Off the Kuff Rotating Header Image

March 14th, 2023:

The latest obsession of election denialist crackpots

Mar 14th, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
3 comments

You may want to sit down before you read this.

In virtual meetings taking place over a year, right-wing activists and Republican legislators have stoked concern over a multistate coalition that Texas and more than 30 other states use to help clean voter rolls. The majority of their grievances — that it is run by left-wing voter registration activists and funded by George Soros, among other things — were pulled straight from a far-right conspiracy website and are baseless.

Now, lawmakers who regularly attend those meetings have introduced legislation written by the group that would end Texas’s participation in the Electronic Registration Information Center, also known as ERIC.

The bills were introduced despite the efforts of Texas’s elections director, who attended a meeting and offered factual information related to their concerns last April, apparently without success.

Keith Ingram, the elections director for the secretary of state’s office, told the group the program was the only option available to ensure voters aren’t registered or voting in more than one state at the same time. Nonetheless, the activists moved forward with an effort that experts say is set to undermine one of the best election integrity tools available to Texas and other states to prevent election fraud.

“We want to be able to do something and we have a senator that’s willing to help change that or add language or improve or reform ERIC,” said Toni Anne Dashiell last August, referring to Sen. Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola. Dashiell, the Republican national committeewoman for Texas, organizes the meetings and refers to them as “TAD Talks.”

Shortly after, the group’s ERIC task force — led by Alan Vera, the current Harris County Republican Party ballot security chairman, and Dana Myers, the Texas Republican Party vice-chair — began drafting legislation. Myers declined to comment for this story. Dashiell and Vera did not respond to Votebeat’s requests for comment or to emailed questions about how the effort would improve elections in Texas.

Vera announced during a January meeting of the task force that they had submitted the draft of such a bill to Hughes’ staff for review. Hughes, who attended almost every single one of the virtual meetings, filed legislation with their suggestions as Senate Bill 1070 in February. Rep. Jacey Jetton, R-Richmond, also a regular speaker in the virtual calls, filed a companion bill in the House. Hughes and Jetton did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

“Now, there is no evidence that ERIC is doing anything to Texas voter rolls, I want to be clear about that,” Hughes said during a virtual meeting in October. “But we do know, again, that the people running ERIC don’t share our worldview.”

There’s a lot more, so read the rest and also read this TPM story from earlier in the week that was about other states doing similar stuff. The very short summary here is that bad people who lie a lot about “vote fraud” are baselessly attacking a bipartisan tool that actually helps identify people who are registered in multiple states and wanting to replace it with some unknown thing that they control. Nothing good can come of this, and unfortunately like most things there’s not much we can do if Republicans are determined to pass something. More from TPM here.

(There is one thing we can do, and that’s really try to take out Rep. Jetton in 2024. HD26 was moderately competitive in 2020, though less so last year. Still, this is a purple-ish district and he should be strongly challenged for facilitating such denialist bullshit. We’re never going to get anywhere until some Republicans start losing elections as a result of the extremist things they do. Jacey Jetton and HD26 is as good a place to start with this as any.)

The Lege still doesn’t want to pay for Paxton’s whistleblower sins

Mar 14th, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

Who can blame them?

A crook any way you look

Now midway through the legislative session, Paxton and state lawmakers are at a standstill, and taxpayers are caught in the middle.

Lawmakers have so far declined to include the settlement money in any budget bills, while Paxton argues that the agreement would ultimately save taxpayers from funding a lengthy court case that may end with a higher price tag.

The whistleblowers’ accusations have prompted an ongoing Department of Justice investigation of Paxton, who has denied any wrongdoing. Paxton’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Political experts say the Legislature’s reluctance to embrace the agreement could be a tactic to pressure Paxton to either pay for the settlement himself or answer for the corruption allegations in court.

“It’s like the Legislature is telling Paxton that this is his problem to take care of,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston. “This is as close as Paxton will come to a political sanction from his party for his actions. … The party is not going to directly say that they think that he’s done wrong, but they certainly don’t want to be on the hook to foot the bill.”

Lawmakers suggested at a budget hearing last month that Paxton should use his own campaign funds to settle the case, as the state’s election laws allow. But a Paxton staffer interjected, noting that whistleblower laws hold the office accountable, not the officeholder.

[…]

As of January, Paxton had $2.3 million in his campaign war chest and $1.3 million in outstanding loans. He would have to fundraise to pay off the rest of the settlement — a “horrific” option for the attorney general, Rottinghaus said.

The whistleblowers on Wednesday requested that the Texas Supreme Court lift its temporary pause on the case. If Paxton and the whistleblowers remain at an impasse through the end of legislative session in May, they’ll all head back to court.

Chris Hilton, the general litigation division chief and a lawyer for Paxton, accused the whistleblowers on Thursday of trying to “undo the agreement by filing a misleading brief with the Texas Supreme Court, all the while coordinating with the media to create drama.”

“We’ll continue to seek a cost-efficient resolution, even while the plaintiffs needlessly drag this process out,” Hilton said.

Turner pushed back on that claim, pointing to a court filing by the attorney general’s office in which Paxton’s attorneys agreed that “should the parties prove unable to obtain funding,” they would jointly ask the Texas Supreme Court to resume the case.

“As we negotiated the formal agreement, the attorney general backtracked and would not agree to a deadline for legislative approval,” Turner said. “Anyone reading this can easily decide for themselves who is being misleading and who is dragging this process out.”

Cal Jillson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University, said Paxton is essentially giving the Legislature an ultimatum: “‘Pay to clean up my mess, or as I stall on this set of corruption charges brought against me by my former employees, that could sum up to a great deal more than $3.3 million.’”

The only reason the attorney general’s staff knows the cost could be higher, Jillson said, “is because they intend to stretch this thing out as far as possible.”

With two months left in the legislative session, there’s still plenty of time for lawmakers to change their minds, but it’s a touchy subject.

See here for the background. I remain fine with the stance that the Lege has taken so far, however doubtful I am about their resolve. Put simply, don’t bail out Ken Paxton. I recognize that this puts a burden on the whistleblowers, who did us all a favor by coming forward like this, and I regret that they are caught in the middle. I also maintain that approving the settlement and cutting the AG’s budget by an equivalent (or greater!) amount would be fine, but I have yet to see any suggestion of that in any of these stories. Changing the law to allow Paxton to pay this with his campaign funds might be OK, and there are other ideas that could work. All I care is that no one takes Paxton off the hook. If that means the taxpayers face a bigger payout down the line, so be it. The point is that he should own it all. The Trib has more.

Metro gets some BRT money

Mar 14th, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

Thank you, FTA, may we please have some more?

Houston’s biggest bus rapid transit line, the planned University Corridor, is still on the drawing board, but already is drawing in federal funds.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, in a Thursday announcement, said the Metropolitan Transit Authority project will receive $150 million in the upcoming budget of the Federal Transit Administration, as part of the New Starts grant program for major transit projects. The approval, subject to Congress passing the overall budget, marks the first federal funds dedicated to the line, out of a potential $939.3 million of the $1.57 billion cost that could come from Washington.

“It is going to help people get where they need to go,” Buttigieg said of the project, one of nine chosen nationally for new funding, totaling $1.3 billion.

The line, when built, will stretch more than 25 miles from the Tidwell Transit Center to the area around the University of Houston, then westward through Midtown, Greenway Plaza, south of Uptown and eventually to Westchase. Buses will have their own dedicated lanes, either by taking existing lanes from local streets such as Lockwood and Richmond, or along its own route parallel to Westpark Drive.

Officials are wrapping up their second round of public meetings on plans for the route, with construction scheduled to start in late 2024. The buses could begin carrying riders in 2028. Current timelines, and all the federal funding, are contingent on the project being completely designed and Metro and federal officials agreeing on the project’s specifics next year.

Transit agency CEO Tom Lambert called the award “great news,” and credited staff for keeping the project on pace after voters approved the long-range plan in 2019, even as Metro maneuvered through a massive drop in ridership related to the COVID pandemic.

Metro’s board is set to consider, possibly later this month, the preferred route for the dedicated lanes.

See here, here, and here for some background. I’m eager to see the official preferred route – we have a route for the Inner Katy BRT line, which if all goes as planned will open a year earlier, in 2027 – and start thinking about how to actually get around town with these things. I will reiterate what I said in that Inner Katy post, which is that to truly realize the potential of these routes, some investment will need to be made along them both in increasing and improving the sidewalks that will connect the stops to the surrounding neighborhoods. For example, if there’s a stop along the Universities BRT at Westpark and Newcastle, building in about a half-mile of sidewalk along Newcastle to the south will connect to Bellaire (where there’s already a really nice and wide walking path) and the HCC West Loop campus. There’s no reason not to make this investment in maximizing the utility of these transit lines.

Also, too, and I’ll never not be bitter about this, but this would open 25 years after the Main Street light rail line, and what, 15 years after the various extensions were built. Had it not been for John Culberson, we could have already had a Universities light rail line in place and maybe be adding on to it instead of building this from scratch so many years later. I know there’s nothing to be gained from crying over this, and all we can do is work to make what we have now better, but this is a grudge I will hold till I die.