Meanwhile, former trustee-elect Brittnai Brown has challenged the notion stipulated in a lawsuit against her that she did not reside in Humble ISD for the required six months before the filing deadline to run for office.
The district found Brown was ineligible because she was not a registered voter in Humble ISD before the filing deadline, despite living in the area.
Brown said she updated her voter registration a few hours before filing for office, with the understanding that when she received a confirmation from the website that she had initiated her address change, that meant she had taken the appropriate measures.
“Verifying both residency and voter registration falls under the shared responsibility of the election administrator and the district. As a candidate, I followed all stated procedures and submitted documentation in good faith,” Brown said in an email to the Houston Chronicle.
It takes up to 30 days for voter registration to become valid after a person changes their address, meaning that Brown’s registration was not technically valid until one month after the filing deadline. She said she was not aware of this discrepancy. Humble ISD representatives had previously said that they had not previously encountered an issue with voter registration of candidates before.
“I chose to run because I believe in the power of education to transform lives. My goal in running for the school board was to ensure that every student regardless of background receives a quality education in a safe, supportive learning environment,” Brown said.
The candidate who filed the challenge against Brown’s candidacy, Tracy Shannon, had asked in her lawsuit to be named victor since she received the second highest number of votes, but district counsel said last month that the only legal recourse they could take in the wake of Brown’s ineligibility was to have the current trustee, Ken Kirchhofer, stay on until the board decides how to fill the vacant seat, either by appointment or by a special election.
Shannon said that she would await which option the board chose for filling the seat, and added that “this whole issue highlights some need to change the law to clarify that the election authority needs to have some responsibility to determine eligibility beyond looking at the application.”
See here for the background. The first half of that story was about a recount that I wasn’t interested in. I appreciate the explanation that candidate Brown provided, but it’s not clear to me that even if it’s accepted it would re-qualify her. The original story didn’t specify when Brown updated her registration but said it was likely around the time of the filing deadline, which is generally around ten weeks before the election. That’s still not enough time to meet the “registered to vote in Humble ISD six months before the election” rule. She may be saying she was living in Humble ISD before then and perhaps her voter registration just hadn’t been updated in a timely fashion to reflect that, but if that’s the case I would think she’d need to sue to challenge the six-month requirement for it to matter. I Am Not A Lawyer, etc etc etc, so who knows what comes next. The Humble board didn’t take it up in their June 3 meeting, but their next meeting is this Tuesday, and one way or another they have to decide what to do with that seat. I’ll keep an eye on it.