrocketed, making it impossible for many health departments to keep up with contact tracing.

“When you kind of jump the gun a little bit and open too soon, and you skip the processes that need to be in place, this kind of thing happens,” Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo said. “You might have the most successfully designed contact tracing program or you may not, but honestly it’s not gonna make a difference because you’re setting yourself up to fail.”

At the state level, Texas moved to ramp up and modernize contact tracing in May, when the Texas Health and Human Services Commission quietly awarded a $295 million contact tracing deal to little-known MTX Group, a tech startup that has a headquarters in North Texas. Abbott’s office has staunchly defended the emergency expenditure, but it’s been controversial from the get-go.

The bid for the work, which was never publicly posted, was awarded to MTX without input from top state leaders, and more than a dozen legislators subsequently called for the state to cancel the contract.

More recently, four people who performed contact tracing work for MTX or one of its partners raised questions about the tech company’s performance. They spoke to the Chronicle on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak on the record about their employment. Three said they fielded only a handful of phone calls during several weeks in May and June.

You can read on for details of the various failures of the program as implemented, and you can see here for more on Texas Health Trace. My point is that having a certain number of contact tracers in place, a number that was never met, was one of the four conditions of reopening set by Greg Abbott. The real failure here, as has been the case with everything else, was the complete lack of effort to meet those metrics that were set out. The failure to do so led directly to the situation we’re in now. The fact that MTX was given a no-bid contract on Abbott’s say-so and no one else’s input is a separate issue, one that deserves a fuller exploration, but not necessarily a main cause of the failure. It’s possible to imagine a scenario in which a legitimate and fully-resourced company could have gotten this contract in a similar fashion and done a better job with it. The process would have still been a problem, but at least the result was okay. Here we had both a bad process and a bad outcome, and both of those need to be investigated. They also need to be hung around Greg Abbott’s neck from now until November of 2022.