Kelly Hall
Kelly Hall and his co-worker were playing the video game “Call of Duty” in the office of their Austin towing company, waiting for customers, when his friend turned his attention to another television.
The election results were up on the screen, and Hall was winning a race he didn’t even know he was still a part of.
“I laughed,” Hall, 36, said. “I was like, ‘Bro, stop playing.’ And he’s like, ‘No, bro, look.’”
Sure enough, he was ahead of his Democratic opponent, Javi Andrade, by a decisive amount.
Hall barely remembers the number of the solidly red Central Texas district he ran in or the name of his would-be Republican opponent, state Rep. Ellen Troxclair. He paid a total of $750 on the campaign, enough to cover the filing fee, then never touched a single yard sign or dirtied a sneaker blockwalking.
Hall said he thought he had dropped out of the race back in January, when he said Democratic Party precinct chairs urged him to “do the right thing” and allow the party-backed Andrade to run unopposed. He decided to run for Round Rock mayor instead.
But on Tuesday, Hall beat Andrade by almost 3,000 votes after missing a December deadline to drop out in time for his name to be removed from ballots.
The bizarre outcome has thrown what would have been a low-profile race into chaos, with some of the state’s top election lawyers clashing over whose name will be on the ballot in November.
The Texas Democratic Party is moving to replace Hall, who it says is ineligible for the nomination because he is running in the Round Rock mayor’s race. But the Republican-controlled secretary of state’s office says the party cannot pick a substitute, potentially setting the stage for what could be a drawn-out legal battle.
[…]
After filing for the HD 19 nomination, Hall said four precinct chairs reached out to him to implore him to consider stepping down, saying the party already had its preferred candidate. Hall said he felt like he didn’t have a choice but to agree. And he didn’t want to run somewhere he clearly wasn’t wanted anyway.
Hall grew up in Oklahoma, where he worked as a correctional officer, before moving to Texas a decade ago. He visited Austin for South by Southwest to party, parked somewhere he shouldn’t, got his car towed and ended up staying in town to work for the towing company because he couldn’t immediately afford the fees.
Hall, who has also served in the Texas State Guard, said he feels his hard-knock background makes him a more relatable candidate than the typical politician.
“They’re mad because they spent thousands of dollars, and I spent nothing,” Hall said about the Texas Democratic Party.
Andrade, an Army veteran and cybersecurity specialist, received about $1,500 in donations and had about $2,150 on hand as of mid-January, according to campaign finance records. Hall’s campaign records show $0 all the way down.
“I mean, it’s kind of cool because everyone thinks you have to be a millionaire or have all this money to run for office and make a difference. You could be just yourself,” he said. “That right there is going to mess up the Democratic and Republican Party because I just won doing nothing. … I just showed right then and there anything is possible.”
[…]
Craig Morgan, the three-term Round Rock mayor Hall is challenging, has been learning more than he ever bargained for about these types of tedious procedural rules. But Morgan has been mostly focused on another part of the statute: residency requirements.
Hall provided a Cedar Park address when he filed for candidacy in House District 19 but a Round Rock address when he filed for mayor. Both the Texas House and city of Round Rock require candidates to have lived within the district or city for a minimum of one year to be eligible to run.
“On one of them, he lied,” Morgan said of Hall’s forms. “That’s just the reality of it.”
Hall said that he was living between two homes and now primarily lives in Round Rock. He did not own either home. His sister was renting the Cedar Park home, and he lived there while he was helping her with her kids as she moved in. Hall said he had lived in the state House district for over two years when he applied, and he began renting the Round Rock home in January 2025.
Morgan said he explored his legal options to contest Hall’s residency but decided it was not worth the trouble because the court precedents on the issue are “all over the map.” He also did not want to sue his longtime colleagues.
“I’m just not going to sue a city that I’ve given 15 years to,” he said. “They’re just doing their jobs.”
There are at least three villains in this story. First of course is Kelly Hall, for being fickle and feckless. Like, a handful of your opponent’s supporters asked you to drop out, and you got your nose all out of joint? If you can’t laugh that kind of thing off, you’re not cut out for politics. Second is Javi Andrade and his supporters, for not raising any money or apparently running any campaign. There were only 13K votes cast in this race; Kelly Hall had 7,887 of them. Any half-decent blockwalking strategy could have overcome that. Take a good look in the mirror before you complain about the result.
But most of all, Texas’ ridiculous residency laws, which we know from plentiful past experience are basically meaningless, are to blame. The problem with the TDP now claiming that Kelly Hall was actually ineligible to run in the primary is that they accepted his candidate filing, because they would have had no grounds at the time to disqualify him. Your residence is where you say it is, whether or not you have ever lived there, as long as you can say you plan to live there. I’m not even sure that Hall’s “I live here, there, and everywhere” filing strategy is illegal under current law. Maybe the TDP could pursue some kind of fraud claim, but good luck proving intent.
We have a gentleperson’s agreement in this state to mostly look the other way when someone claims a warehouse or a summer house or their mother’s living room sofa as their residence, and most of the time it doesn’t matter; opposing candidates seldom raise it as an issue in races, and when they do the voters often don’t care, or at least don’t prioritize it as an issue. Every once in awhile, it leads to a dumb result, like what happened here, and the courts will shrug their shoulders and say the law as written is sufficiently broad and vague that there’s nothing they can do. That’s what I expect to happen here. It doesn’t matter much – as noted, HD19 is a 70% Trump district, and by the available evidence Javi Andrade was not going to be any better an opponent to the incumbent than Kelly Hall would have been. This will just become another one of those stories about why our residency laws are so stupid. I’ll trot it out as an example the next time this happens, which it surely will in a few more years.