Good, but perhaps not the end of the story.
A North Texas appeals court rejected a petition from a Dallas County republican trying to force the county to hold a precinct-specific Election Day for the upcoming primary election.
The petition came after former county GOP Chair Allen West agreed to countywide voting for upcoming runoffs — in the wake of a chaotic March election marred by confusion and legal challenges.
The filing from petitioner Barry Wernick, a Republican Party precinct chair and commissioners court candidate, requested the Dallas-based Fifth Court of Appeals order the county elections administrator to conduct the upcoming runoff Election Day with precinct-based polling places.
The judges declined Friday, finding they had no jurisdiction to do so. They also found Wernick had no standing for relief, in part because he won his primary race outright and wasn’t in a runoff.
He also was not a party to the election services agreement between the GOP’s County Executive Committee and the county, the court said, calling Wernick “a stranger to the contract.”
“(Wernick) is a party precinct chair and, therefore, a member of the CEC. He also serves as a chair of a committee of the CEC,” Friday’s opinion said. “But he is not the county executive committee, nor is he chair of the CEC.”
The court did not weigh in on the merits of the challenge itself — namely, whether the contract to go back to countywide voting between the county and the GOP under West was valid.
Wernick said he was disappointed by the decision. In a thread on X, he said he was weighing his next steps including a possible appeal to the Texas Supreme Court.
See here for the previous update. I’m not worried about this dude appealing – even to my non-lawyer’s eyes it’s clear he has no standing and I’d fully expect the Supreme Court to swat him aside. There’s still time for someone who does have standing to file a writ with the appellate court, and I don’t know enough to have a sense of how that might go. More likely than not this is the end of it – for this year, because as we’ve discussed before, the overall issue of voting centers versus precinct location voting isn’t going away – but I’m not ready to hoist a victory flag just yet.