Off the Kuff Rotating Header Image

February 8th, 2023:

January 2023 campaign finance reports: HISD

Previously: City of Houston, Harris County.

While I did July reports for Harris County and the city of Houston, I last rounded up HISD finance reports a year ago. As with the city it is now election season, so let’s see where the incumbents are.

Elizabeth Santos – Dist I
Kathy Blueford-Daniels – Dist II
Dani Hernandez – Dist III
Patricia Allen – Dist IV
Sue Deigaard – Dist V
Kendall Baker – Dist VI
Bridget Wade – Dist VII
Judith Cruz – Dist VIII
Myrna Guidry – Dist IX


Dist  Candidate     Raised      Spent     Loan     On Hand
==========================================================
I     Santos             0        434        0       2,174
II    B-Daniels      1,000        912    2,000       2,036
III   Hernandez          0         16        0       2,165
IV    Allen              0          0        0           0
V     Deigaard           0      1,777        0       2,084
VI    Baker              0        281        0         140
VII   Wade           2,200      3,422    8,500       1,138
VIII  Cruz               0          0        0       1,146
IX    Guidry           350        500    4,500         350

The Trustees who will be on the ballot if they run again are Blueford-Daniels, Hernandez, Allen, and Cruz. If anyone who is not an incumbent filed a report, HISD doesn’t have it available where I could find it. They will at some point have a “Trustee Election 2023” landing page where non-Trustee finance reports and financial disclosures can be found, but not yet. You can find these reports (and past reports) on each individual Trustee’s page. As you can see, no one did much in the last six months of 2022, so we start out with coffers mostly empty. How busy we get after that will depend on who else files, and that little unresolved matter with the TEA. Until then, that’s all we got. I’ll wrap up with HCC reports next.

Even the Republicans know their election contests are losers

This Chron story is about Dan Patrick telling a group of local Republicans that the 2022 election should be re-done in Harris County, because he has nothing better to say or do with his time. His claims, which the story notes he does not try to verify, aren’t worth the effort to copy and paste, but this tidbit caught my eye:

Without citing any examples of disenfranchised voters, the petition asks the court to declare the elections office made mistakes substantial enough to affect the outcome of the election.

According to Mealer’s petition, “there is no dispute that there were several dozens of polling locations who at some point in the day, ran out of paper and turned voters away.”

Tatum has maintained that while paper supplies ran low at some locations, the county has not been able to confirm whether any voters were turned away as a result.

Republican judicial candidate Erin Lunceford filed an election contest lawsuit in December after losing Harris County’s 189th judicial district court race to Democrat Tamika Craft.

In an email obtained by Craft’s attorneys and posted on the Harris County District Clerk’s website, Harris County Republican Party Chair Cindy Siegel gave candidates the party’s estimate of disenfranchised voters. Siegel’s email was sent on Jan 3, three days before the deadline to file election contest lawsuits.

“Based upon information to date we believe there were approximately 2,600 or more estimated voters turned away due to running out of ballot paper or machines not working for a period of time,” Siegel wrote.

It’s unclear whether that estimate would be enough to flip even the narrowest margins, as in Lunceford’s race, which Craft won by 2,743 votes out of more than 1 million ballots cast, or 0.26 percent of the vote.

The margins are far wider in some other races candidates are contesting. District Clerk candidate Chris Daniel lost by 25,640 votes, while County Clerk candidate Stan Stanart lost by 34,448 votes.

The election contests will be heard by Judge David Peeples of Bexar County. A trial date has not been set yet.

Emphasis mine, and see here for the previous entry. Note that as yet, not a single person has been identified as someone who showed up at a voting center on Election Day, was actually unable to cast a ballot while there because of paper issues, left before the problem was resolved, was unable to go to any of the 750 other voting locations in the county, and ultimately did not cast a ballot. Maybe such people exist and Republicans have been successful at keeping them all quiet until the lawsuits are heard, who can say. At this point, three months out, they seem as plausible as Bigfoot sightings, but let’s take Cindy Siegel at her word and assume the existence of 2600 actual people who were actually unable to cast a ballot on Election Day.

And if we do assume that statement to be a fact, then it is still the case that every single one of those Republican losers are still losers, with most of them still losing by more than a full percentage point, which is well above the standard for recounts that the loser doesn’t have to pay for. And that assumes that literally every one of those 2600 non-voters would have voted for the Republican candidate. Which would be so outlandishly unlikely as to appear to be its own conspiracy. I know that the Republicans are claiming that these problems took place at mostly Republican locations – another claim that is dubious at best and seemingly contradicted by news reporting on Election Day – but even the most partisan locations aren’t unanimous. In all likelihood, these votes would more or less split fifty-fifty, as a microcosm of the larger election, but let’s go ahead and assume the “friendly turf” claim as well. Suppose these votes split 80-20 for the Republicans, which would be plausible for an exclusive sample of such locations. That would mean that the Republicans netted about 1600 votes, which I need not point out is even farther away from closing the gap. If the margin is 60-40, the net gain is about 500 votes. Even under the most ludicrously generous assumptions, the math just plain doesn’t work.

And whatever else you may think about Dan Patrick, he’s not an idiot. He knows this. He also knows that his audience doesn’t care, and he knows that if he keeps repeating the lie, some people who don’t pay close attention will just think that the election was a mess and we don’t really know who won and maybe these “election integrity” laws that the Republicans keep passing have some merit. Winning takes many forms, after all. The Trib, which reported Patrick’s remarks but didn’t fact check them, and Campos, who called the Trib story “lazyarse reporting”, have more.

Uvalde school district will not finish its internal review of police response to mass shooting

If nothing else, there are two clear arguments to be made in this debate.

The Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District announced it will not continue with an independent review of the district police response to the Robb Elementary School shooting.

UCISD announced in September it would work with JPPI Investigations to conduct an internal review of its police response to the deadly mass shooting that killed 19 students and 2 teachers last year.

The City of Uvalde previously engaged Jesse Prado of JPPI Investigations to investigate actions by the Uvalde Police Department.

A spokesperson with the district told the Uvalde Leader-News it halted the review and will work with findings from four different investigations.

This includes reports from a Texas House Committee, the Texas School Safety Center, the Texas School Police Chiefs’ Association, and the U.S. Department of Justice.

Note that UCISD has suspended its police force, and only one member of its force is still employed by UCISD, with that person still on leave. Given all this, pick your side:

1. It’s unlikely that UCISD’s own report would tell anyone anything that couldn’t be learned from the four other reviews. Producing that report costs money that UCISD could better spend elsewhere. UCISD doesn’t even have a police force at this point. The TSPCA report provided “a blueprint for building a suitable police force” if they do want one. Dropping the JPPI report was the sensible thing to do.

2. UCISD has a moral obligation to understand what went wrong with the police force they employed and why, whether or not they have their own police department going forward. The other reports will concentrate on their own actors and responsibilities and may not address concerns specific to UCISD. Those reports are being produced on their own timetable and may not be available to UCISD any time soon, or indeed at all. The TSPCA and Justice Department reports are not public, and if anyone deserves to know what happened, it’s the people of Uvalde. Not producing their own report is ducking their responsibilities and should be condemned.

Have at it.