We precinct chairs did the thing on Tuesday.
Katie Wilson
A Harris County public defender who narrowly lost her primary race for a judicial seat will be on the November ballot for a different criminal court following a late Tuesday vote by Democratic precinct chairs.
Democrats tapped Katie Wilson, a former prosecutor in Colorado, to be the party’s nominee for the 486th District Court in November. The felony court seat opened in May after a Republican judge, Aaron Burdette, announced he was resigning to pursue private practice.
Burdette’s departure triggered a new election for his court in the packed midterms — and a rare opportunity for party precinct chairs, not voters, to select a judicial candidate.
Burdette stepped down after the March primaries, when voters selected Republican and Democratic candidates to compete in the November general election. Texas election law requires precinct chairs to select a nominee for an unexpired term that falls between the primary and general elections.
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Wilson defeated Carvana Cloud, an associate judge for the city of Houston’s Municipal Courts Department, with 58% of the vote in a runoff. The other candidates included criminal defense attorneys Juan Aguirre, Cynthia Rayfield-Aguilar and Allison Mathis, as well as a prosecutor, Michael Abner.
A second prosecutor, Joseph Sanchez, was interviewed ahead of the vote, but he wasn’t nominated in time to be considered. He blamed logistical problems caused by party organizers and their use of teleconferencing.
“I did not just lose the nomination last night for the 486th District Court, I was never even given the chance to be considered or the chance to be heard due to a poorly run meeting that occurred virtually on Zoom, and due to a reductive child-like application of Robert’s Rules of Order,” Sanchez said in a Facebook post.
See here for the background, and here for the judicial Q&A responses Katie Wilson sent in for the primary. We also officially nominated Jermaine Thomas, the recently-appointed Judge of the new Harris County Civil Court At Law #5, which was easier as there was just one last-minute alternative. The process was messy and took longer than it would have if we’d done it in person, but I have no quarrel with the decision to move it to Zoom. I can’t say exactly why Joseph Sanchez didn’t get nominated – there was an announced time limit on nominations, and there were people with their hands up on the Zoom call at the time a motion to close nominations was accepted. There was also a fuss caused by a well-intentioned but poorly thought-out and executed screening process, intended to help us precinct chairs evaluate the nominees. I’m not going to get into it because something like that will never happen in that fashion again. Congratulations to Katie Wilson and Judge Jermaine Thomas. Greg Abbott hasn’t yet appointed someone to the 486th, and the Republican precinct chairs haven’t yet made their nomination; I’m sure they’d like Abbott to go first, but that’s not my problem.