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Collin County

House impeaches Paxton

For the third time in as many days, I say Wow.

A crook any way you look

In a history-making late-afternoon vote, a divided Texas House chose Saturday to impeach Attorney General Ken Paxton, temporarily removing him from office over allegations of misconduct that included bribery and abuse of office.

The vote to adopt the 20 articles of impeachment was 121-23.

Attention next shifts to the Texas Senate, which will conduct a trial with senators acting as jurors and designated House members presenting their case as impeachment managers.

Permanently removing Paxton from office and barring him from holding future elected office in Texas would require the support of two-thirds of senators.

The move to impeach came less than a week after the House General Investigating Committee revealed that it was investigating Paxton for what members described as a yearslong pattern of misconduct and questionable actions that include bribery, dereliction of duty and obstruction of justice. They presented the case against him Saturday, acknowledging the weight of their actions.

“Today is a very grim and difficult day for this House and for the state of Texas,” Rep. David Spiller, R-Jacksboro, a committee member, told House members.

“We have a duty and an obligation to protect the citizens of Texas from elected officials who abuse their office and their powers for personal gain,” Spiller said. “As a body, we should not be complicit in allowing that behavior.”

Paxton supporters criticized the impeachment proceedings as rushed, secretive and based on hearsay accounts of actions taken by Paxton, who was not given the opportunity to defend himself to the investigating committee.

“This process is indefensible,” said Rep. John Smithee, R-Amarillo, who complained that the vote was taking place on a holiday weekend before members had time to conduct a thorough review of the accusations. “It concerns me a lot because today it could be General Paxton, tomorrow it could be you and the next day it could be me.”

[…]

The vote came as hardline conservatives supportive of Paxton’s aggressive strategy of suing the Biden administration were lining up in support of him. Former President Donald Trump — a close political ally to Paxton — blasted the impeachment proceedings as an attempt to unseat “the most hard working and effective” attorney general and thwart the “large number of American Patriots” who voted for Paxton.

Trump vowed to target any Republican who voted to impeach Paxton.

As lawmakers listened to the committee members make their case, Paxton took to social media to boost conservatives who had come to his defense, including Trump, U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Georgia, and conservative radio host Grant Stinchfield, who tweeted, “Kangaroo Court in Texas.”

About 90 minutes into the debate, the official Twitter account of the Texas attorney general’s office began tweeting at members of the committee to challenge some of the claims being made.

“Please tell the truth,” the agency’s account said.

Because Paxton was impeached while the Legislature was in session, the Texas Constitution requires the Senate to remain in Austin after the regular session ends Monday or set a trial date for the future, with no deadline for a trial spelled out in the law.

See here and here for the background. The Trib did some liveblogging of the proceedings, and DMN reported Lauren McGaughy was livetweeting it. You can see how every member voted here. Of interest: Every member from Paxton’s home base of Collin County voted Aye. Everyone in Harris County voted Aye except Reps. Harless (HD126, Nay), Paul (HD129, Nay), Schofield (HD132, Nay), Swanson (HD150, Nay), and Harold Fucking Dutton (Present, Not Voting). Rep. Tom Oliverson was an Excused Absence, and Rep. Shawn Thierry was marked as absent.

As noted before, if Paxton is convicted Greg Abbott will appoint a replacement, who would then have to run in 2024. He can appoint an interim AG pending the Senate action, but has not yet said anything as of the drafting of this post. We do have this:

We wait to see when the Senate will act. I’ll have some further thoughts later. The Chron, WFAA, the Statesman, Texas Public Radio, the San Antonio Report, the Texas Signal, Reform Austin, Daily Kos, TPM, Mother Jones, and the Press have more.

Sexual harassment lawsuit against Collin County DA settled

From last week.

Greg Willis

Collin County Commissioners unanimously agreed Monday to settle an amended lawsuit against the Collin County District Attorney’s Office by three current and three former employees of that office.

The suit accused District Attorney Greg Willis and First Assistant District Attorney Bill Wirskye of sexually harassing multiple women who work or have worked in the district attorney’s office, and of retaliating against them when they refused to comply with their sexual advances.

In a statement released by Collin County Judge Chris Hill, he also claims the lawsuit falsely claimed members of the Commissioners Court were aware of the misconduct in the office and refused to take action.

The statement goes onto say the Commissioners Court engaged an independent legal firm to investigate the allegations immediately upon learning of them. That investigator talked with more than 30 current and former employees at the DA’s office, who they say discovered numerous inconsistencies, inaccuracies and false statements in the allegations. Multiple employees also reportedly directly disputed many of the lawsuit’s allegations.

“As the female leadership in the Collin County District Attorney’s Office, we would like to issue this statement in support of District Attorney Greg Willis and First Assistant Bill Wirskye,” said 11 current female chief prosecutors in the Collin County DA’s Office. “They have cultivated an environment that empowers women and supports working mothers. We are proud to continue to seek justice alongside their leadership.”

The Commissioners Court said in the statement they ultimately concluded the allegations were unfounded and refused to settle claims of sexual misconduct and sexual harassment, along with allegations against court members.

“In spite of the Court’s objections, the county’s insurance company was concerned about the potential costs of litigation and any potential judgment, and the insurer offered the six plaintiffs $1.75 million to settle the lawsuit,” the statement reads. “The six plaintiffs amended their lawsuit, retracting the allegations of sexual harassment and sexual misconduct, retracting all allegations against the Court members, and retracting the allegations against the District Attorney and the First Assistant District Attorney.”

The plaintiffs alleged in an amended filing that they suffered retaliation and subsequently accepted the settlement offer.

Afterward, the three remaining employees resigned from their employment with the county, the statement added, as a condition of the settlement agreement.

See here and here for the background. Willis is a longtime Ken Paxton crony, which is what interested me in the case to begin with. There’s some information in the story about the allegations – there’s more in those links I provided above – but no response about the dismissal from the plaintiffs’ side, so all we have is the defense posturing to analyze. The original allegations were pretty shocking, but a lot of things can happen between the filings and the courtroom. I’m fascinated by the defense putting the onus on the settlement on the county’s insurance company, like “we wanted to fight this in court but those actuarial wusses held us back”. I sure wish I knew more, but this is often how it goes. KERA has more.

So whose fault is the Sidney Powell lawsuit dismissal?

My reaction to the news that the lawsuit brought by the State Bar of Texas against Trump nutcase lawyer Sidney Powell was being dismissed was that it was the State Bar’s fault for screwing up the paperwork. The DMN editorial board puts the blame elsewhere.

A local Republican judge’s decision to throw out the State Bar of Texas’ disciplinary case against former Donald Trump lawyer Sidney Powell on flimsy technical grounds was a disservice to the public the judge serves.

Collin County state District Judge Andrea Bouressa last week granted Powell’s motion for a summary judgment largely because of filing and clerical errors bar lawyers made. Among the mistakes Bouressa found so egregious were a mislabeling of the bar’s exhibits and a failure to file a sworn affidavit attached to a motion.

What a travesty of justice. Such errors occur in court cases often. And while not excusable, they shouldn’t be a basis for a judge to throw out such a serious case without considering evidence.

[…]

There’s no question the state bar made some careless errors in its brief asking the judge to deny Powell’s motion to dismiss the case for lack of evidence. Exhibits were clearly mislabeled and some were altogether missing.

But Bouressa’s heavy-handed ruling is concerning. First, it wasn’t rendered as part of an in-person hearing, during which the filing issues may well have been quickly resolved in open court.

Rather, her decision came after her private review of the parties’ documents. Her judgment says that she tried to contact the bar’s lawyers for clarification on their confusing exhibits, but it “responded that no corrective action was necessary.”

That’s puzzling. The court file revealed only one email exchange between Bouressa’s court coordinator and a legal assistant at the bar, and it involved only one question about one exhibit. The assistant answered the question.

We understand it’s within Bouressa’s right to rule against a party for clerical errors. But legal experts tell us that appellate courts lately have been frowning upon judges who dismiss cases based on filing mistakes rather than on actual evidence.

That’s what happened here. Eric Porterfield, associate professor at the University of North Texas Dallas College of Law and an expert in civil procedure, reviewed the judgment for us and said it’s clear that while the bar was sloppy, Bouressa’s decision wasn’t based on the merits of the case.

Instead, the regal Bouressa got hung up on what she called the “defects” of the bar’s documents. In doing so, she shut the door on the public’s right for a full hearing of the facts surrounding Powell’s outlandish conspiracy theories that threatened the peaceful transfer of the power of the presidency.

See here for the background. As I said, my initial inclination, made with admittedly limited information, was that the State Bar screwed it up. If this take is more accurate, then they were screwed by the judge. The good news there is that appealing the dismissal is an option and it has a decent chance of working. If they do that, then I retract what I said before about the State Bar.

State Bar lawsuit against Paxton survives motion to dismiss

Good news.

The only criminal involved

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton must face an ethics lawsuit by state attorney regulators over a case he brought challenging results of the 2020 election, according to a court ruling posted on Monday.

Judge Casey Blair on Friday denied Paxton’s bid to dismiss the case on jurisdictional grounds. Blair said he was not ruling on the merits of the case.

[…]

The ruling is a setback for Paxton, who had argued that his work as the top Texas state lawyer was beyond the reach of Texas attorney ethics regulators. Potential penalties if the case succeeds could include suspension or disbarment.

The Texas State Bar, an agency that oversees licensed attorneys in the state, filed the lawsuit against Paxton in state court in Dallas last May. The complaint said Paxton made “dishonest” statements in a lawsuit that sought to toss 2020 election votes in four states.

The U.S. Supreme Court threw out the election challenge in December 2020.

Paxton’s lawyers told the Texas court that the bar’s allegations were tied to his “performance of his official duties” and that seeking to discipline him “is tantamount to a judicial veto over the exercise of executive discretion.”

The state bar countered that Texas attorney conduct rules “apply to any attorney engaged in the practice of law regardless of their position.”

Technically, this lawsuit was filed in Collin County, per State Bar rules. Both sides filed their briefs in July, and the hearing was in August. Paxton’s argument was basically that the State Bar had no authority over him in this matter, which the judge (a Republican from Kaufman County) rejected.

Assuming this doesn’t get appealed or is upheld on appeal, there will be a hearing on the merits. If that goes well, we may finally get some form of accountability for our lawless Attorney General. Note that a similar lawsuit filed against Paxton’s First Assistant Brent Webster was dismissed in September when the judge in that case bought the same argument about separation of powers. That ruling is under appeal; if there’s been any further news about it, I’ve not seen it.

So there you have it. Stay patient, there’s still a long way to go. MSNBC has more.

Yep, still no voter fraud found

So says the official 2020 election audit.

Despite challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, there was neither widespread voter fraud nor other serious issues in Texas’ 2020 elections, according to an audit of four of Texas’ largest counties released Monday evening by Secretary of State John Scott’s office.

While the 359-page report did find some “irregularities,” it nonetheless reinforced what election experts and monitors — including Scott, the state’s chief election official — have routinely said: that the 2020 contest was not riddled with widespread fraud, and Texans should be confident that future elections will be similarly secure.

“When the Texas Election Code and local procedures are followed, Texas voters should have a very high level of confidence in the accuracy of the outcome of Texas elections,” the report stated. “When procedures are followed, results of the election are trustworthy. Indeed, in most cases, the audit found that the counties followed their procedures and clearly documented their activities.”

[…]

The report found that “many of the irregularities observed” in 2020 were likely caused by the “extraordinary challenges” posed by the pandemic and ensuing staffing shortages. And, auditors said, such problems are even less likely to occur in future contests because of legislative changes, including those in Senate Bill 1.

Of the four counties the report analyzed, the Harris County general election had the most issues, including improper chain of custody of mobile ballot boxes at 14 polling locations. Auditors also found thousands of discrepancies between electronic pollbook records and audit logs.

See here for a bit of background. No one who doesn’t have to is going to read the entire 359 page report, but you can get a high level summary at the beginning of it. I have two points to add. One comes from the Chron story, which addresses some of the items raised in the audit about Harris County:

Harris County did not properly handle certain electronic voting records during the 2020 election, according to an audit from the Texas secretary of state’s office that uncovered numerous administrative mishaps but no evidence of widespread voter fraud in four of the state’s largest counties.

In a report released Monday evening, the state elections office found that Harris County failed to properly document the “chain of custody” — a required step-by-step accounting of voting records — for thousands of ballots across at least 14 polling locations. The finding was among those mentioned by state elections officials last month in a letter to the Harris County elections administrator, delivered days before the November midterms.

The report outlined a number of slip-ups across the four audited counties, which included Republican-controlled Collin and Tarrant counties and Democratic-run Dallas and Harris counties. It concluded that Texas voters “should have a very high level of confidence in the accuracy of the outcome of Texas elections” when counties follow the state election code and their own local procedures.

“Each of the four counties has detailed procedures and detailed forms to document compliance with the code and ensure that only lawful ballots are cast and counted,” the report reads. “When procedures are followed, results of the election are trustworthy. Indeed, in most cases, the audit found that the counties followed their procedures and clearly documented their activities. In some cases, however, they did not.”

When counties did not properly follow state law and local procedures, “discrepancies and irregularities ranging from small to large ensued,” the report said.

State officials singled out Harris County for “very serious issues in the handling of electronic media,” finding that the county lacked records to explain the origin of 17 “mobile ballot boxes” — the pieces of hardware that store vote tallies and transmit the data to and from polling places. The report also identified disparities between electronic records from the polls and “tally audit logs” at numerous locations.

Since the 2020 election, Harris County has switched to a new system that stores voting records on vDrives — a type of USB thumb drive — with “procedures in place to document proper chain of custody … in the event a vDrive fails,” the report reads.

[…]

Harris County Elections Administrator Cliff Tatum has pledged a complete assessment of the issues that arose during the midterm while warning the county is in “dire need” of improvements to the way it conducts elections.

Last month, Tatum penned a letter to state officials seeking to address the audit’s preliminary findings, including the chain-of-custody problems.

Writing to Chad Ennis, director of the secretary of state’s forensic audit division, Tatum said the issue with the 14 locations cited in the report arose when votes were “stranded” on devices used at Harris County’s drive-thru voting and other locations.

To read the “stranded” results, Tatum wrote, county officials had to create 30 “replacement” mobile ballot boxes.

“The number of cast votes on those 30 MBBs align with the expected number from the voting sites,” Tatum wrote to Ennis. “This explains why there were more than 14 MBBs created to read the results and why those initial 14 were not read into the tabulator.”

The poll book disparities, meanwhile, were the result of voting machines being moved from one location to another during the election.

“While this may have been done to address long lines at any of the vote centers during the 2020 election, this is a practice that our office no longer follows,” said Tatum, who was appointed elections administrator in July.

We have the joy of being “randomly” audited again for this November’s election, so we’ll see what they have to complain about this time.

The other point I would raise, which was mentioned in passing in that Chron story, was that this audit was released on Monday night (the Trib story published at 8 PM) during Christmas week. I don’t know about you, but I think that if they had something juicy to report, they’d have dropped it at a time when people would be actually paying attention. This has all the hallmarks of a “nothing to see here” report.

On comparing counties from 2018 to 2022

I started with this.

Voters in counties across Texas chose GOP leaders over Democrats at a higher rate than they did four years ago, a Dallas Morning News analysis shows.

The findings, based on data as of noon on Wednesday, reflect that an overwhelming number of counties — 205 out of 254 — favored Republicans. Those counties turned more Republican by an average of 2.87 percentage points, the data showed.

The analysis also showed urban areas are shifting toward Democrats, part of a continuing trend across the country.

All five North Texas counties experiencing population growth saw an uptick in the percentage of votes for Democrats, the analysis showed.

Collin County, a Republican stronghold anchored by suburban women, shifted its share of votes to Democrats by 4.45 percentage points compared to 2018, according to the analysis.

Tarrant County, another GOP-dominated region that has seen an increasing number of Democratic votes, increased support for Democrats by 3.04 percentage points; Dallas County, by 3.23 percentage points; Denton by 3.53; and Rockwall by 3.5, the analysis showed.

Political experts who reviewed The Dallas Morning News’ findings weren’t surprised by the shift. Though slow-moving, the changes can make an impact over the next decade, they said.

“We shouldn’t delude ourselves in any way that the Democrats are about to take over,” said James Riddlesperger, a professor of political science at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. “At the same time, election coalitions are dynamic and what we’re seeing is the competitiveness of the two political parties in this area is becoming more apparent.”

This Trib story has more of the same. And it set me off to do the thing I usually do, which is put a bunch of numbers into a spreadsheet and then try to make something interesting happen with them. If you were to do the same – copy county-by-county election results for the Governor’s races from 2018 and 2022 into Excel – you’d see what these stories say, which is that Beto generally did better than Lupe Valdez in the large urban and suburban counties, and generally did worse elsewhere. You’d also notice that the reverse is true, which is that Abbott did worse where Beto did better and vice versa. You might think this means something about maybe Dems closing the gap in some places, and maybe that’s true, but if so then you have to contend with the fact that the likes of Dan Patrick and Ken Paxton did better overall than they had done four years ago, and as such there’s a limit to this kind of analysis.

I got to that point and I just didn’t feel like putting more time into it. I’ll spend plenty of time looking at district-level numbers, to see how the assumptions of the 2021 redistricting have held up so far and where opportunities and dangers for 2024 might lurk. Much of that data won’t be available until after the next Legislative session begins, though some county data should be there after the votes are canvassed. But statewide, I think we already know what we might want to know, at least at a macro level. We Dems didn’t build on 2018. There’s nothing to suggest that the trends we saw over the last decade have reversed, but there was nothing to see this year to suggest that we have moved the ball any farther than it would have moved on its own. So I’m going to put my effort into places where I hope to find things to work for in the next election or two. I promise I’ll throw numbers at you in those posts.

Collin County DA denies sexual harassment allegations

Pretty damn forcefully, but also in a way that’s kind of telling.

Greg Willis

Collin County District Attorney Greg Willis repeatedly called accusations of sexual harassment and retaliation against him “false, defamatory and outrageous” at a news conference Wednesday, where he presented “extraordinary evidence” he says debunks allegations in a federal lawsuit filed last month.

Willis — flanked by about three dozen supporters, including his wife, State District Judge Jill Willis, and prosecutors inside the McKinney courthouse — played an audio recording and displayed notes written by the six current and ex-employees suing the DA. He said he had been “unfairly attacked” in the 75-page lawsuit.

“We have spent our entire professional lives fighting for the rule of law, and the rule of law is what holds our society together,” Willis said, speaking of himself and his wife. “Fair, equal and unbiased justice must always prevail, and in our roles we have the duty to seek justice at all times. The truth matters.”

The suit says Willis inappropriately touched and propositioned female employees. It also alleges that Willis’ top prosecutor, First Assistant District Attorney Bill Wirskye, fostered a toxic workplace and that county officials were complicit in covering up the systemic misconduct.

The office’s chief and deputy chief investigators, as well three former employees and a current prosecutor, lodged the accusations against the county’s two highest-ranking prosecutors, County Judge Chris Hill and commissioners Susan Fletcher, Darrell Hale, Duncan Webb and Cheryl Williams. The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages.

Willis’ attorney, Rogge Dunn, said in a prepared statement that Willis “revealed only a small sampling of the compelling mountain of evidence proving the plaintiffs’ claims are false and completely trumped up.”

He added: “In 35 years of handling employment lawsuits, this is one of the most frivolous lawsuits I’ve ever seen.”

Jeffrey Simon, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said in a prepared statement that the employees “greatly feared [Willis’] rage and retaliation” if they defied him.

“Efforts by Mr. Willis to characterize those acknowledgments as proof of his innocence are consistent with the allegations that he remains consumed with trying to cover his tracks in the event he’s exposed,” the statement said.

[…]

One of the former employees, Fallon LaFleur, alleges Willis gave her a “full-frontal hug” as she left the district attorney’s office following her exit interview. LaFleur worked as a prosecutor from 2019 to 2021, according to the lawsuit. She resigned from the office, the lawsuit says.

The lawsuit says Willis hugged her “while her arms were stiff beside her body” and “he rubbed her lower back with his hands and pressed her breasts against him.”

In an audio recording of the exit interview, a woman Willis said is LaFleur can be heard saying, “Can I give you a hug?” and, “You are so wonderful! Thank you so much! And I will see you around.” Willis described her tone during this interaction as “animated” and cheerful.

“The truth is now clear for all to see what she said in this lawsuit did not happen,” Willis said. “It is a lie. It is false.”

It is unclear why Willis recorded the exit interview.

According to the lawsuit, LaFleur attempted suicide because of the “severe and pervasive discriminatory workplace.” Later, Wirskye was overheard calling LaFleur “crazy” and insinuating LaFleur attempted suicide to get out of a trial, the lawsuit says. LaFleur has since been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, according to the lawsuit.

Simon, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, said recording their conversation may have violated the Collin County employee handbook, which “expressly prohibits the recording or taping of conversations” inside the DA’s office or county offices.

“The fact that Mr. Willis appears to have tried to secretly set her up in the event she later exposed his behavior is again entirely consistent with the conduct alleged against him,” Simon said in his statement.

See here for the background. KERA dug into the code of conduct matter.

KERA obtained a section of a 2006 Collin County handbook, which says employees are “not allowed to film, record or tape in any format, a conversation or activity taking place on county property or where county business is being performed, unless you inform and obtain the consent of all parties to the conversation or activity.”

On Wednesday, Willis released portions of a May 2021 exit interview with Fallon LaFleur, one of his former subordinates. Willis had called a press conference to dispute allegations of sexual harassment against him that were detailed in a federal lawsuit. LaFleur had worked as a misdemeanor prosecutor.

LaFleur’s attorney, Jeffrey Simon, said she didn’t know Willis was recording the conversation. Simon said the fact Willis recorded LaFleur’s exit interview without her consent or knowledge is suspicious.

“What kind of workplace is one running that a boss feels compelled to secretly record their employees? Did Mr. Willis foresee that one day he and a toxic workplace that our clients alleged to exist would be exposed?” he said.

The handbook also says the rules about recording apply “even if you yourself are taking part in the conversation or activity.” Simon said Willis didn’t reveal to LaFleur at any point in their conversation that he was recording.

“What if in the interview he added to at least one or all of those comments of fawning praise and personal assurance, I’ve been secretly recording you?” he said.

I presume that if he did inform LaFleur about the recording, that would be on the recording as well. Recording the exit interview, when that’s against the county’s code of conduct, sure seems sketchy to me. It can’t be policy to do that, since that policy would (presumably, at least) be in violation of the code, and if it was done as a one-off you have to wonder why, as attorney Simon does. Let’s just say that I look forward to the court hearings, when people will be speaking under oath. KERA and the Dallas Observer have more.

UPDATE: OMFG.

Collin County District Attorney Greg Willis this week argued a snippet of a recorded conversation cast doubt on allegations of sexual harassment and retaliation against him by current and former employees.

But the entire 20-minute conversation with then-prosecutor Fallon LaFleur shows she told Willis in spring 2021 she was sexually harassed during the nearly three years she worked for him.

Willis posted the recorded interview and a transcript to his new website, collincountytruthfiles.com, but played only 11 seconds at a news conference Wednesday when he challenged the accusations.

[…]

“I worry there is a lot you don’t know,” LaFleur said timidly to Willis, about three-fourths of the way into the exit interview.

“I’m aware that there is a lot I don’t know,” Willis said. “The person at the top usually knows the least.”

LaFleur then described comments by First District Attorney Bill Wirskye: “I’ve personally been called a whore in a whorehouse.”

“It felt mean. It felt like sexual harassment,” she said.

In the clip Willis played at the news conference, LaFleur asks the DA for a hug. In the lawsuit LaFleur alleges Willis gave her a “full-frontal hug” while her arms were stiff beside her body. Willis rubbed her lower back and pressed her breasts against him, according to the lawsuit.

This interaction was the only accusation of inappropriate physical contact LaFleur lodged against Willis in the lawsuit. Several other women made similar allegations of unwanted massages, moaning as he touched them and unwanted sexual advances.

Willis, who would not answer questions Wednesday after his news conference, did not acknowledge the rest of the recording. His spokeswoman said she would ask Willis and his attorney questions from The Dallas Morning News on Thursday. But she didn’t follow up with answers to why Willis didn’t discuss it, why the full recording and transcript were posted to the website, and if Willis recorded other conversations with Willis recorded other conversations with employees.

Wirskye did not attend the news conference or respond this week to requests for comment. He previously called the allegations “politically motivated and politically timed” and made “by some very disgruntled and very troubled individuals.”

Jeffrey Simon, a lawyer for the former and current employees, said in an interview the audio “clearly corroborates paragraph after paragraph of allegations” LaFleur made in the paragraph of allegations” LaFleur made in the court filing.

“It’s astonishing to me, to us, that [Willis] thought that by virtue of the 11 seconds that he played that somehow disproved the importance of the 20 minutes of audio,” Simon said.

“If Mr. Willis believes that at his grandstanding … hurts Ms. LaFleur’s case, he is mistaken. He’s helping to prove it.”

That sound you heard was my jaw hitting the floor. There’s more to the story, none of which sounds good for Ken Paxton’s buddy Greg Willis. Like I said, I can’t wait for this to get a hearing.

There is still a right to free speech at Collin College

Good.

A Texas professor who said she was fired from Collin College in North Texas after she publicly criticized the school’s response to the coronavirus pandemic has won her job back for two more years according to a legal settlement with the school.

Education professor Suzanne Jones filed a lawsuit in September 2021 accusing the school of violating her First Amendment right to free speech and claimed they fired her for her critical comments and for her work to start a local campus chapter of the Texas Faculty Association, a statewide higher education faculty union that lacks bargaining rights.

In a settlement announced Thursday, the college agreed to pay Jones $230,000 as part of a two-year contract starting in January 2023, a much higher sum than her prior annual salary of around $66,000. But she is restricted to teaching online classes only through the college’s iCollin program, and she must resign once the contract is up in 2025. In addition, the college agreed to pay $145,000 in legal fees for Jones. Neither party admitted liability in the settlement.

“The most important thing is that professors feel they are free to speak their minds on matters of public concern without looking over their shoulders for an administrator to punish them for a viewpoint they disagree with,” said Greg Greubel, the lawyer who represented Jones on behalf of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a legal group that defends free speech on college campuses. “All levels of public employees, from Collin College to any prestigious university, they all have First Amendment rights and they all deserve to be respected.”

Greubel said that if Jones decides to leave before her contract is up she will keep the full $230,000 in the contract. But her goal was to be reinstated as a teacher at the college.

Jones had worked at Collin for two decades before her contract was not renewed. The lawsuit said that the college gave three reasons for why they were letting her go. That included that she had signed her name and college affiliation to a petition calling for the city of Dallas to remove Confederate monuments. They also raised issue with her opposition to the college’s reopening plan during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and that she had listed herself as a Collin College professor on the Texas Faculty Association website.

Jones had filed the lawsuit against Collin College, President Neil Matkin and Toni Jenkins, a now-retired vice president of campus operations at Collin College.

After Jones filed the lawsuit claiming those actions were protected speech, lawyers for Collin College had asked the judge presiding over the case to dismiss the case, claiming they had “qualified immunity,” which protects government officials from lawsuits unless they clearly violated an individual or group’s constitutional rights.

But the judge denied that request in August, calling the arguments “dead on arrival,” which meant the officials could be held personally and financially responsible if found to have violated Jones’ First Amendment rights.

See here for a bit of background. Collin College, which is a community college in Collin County, has been the subject of several lawsuits like this, and the bills are coming due. FIRE, the group that represented Professor Jones, included Collin College in its “10 Worst Colleges for Free Speech” list in 2021 and 2022. The Dallas Observer, which has followed these stories closely, adds on:

The settlement with Jones is the second in an ongoing free speech saga. In January, Collin College agreed to pay $70,000 to Lora Burnett, a history professor who said she’d been sacked after criticizing former Vice President Mike Pence in October 2020 and speaking out against the college administration.

FIRE also represented Burnett.

In March, history professor Michael Phillips, author of White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion in Dallas, 1841–2001filed a lawsuit against Collin College, its president and school officials.

Phillips, who is also represented by FIRE, alleges that the school similarly terminated his contract over his public criticism of the school’s COVID-19 policies and other free speech concerns.

“I never dreamed I would teach at a college where I would be ordered to not share facts, particularly life-saving ones, with my students,” Phillips said in a FIRE release at the time. “We should model for our students how to hear speech and ideas we don’t like, skills necessary for participating in a democracy.”

Phillips’ suit is ongoing.

You love to see it. The DMN has more.

Collin County DA accused of sexual harassment

Oh, boy.

Greg Willis

Six individuals who currently work or have worked in the Collin County District Attorney’s office filed a federal civil suit Monday, alleging that they were sexually harassed, discriminated against because of their gender, and faced retaliation after reporting the allegations about their boss and his top lieutenant.

The suit names Collin County District Attorney Greg Willis, his first assistant Bill Wirskye, Collin County Judge Chris Hill, and county commissioners Susan Fletcher, Darrell Hale, Cheryl Williams, and Duncan Webb. The suit was filed by the district attorney’s chief investigator, Kim Pickrell; deputy chief investigator Keith Henslee; former misdemeanor prosecutor Fallon LaFleur; prosecutor VyKim Le; and two plaintiffs identified as Jane Doe.

The suit alleges that Willis sexually harassed female employees then retaliated against them. It says he repeatedly made sexual comments and inappropriately touched them. The lawsuit also alleges that Willis propositioned the women for sex during work trips and during regular closed-door meetings. It also claims that Wirskye routinely hazed female employees.

Le said that Willis had touched her inappropriately on at least two occasions, and the two unnamed plaintiffs recounted instances of unwanted touching and propositioning. After Pickrell and Henslee went to Wirskye with their concerns, the lawsuit alleges he retaliated by complaining about their performance.

Wirskye is also accused of referring to groups of prosecutors profanely, and called female prosecutors “bitches, whores, and sluts.” Henslee, Le, and LaFleur all recounted instances where Wirskye was allegedly retaliatory or crass.

The county commissioners were included because they “have known of this misconduct for years but have continued to enable it by refusing to take remedial action or even conduct a reasonable investigation.” A spokesperson for the county said it would not comment on pending litigation.

In addition to filing the lawsuit, the plaintiffs say they have also filed complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Texas Workforce Commission.

A copy of the lawsuit is embedded in the story. This case is obviously a potential blockbuster on its own, but I am specifically interested in it because Greg Willis is a good buddy of Ken Paxton’s and one reason why Paxton is being pursued by special prosecutors in his neverending Servergy fraud case, as Willis (properly!) recused himself at the beginning. Maybe any Collin County DA would have had to do the same – politics is a small world, after all, and politicians like to avoid hot potatoes when they can – but in another world maybe that doesn’t happen, and if so then the years-long saga of how the special prosecutors would or would not be paid would never have happened. Anyway, I’ll be keeping an eye on this. The DMN, whose story I was unable to read as I drafted this, has more.

Paxton to be deposed in Servergy-related lawsuit

This gets into some deep lore about the Paxton crime saga.

Best mugshot ever

Attorney General Ken Paxton will face lawyers for the men who accused him of securities fraud seven years ago in a one-hour deposition after the November elections.

The Dallas Morning News reported Thursday that Collin County District Court Judge Cynthia Wheless ordered Paxton to sit for the deposition on Nov. 28, three weeks after the culmination of Paxton’s reelection race. He is running against Democrat Rochelle Garza.

Paxton did not immediately respond to requests for comment through his government or campaign offices. Phil Hilder, the lawyer representing Paxton in his securities fraud case, declined comment.

[…]

The deposition is part of a lawsuit that is separate but related to the seven-year-old securities fraud indictment in which two men, Byron Cook and Joel Hochberg, accuse Paxton of encouraging them to invest in McKinney-based technology company Servergy Inc., without disclosing he would make a commission from those investments. Cook is a former state legislator who served in the Texas House with Paxton.

A year after Paxton was indicted on three felony charges alleging securities law violations, an associate of his, Charles “Chip” Loper III, sued Cook and Hochberg, accusing them of creating a scheme to profit off the investment funds of Unity Resources, a mineral assets company. Loper said the scheme hurt him and his father financially.

Cook and Hochberg’s lawyers said that lawsuit was retaliatory. Last year, they were able to add Paxton as a “responsible third party” to the case by arguing that he was also an investor and the company’s lawyer. As such, they said, Paxton should be held responsible for any alleged wrongdoing.

In a deposition in the Unity case, Cook and Hochberg’s lawyers can ask Paxton about his other securities fraud case.

Here’s the origin story of this part of the crime timeline. This branch eventually led to SEC charges that Paxton subsequently beat; you will note that the SEC took two cracks at him. The lawsuit that this story is based on is one of two that were later filed by Paxton buddies against Cook and Hochberg. The other was filed by Paxton’s pastor, a fellow named Mike Buster. I had completely forgotten about all of that – those two lawsuits were filed in 2017, which is to say approximately 372 years ago – and as far as I can tell from my archives this is the first update I’ve seen since then. I have no idea what to expect, and I’m a little confused by the reference to Paxton’s “other securities case” in the story. I suppose it means the federal case that got dismissed, but who knows. We’ll find out a bit after Thanksgiving, I hope.

There’s still a lot of confusion about how Texas’ abortion ban will be enforced

There will be chaos, in addition to the fear and danger to pregnant people that already exists.

Abortions are already effectively outlawed in Texas, where clinics closed after the U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning Roe vs. Wade. But a new law takes effect Thursday that makes performing the procedure a felony, punishable by up to life in prison and fines of at least $100,000. There are no exemptions for rape, incest or fetal anomaly — only for when the pregnant person’s life is in danger.

It’s not clear how many prosecutions will materialize or even how police will handle complaints. But the first cases will test the bounds of a sweeping new law that is prompting fear and confusion for patients, their families and the medical community alike. Experts say the few abortions that do occur in Texas are now carried out in hospitals during emergencies, or at home with medication obtained online or through other means. Pregnant women cannot be prosecuted.

“Are they going to be going after doctors who perform emergency abortions? What does that look like?” said Joanna Grossman, a professor at Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law.

So far, Attorney General Ken Paxton has been the most bullish about enforcement. His office can only enforce the six-figure civil fines, but he offered to help local prosecutors bring criminal charges under the state’s abortion ban.

“I will do everything in my power to protect mothers, families, and unborn children, and to uphold the state laws duly enacted by the Texas Legislature,” Paxton, aRepublican up for a third term in November, said in an advisory.

[…]

In Tarrant and Denton County, officials said prosecutors will evaluate each case and present it to a grand jury only if the facts warrant prosecution. Neither office specified what circumstances might qualify.

“Prosecutors do not make the law – we follow it,” Tarrant County Criminal District Attorney Sharen Wilson said in a written statement. “We followed Roe v. Wade when it was the law and we will follow Texas state law now.”

“Police agencies bring us cases, we don’t go out and investigate cases ourselves,” said Denton County First Assistant District Attorney Jamie Beck. “If an agency brings us a case that deals with this issue and these laws, we will treat it like any other case.”

Yet, how the police will handle complaints remains a question mark.

Some city councils, including in Dallas and Denton, voted to restrict the resources that can be used to investigate abortions or request that police deprioritize those cases. Several police groups said they don’t know how enforcement will work, and one questioned whether law enforcement would want to be involved at all.

“They are extremely difficult investigations and there’s all kinds of politics surrounding it,” said Kevin Lawrence, executive director of the Texas Municipal Police Association. “It’s a lot easier to say something is illegal than to actually prosecute someone for it.”

In Dallas, Police Chief Eddie García said that depending on priority and call type, there will be instances “that we may have to respond and take a report.” But he echoed the uncertainty, saying it’s “too soon to tell how the state plans to enforce this new law, and who will be enforcing it.”

While almost every felony complaint is looked into, final decisions about how to proceed rest with district attorneys, said James McLaughlin Jr., executive director and general counsel for the Texas Police Chiefs Association. “What proof would they want to see in order to accept a case?” he said. “We’re pretty used to filing burglary cases, robbery cases, homicide cases, but this is different.”

We’ve talked about this in various forms. Dallas County’s DA, along with several other large county DAs (not, as far as I know, including Harris County, at least at this time), has said he won’t pursue prosecutions of abortion-related charges. Which is nice and noble and morally correct and certain to be turned into roadkill by the next Legislature if they have the power to do so. It’s interesting to see what these cops are saying about investigating abortion-related allegations – as we have discussed, they can seek out evidence in various privacy-intruding ways, but we just don’t know yet what they actually will do. Again, the Lege is sure to meddle in this if they can. We also have the TDCAA’s analysis and guidance on Texas’ new laws that criminalize abortion, which among other things show that the zeal to continuously be passing anti-abortion laws has introduced quite a bit of chaos and more than a little potential for contradictions and double jeopardy possibilities. The courts are going to have so much fun with all this. That touched on the vigilant bounty hunter law SB8, which so far as served only as a tool of intimidation rather than of enforcement. But with the “trigger” law going into effect today, it’s a whole new ball game. And just a matter of time before someone gets arrested.

UPDATE: The Trib now has a story on the enabling of the trigger law. The 19th notes that four other states have similar laws coming online this week.

Let’s name a few legislative battlegrounds

It’s getting to be that time of the election cycle.

Mihaela Plesa

Two years ago, Democrats were gearing up for a rare opportunity in modern times: capturing the Texas House majority.

But after they came up woefully short — and Republican-led redistricting reduced the number of competitive races — the battlefield heading into November is notably smaller.

Still, both sides see important stakes in the state House races this time around. While the majority is not on the line, the hottest races are unfolding in key areas that each party understands is critical to their growth for the next decade.

Look no further than the three districts that both Democrats and Republicans see as their highest priorities. Two of them are in South Texas, where Republicans are working to make inroads with Hispanic voters, while the other is in North Texas’ Collin County, a place emblematic of the fast-growing suburbs where Democrats have gained ground over the last few election cycles.

The GOP is especially serious about the two seats in South Texas — House District 37, a new open seat in the heart of the Rio Grande Valley, and House District 118, a San Antonio-based seat that Republican John Lujan flipped last year in a special election. House Speaker Dade Phelan, R-Beaumont, and the Republican State Leadership Committee, a national group that works to elect Republicans to state legislatures, are announcing Monday that they are funding $360,000 in TV ads aimed at the two districts, a substantial opening salvo on the battlefield.

[…]

Millions of dollars are expected to pour in to HD-37 and HD-118 — the two South Texas seats — and then HD-70, the one in Collin County. President Joe Biden would have carried each of the three seats over Donald Trump in 2020, but only by margins of 2 to 11 points, which gives them battleground status in the current environment, according to operatives. HD-37, which Republicans rammed into the map overnight during redistricting, is the closest on paper, with a Biden margin of only 2 percentage points.

Lujan is easily the most endangered Republican incumbent, but a few others can be expected to have competitive races, including Reps. Steve Allison of San Antonio, Morgan Meyer of Dallas and Angie Chen Button of Richardson. However, all three have had tough general elections before — especially Meyer and Button — and Republicans have faith in their ability to defend themselves.

There are also some additional open seats that the GOP will have to monitor, like the Houston seat where Republican state Rep. Jim Murphy is retiring.

On the Democratic side, the most endangered incumbent may be Rep. Eddie Morales of Eagle Pass, who represents a massive district covering most of the Texas-Mexico border.

As for the issues, the GOP messaging is set to take on a national tone, seeking to tap into Biden’s deep unpopularity in Texas, especially on border security and inflation. The House Democratic Campaign Committee said its candidates are focusing on “good jobs, strong public schools and access to affordable health care.”

“In contrast, Republicans are obsessed with banning abortion with no exceptions and making sure anyone can carry a gun with no training or license,” an HDCC spokesperson, Stella Deshotel, said in a statement.

With the primaries over, candidates across the races are sounding notes of independence and bipartisanship. Mihaela Plesa, the Democratic nominee for HD-70, said in an interview it was important for representatives to go to Austin and “not just be another vote for the party line.” Her Republican opponent, Jamee Jolly, said she was optimistic she would appeal to the Biden voters in the district, which he would have carried by 11 percentage points.

“I think a lot of people chose Biden because they didn’t like the Republican option. I know that for a fact because I have friends who have said that,” Jolly said, adding that her friends found Trump “divisive” and that she would legislate as “much more of a convener, a solutions-seeker,” reaching across the aisle.

Plesa said the No. 1 issue she hears about is public school finance, along with concerns about the “social wars” that are erupting in the classroom. But she said she is also hearing a lot about abortion after the Roe v. Wade decision, which triggered a ban without exceptions in Texas. Jolly said that her focus is now on “how we continue to support maternal health care.”

First and foremost: San Antonio is not South Texas, and I will die on that hill. I am begging you to be more precise in your geographical descriptors.

Second, just to provide some perspective, here are the 2020 Biden/Trump numbers for all of the districts name-checked in this story:


Dist  Biden   Trump Biden% Trump%
=================================
037  27,740  26,576  50.6%  48.4%
070  45,111  35,989  54.7%  43.6%
074  31,415  28,538  51.7%  46.9%
108  54,481  55,364  48.9%  49.7%
112  44,881  45,370  48.9%  49.4%
118  36,578  34,584  50.6%  47.9%
121  50,133  52,533  48.1%  50.4%
133  40,475  42,076  48.4%  50.3%

Most of these districts got more Democratic between 2012 and 2020, often much more Democratic. HDs 37 and 74 are the exceptions in that list. You can go read that earlier post for all the context. HD70 is a current Republican district that was redrawn to be Democratic, whose incumbent is not running for re-election, and should be the most likely of the bunch to flip. I don’t think I’m going out on a limb here to say that if Dems don’t pick up HD70, it will have been a disappointing Election Day. It’s impossible to imagine a good overall result if the Republicans can hold that one. Republicans flipped HD118 in a low-turnout special election, which is a thing they had done before as well. Dems won it back that November, but HD118 was a more Democratic district in the previous map. Bexar County moved strongly Democratic overall last decade, though (Pre-redistricting) HD118 was at the bottom of the progress list. I also feel confident saying that Dems will be disappointed if they don’t take this one back.

Fundraising numbers are also a factor, and likely a reason some other relatively even districts were not mentioned in this Trib story. HD70 Dem candidate Mihaela Plesa has done pretty well, while HD118 candidate Frank Ramirez, who fell short in the runoff of that earlier special election, has done less so. I’ll want to take a look at the 30-day numbers in some of these races to see what other signals there may be.

I don’t want to get too deep into all this, as I don’t know much about these races beyond the numbers. I do believe that we will see a different, perhaps broader, class of contested races in 2024, partly because a lot of Republican seats were drawn with relatively tight margins, and partly because this year may tell us something new about the trends we have been seeing in the past three elections. There are always some districts that over- or under-perform their expected numbers, and this time should be no exception.

Fraudit 2.0

Here we go again.

Harris County will be one of four Texas counties to undergo an audit of its upcoming November election results by the Texas secretary of state’s office.

It will be the second election audit in two years for Harris County, though the first to be conducted under election law the state legislature passed in 2021.

Eastland, Cameron and Guadalupe counties were selected for the audit process, as well.

By state law, four counties are to be audited at random every two years, two with a population greater than 300,000 and two counties with smaller populations. There are 18 Texas counties with populations greater than 300,000, meaning the state’s large urban counties will face the most audits. Texas has 254 counties.

The audits are to be conducted after November elections in all even-numbered years, and they will look at elections in the four selected counties from the preceding two years. The counties selected will not have to pay for the audits.

On Twitter, Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee questioned the randomness of the selection process. In response, the secretary of state’s office tweeted a link to a video on Facebook that showed the process — the names of large counties and smaller counties are printed on individual labels, and then the four counties are drawn from a bucket. When an employee drops the labels of the large counties into the bucket, it does not happen on camera.

Menefee’s office put out a statement in which the county attorney called the latest audit a ‘waste of time.”

“Harris County will comply, as we’ve always done,’ Menefee said. “But this is a waste of time. Last year the state coincidentally launched an audit of the county’s 2020 election just hours after former President Trump called on the governor to do so. That audit has been consuming the resources of our Elections Administrator’s office at a time where they’ve had to hold a record number of elections. By the way, that audit has still not been completed.

“Now, the state has ‘randomly’ selected Harris County to be audited for the 2022 election,” the statement continues. “Voters should be asking themselves what purpose these audits serve beyond wasting taxpayer money. As has been shown time and again, our elections are secure. The entire premise of these audits—that there is widespread fraud in our elections—is false.”

[…]

In September 2021, the secretary of state’s office announced it had begun a “full and comprehensive forensic audit” of the 2020 election in four Texas counties, including Dallas, Harris and Tarrant — the state’s three largest counties, all of which voted for President Joe Biden. The audit also encompassed Collin County, the largest in Texas carried by former President Donald Trump.

State law establishing the new audit process specifies: “a county selected in the most recent audit cycle may not be selected in the current audit cycle.” Though Harris County’s 2020 election results currently are being examined under a “forensic audit” by the state, the county still is eligible for a new audit in the current cycle because they are separate audit processes, according to Texas Secretary of State spokesperson Sam Taylor. He confirmed Harris County will not be eligible for an audit in the following election cycle.

See here for all my previous blogging on this topic. The video in question can be found here; it was posted by someone at the SOS office in response to a snarky tweet by Christian Menefee. There was a preliminary result from that first “audit” posted in January of 2021 – I can say I’m not aware of any followup stories about that. This is a bullshit law passed to satisfy the Big Lie, and it’s on the list of laws that have got to go when Dems get a turn.

(There’s also an unofficial “audit” of 2020 primary ballots going on in Tarrant County. I can’t even read that story, I start seeing red two sentences in.)

Paxton so petty

This guy, man. What a stain.

Best mugshot ever

Attorney General Ken Paxton is escalating his feud with the State Bar of Texas by banning his office’s lawyers from speaking at any events organized by the bar.

Paxton’s office also will not pay for any attorneys to attend bar-sponsored events, according to an internal email obtained by The Texas Tribune.

The state bar is suing Paxton over his 2020 lawsuit challenging the presidential election results in four battleground states. Paxton has denounced the lawsuit, which alleges professional misconduct, as political harassment.

The internal email — sent Monday by Shawn Cowles, Paxton’s deputy attorney general for civil litigation — references the lawsuit, calling it “just the latest instance in the Bar’s ongoing evolution into a partisan advocacy group.”

“Let’s be clear: these are politically motivated attacks that violate separation-of-powers principles and offend our profession’s values of civil disagreement and diversity of thought,” Cowles wrote.

The new office policies are effectively immediately.

[…]

The state bar is an agency of the judiciary that licenses lawyers to practice in Texas and hosts regular training and networking events around the state.

Let’s put aside any question for a minute about whether or not Paxton has a legitimate gripe with the State Bar’s actions against him. (He doesn’t, but for the sake of argument let’s pretend he does.) He’s taking out his anger on his employees. How would you feel if your boss forbade you from doing any professional development because he’s in trouble with the cops? You have to be an exceptionally shitty person to act like this.

The State Bar’s response to Paxton

As you know, the State Bar of Texas filed a lawsuit against Ken Paxton in a Collin County district court in order to proceed with the complaint filed against Paxton for his attempt to overthrow the 2020 election by filing a massively dishonest and bad-faith lawsuit against four states won by President Biden. Paxton filed his response to that lawsuit a month ago, and now the State Bar has responded to his response.

Best mugshot ever

Weeks before the May 24 primary runoff election for attorney general, Paxton publicly tweeted the State Bar was following a “political narrative” by filing its action “just a few weeks before” his election. Paxton made the same argument in his court answer to the petition.

The commission filed its response last week, emphasizing the petition was filed the day after the election and the only significance to that filing date is that it occurred on the same day the presiding judge of the First Administrative Judicial Region signed the Order of Assignment; the commission couldn’t have filed sooner.

Moreover, the complaints were presented to an investigatory panel Jan. 5. After the panel found “credible evidence” to support a finding that Paxton violated the code of ethics, “the commission attempted to negotiate a resolution with (Paxton),” the response states.

It was Paxton that elected to have the disciplinary action heard in Collin County, and it was Paxton that “conjured up the specter of a political narrative,” the commission stated, to politicize an otherwise straightforward disciplinary proceeding.

In Paxton’s answer, he cited several defenses, including a lack of jurisdiction, a violation of separation of powers, and sovereign immunity.

Paxton asserts in his plea that he is unique, and unlike every other licensed attorney holding the position of state attorney general in the United States, is altogether exempt from having to comply with his state’s rules of professional conduct, even when acting directly as counsel of record before a court, the commission response states.

[…]

Paxton argued that as part of the executive branch the courts had no jurisdiction over him. The commission said this premise was tested and failed in two other states, Minnesota and Connecticut. Referring to In Re Lord, the Minnesota Supreme Court held, “the governor has no power to clothe the attorney general with immunity for disciplinary powers of the court when the attorney general appears in court as an attorney,” and that such a finding would “reduce the court to a tool of the executive.”

The commission said that, despite Paxton’s contentions that the disciplinary action was brought for political or retaliatory purposes, that action is not about his decision as the attorney general to file the case.

“Rather, the commission contends that the pleadings respondent prepared and filed contained numerous statements that were false, dishonest, and deceitful,” in violation of the Texas Disciplinary Rules of Professional Conduct, the response states.

Referring to Paxton’s separation of powers argument, the commission told the court the State Bar Act gives the Texas Supreme Court administrative control over regulations governing the practice of law, and the high court has inherent regulatory powers as well within the state Constitution.

On sovereign immunity, the commission said Paxton isn’t being sued in his official capacity, but personally in his capacity as a licensed attorney.

See here and here for the previous updates. A major component of the State Bar’s response has been to take on Paxton’s claims that the whole process is political, because that’s the main tool he has in his bag whenever someone tries to hold him accountable for anything. Indeed, the headline of this story notes how the State Bar turned Paxton’s complaints about the process against him, because Paxton can’t help but be a lying liar who lies a lot. I can’t say how effective any of this will be, but you do love to see it. I don’t know when the next update is, but as always I’ll be watching. The Statesman has more.

Paxton responds to State Bar lawsuit against him

Blah blah blah, you can’t sue me, blah blah blah.

Best mugshot ever

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is seeking to dismiss a professional misconduct lawsuit filed by the state bar against him related to his legal challenge of the 2020 presidential election, court documents show.

In a court filing June 27, Paxton asked a district court in Collin County to dismiss the Texas State Bar’s lawsuit. The state’s top lawyer, a Republican who is seeking a third term in office, said state bar investigators are biased and politically motivated against him.

[…]

In the court filing, Paxton said the state bar’s Commission for Lawyer Discipline, which filed the suit, had no authority to “police the decisions of a duly elected, statewide constitutional officer of the executive branch.” Paxton also stood by his decision to challenge the results of the 2020 election.

See here for the previous update. This is more or less the standard way to respond, and indeed Paxton is making the same arguments he’s made in the past, because there’s nothing new here. It’s just a matter of eventually getting a judge to rule on it. I don’t know what the potential for delay is here, but we know from past and recent experience, if there’s one thing Ken Paxton is good at, it’s throwing up every possible obstacle in the path of holding him accountable. I don’t expect this to be any different, but maybe I’ll be surprised.

State Bar finally files that professional misconduct lawsuit against Paxton

We’ve been eagerly awaiting this.

Best mugshot ever

A disciplinary committee for the State Bar of Texas on Wednesday filed a professional misconduct lawsuit against Attorney General Ken Paxton for his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential elections in four battleground states won by President Joe Biden.

The filing in Collin County by the Commission for Lawyer Discipline, a standing committee of the state bar, is an extraordinary move by the body that regulates law licenses in the state against the sitting attorney general. It stems from complaints against Paxton for a lawsuit that the U.S. Supreme Court threw out, saying Texas lacked standing to sue and that Paxton’s political opponents called “frivolous.”

It seeks a sanction against Paxton, which will be determined by a judge, that could range from a private reprimand to disbarment.

In its filing, the commission said Paxton had misrepresented that he had uncovered substantial evidence that “raises serious doubts as to the integrity of the election process in the defendant states.”

“As a result of Respondent’s actions, Defendant States were required to expend time, money, and resources to respond to the misrepresentations and false statements contained in these pleadings and injunction requests even though they had previously certified their presidential electors based on the election results prior to the filing of Respondent’s pleadings,” the lawsuit read.

The lawsuit also says Paxton made “dishonest” representations that an “outcome determinative” number of votes were tied to unregistered voters, votes were switched by a glitch with voting machines, state actors had unconstitutionally revised their election statutes and “illegal votes” had been cast to affect the outcome of the election.

The lawsuit says Paxton’s allegations “were not supported by any charge, indictment, judicial finding, and/or credible or admissible evidence, and failed to disclose to the Court that some of his representations and allegations had already been adjudicated and/or dismissed in a court of law.”

The complaint asks for a finding of professional misconduct against Paxton, as well as attorney’s fees and “an appropriate sanction.”

[…]

The lawsuit against Paxton stems from multiple complaints filed by Kevin Moran, president of the Galveston Island Democrats; David Wellington Chew, former chief justice of the Eighth District Court of Appeals; attorney Neil Kay Cohen; attorney Brynne VanHettinga; and Gershon “Gary” Ratner, the co-founder of Lawyers Defending American Democracy.

See here, here, and here for some background; this post contains some technical details from the original complaint. As far as I can tell, this encompasses all of the 2020 election-related complaints against Paxton; there’s a separate complaint having to do with his threats against the Court of Criminal Appeals for not letting him prosecute “voter fraud” cases at his discretion, whose disposition is not known to me at this time. There’s also the complaint against Brent Webster, which will be litigated in Williamson County, and more recently a complaint against Ted Cruz that will presumably take some time to work its way through the system. That first 2020 election complaint against Paxton was filed last June, so it took nearly a year to get to this point. I have no idea if that’s a “normal” time span for this – I suspect nothing about this is “normal” anyway.

One more thing: I presume this was filed in Collin County because that’s where Paxton passed the bar, or some other technical reason like that. The Chron adds a bit of detail about that.

Under the state bar’s rules, disciplinary suits are filed in the county in which the attorney primarily practices. If there’s more than one, the bar files in the county where the attorney lives — Paxton indicated Collin County. Similarly, the suit against Webster was filed in his hometown of Williamson County. That determination is up to the subject of the suit, according to the rules.

Also per the bar’s rules, these suits are heard by an appointed judge from another district.

In Paxton’s case, it will be Judge Casey Blair of Kaufman County, a Republican elected in 2014. Webster’s case will be heard by Judge John Youngblood of Milam County, also a Republican who was first appointed by Gov. Rick Perry in 2011 and first elected in 2012.

Good to know. I can’t wait to see what happens next.

Precinct analysis: Abbott’s weak spots

Is this a thing?

As dominating as Gov. Greg Abbott’s GOP primary victory on Tuesday looked at first blush, a closer look at the results shows a nagging problem within his own party that could ultimately cost him in his race against Democratic nominee Beto O’Rourke.

Although two-thirds of the Republican Party voters statewide backed Abbott for a record-tying third term as governor, some of the most important GOP counties in Texas signaled the continuation of a mini-revolt against him.

In fast-growing Montgomery County, Abbott won 56 percent of the vote. That’s a strong number in most counties, but in rock-solid red Montgomery it’s eyebrow raising. No county was more important for former President Donald Trump in Texas in 2020 than Montgomery. He won 71 percent of the vote there — the biggest win of any county with at least 100,000 voters in Texas.

And in Collin County, a GOP suburban stronghold north of Dallas with a strong tea party contingent, Abbott hit 60 percent. Again good, but well behind the 70 to 80 percent he won in places like Bexar, Cameron on the border and Potter County in the Panhandle.

The results hint at a problem other Republicans have been talking about for months. Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller said there is a contingent of voters within the Republican Party who are very angry with Abbott over the way he handled the pandemic and who might just skip the race.

“There’s no way they’ll ever vote for Beto, but they aren’t going to vote for Abbott,” Miller said.

[…]

But in past races, Abbott, an attorney and former judge originally from Wichita Falls, hasn’t had any trouble with the Republican base. In his races for attorney general and governor since 2002, Abbott never had serious primary opponents. This year he drew two of them in Huffines and former Texas Republican Party chairman Allen West. Huffines spent more than $15 million and West $2 million in their bids to challenge Abbott.

Both got in the race last year, citing Abbott’s handling of the pandemic. Abbott easily weathered the attacks, winning 66 percent of the Republican Primary vote.

Still, public polling shows the problem Abbott has with the GOP base. In the latest Texas Politics Project poll from the University of Texas, 74 percent of Republicans approved of the job Abbott has done as governor. While high, it is more than 10 percentage points lower than where Abbott was two years ago just before the pandemic hit. At times, Abbott had an 89 percent job approval rating from Republicans before the pandemic, according to past University of Texas polls.

As with the Beto comparison post, here are the counties with at least a thousand votes being cast where Abbott, who got over 66% of the vote overall, got less than sixty percent.


County       Abbott Huffines    West   Abbt%   Huff%   West%
============================================================
Ochiltree       502      169     261  47.18%  15.88%  24.62%
Caldwell      2,384      312     174  50.74%   6.64%   8.00%
Brewster        678       54     446  50.75%   4.04%  33.38%
Mitchell        594      103     190  53.13%   9.21%  16.99%
Montgomery   40,112   16,057   9,185  56.14%  22.47%  12.85%
Kerr          5,368    1,294   1,928  56.90%  13.72%  20.44%
Gillespie     3,758      547   1,486  58.33%   8.49%  23.06%
Brazoria     17,922    4,984   4,076  58.68%  16.32%  13.35%
Wise          5,857    1,304   1,696  58.73%  13.08%  17.01%
Waller        2,803      822     591  58.94%  17.28%  12.43%
Hansford        727       84     218  59.15%   6.83%  17.74%
Collin       47,434   13,088  11,616  59.72%  16.48%  14.62%

In Caldwell County, The Other Rick Perry got 1,400 votes, good for a mind-boggling 29.80% of the total. He also got 12.12% of the vote in Starr County, though that represented only 132 votes cast. Nowhere else did he come anywhere close to that. If anyone can come up with a good guess as to what the heck was going on in Caldwell County, please let me know.

There’s not a whole lot these counties have in common. They’re all around the state. Most are indeed quite red, but Brewster (a border county on the western end of the state, home of Alpine where longtime Democratic State Rep. Pete Gallego was from) was carried by Beto in 2018 with 52.5% of the vote; Trump carried it in 2020 with 51.0%. Collin and Brazoria are suburban counties that are red today but trending Democratic, Caldwell is smaller and more exurban than suburban – east of Hays and Comal, south of Travis – but it too has moved slightly left over the past decade. Montgomery is of course the red king of Texas, in terms of size and growth and Republican share of the vote, while Kerr is a western hill country place about a third of the size of Montgomery’s little brother Comal and just as red. The rest are a deep shade of crimson.

Is any of this a real threat to Abbott? I feel like this is a funhouse mirror reflection of the “Beto in Latino counties” discourse from four years ago. It’s enough to inspire some questions, but unless the likes of Allen West and Don Huffines are actively campaigning against Abbott this fall, I don’t think it will matter much, if at all. Maybe some of the truly deplorable contingent stays home, or skips the Governor’s race out of spite. I’ll be delighted if that happens, but I won’t be holding my breath. If Beto’s going to win, it’s going to be one part generating the kind of wave we got in 2018, one part getting some crossovers because of an issue like marijuana legalization or the freeze, and maybe one part some Republican fatigue or frustration with Abbott. Like I said, I’ll be more than happy to see Abbott underperform in any or all of these counties. I’m just not betting the election on it.

Precinct analysis: Beto’s range in the 2022 primaries

When you get 91.34% of the vote in an election, as Beto did in the Democratic primary for Governor, there’s usually not a whole lot of interesting data beneath the surface. But you never know until you look, so I went and got the numbers for the Dem gubernatorial primary by county and sorted them by Beto’s percentage. Here are some highlights from that:


County      Diaz%  Cooper%   Beto%   Voters
===========================================
Maverick   16.40%   10.48%  60.71%    6,653
Frio        8.14%    6.87%  71.72%    2,518
Dimmit     10.41%    7.97%  71.98%    1,845
Duval       8.18%    6.73%  75.62%    1,858
Webb        8.55%    5.29%  77.02%   17,675
Jim Wells   8.23%    6.57%  78.71%    3,866
Cameron     6.99%    4.71%  81.46%   19,705
Hidalgo     6.44%    3.87%  81.68%   37,309
Jefferson   2.35%   12.72%  83.33%   12,637
El Paso     2.93%    2.14%  91.61%   37,017
Fort Bend   2.64%    3.69%  92.02%   39,613
Harris      2.10%    3.22%  92.83%  157,880
Nueces      2.63%    2.52%  93.17%   13,426
Dallas      1.98%    3.14%  93.53%  126,203
Tarrant     2.18%    3.03%  93.77%   73,413
Bexar       2.30%    1.38%  94.13%   94,334
Montgomery  2.25%    1.87%  94.13%   10,585
Travis      2.98%    0.85%  95.00%  108,831
Denton      1.85%    2.01%  95.09%   27,340
Collin      1.77%    1.36%  95.48%   36,368

I limited myself to counties where at least a thousand votes had been cast, though obviously I didn’t include all of them. Maverick was easily Joy Diaz’s best county, while Jefferson (where he’s from) was Michael Cooper’s best. I didn’t include the other two candidates in this table because they weren’t interesting, but Inno Barrientez had his best showing in Frio County, with 8.02% of the vote.

You might look at some of these places and think that this is a sign of weakness on Beto’s part, since the low-scoring places are mostly heavily Latino. I would invite you to consider how he did in these counties in 2018 before you arrive at such a conclusion.


County    Beto 18  Beto 22
==========================
Maverick   22.13%   61.71%
Frio       23.84%   71.72%
Dimmit     29.07%   71.98%
Duval      41.58%   75.62%
Webb       41.65%   77.02%
Jim Wells  40.24%   78.71%
Cameron    46.77%   81.46%
Hidalgo    50.50%   81.68%

Sema Hernandez got over 60% in Maverick, almost 60% in Frio, and over 50% in Dimmit. She won a plurality in Duval, Webb, and Jim Wells, and had over 40% in Cameron and Hidalgo. I largely pooh-poohed the “Beto underperformed in the Latino counties!” hot takes in March of 2018 and I stand by that, but however you felt about those numbers then, it’s very different now.

He really crushed it in the big counties, with Collin the winner as Most Beto-est County Of Them All. You could do this same sort of comparison with 2018 as well if you wanted – Beto got 65.5% in Collin in 2018, 57.7% in Dallas, and 59.1% in Harris – but all we’re really saying is he got a lot more votes from basically the same size electorate. However you slice it, that much remains.

More data about mail ballot rejections

Keep it coming.

Thousands of Texans who attempted to vote by mail in the March primary were disenfranchised in the state’s first election conducted under a new Republican voting law. The state’s largest counties saw a significant spike in the rates of rejected mail-in ballots, most because they did not meet the new, stricter ID requirements.

Local ballot review boards met this week to finalize mail-in ballot rejections, throwing out 11,823 mail-in ballots in just 15 of the state’s 20 counties with the most registered voters. That doesn’t include Harris County, where thousands more votes had been flagged for rejection if voters couldn’t correct them in time. The final statewide count for rejected ballots is still unknown; counties are still reporting numbers to the Texas secretary of state’s office.

The rates of rejections range from 6% to nearly 22% in Bexar County, where almost 4,000 of the more than 18,000 people who returned mail-in ballots saw their votes discarded. In most cases, ballots were rejected for failing to comply with tighter voting rules enacted by Republicans last year that require voters to provide their driver’s license number or a partial Social Security number to vote by mail, according to rejection data collected by The Texas Tribune. A few counties’ rejection rates also included ballots that arrived past the voting deadline, but problems with the new ID requirements were the overwhelming cause for not accepting votes.

The impact of the ID requirements was particularly pronounced in several larger counties, including Bexar. In Dallas County, ID issues were to blame for nearly all of the lost votes reported, accounting for 682 of the 694 ballots that were rejected. Most ballots that were rejected because of the ID requirements were missing an ID number altogether. The county had an overall rejection rate of 6.5%

In Hays County, a suburban county south of Austin, all but one of the 208 rejected ballots were lost to ID issues. The county’s total rejection rate was 8.2%.

In Hidalgo County, just five of the 526 mail-in ballots that were rejected were scrapped because they arrived late. Most were rejected because of the ID requirements, officials said. The county had an overall rejection rate of 19.4%.

In Williamson County, roughly 73% of the 521 rejected ballots were lost to ID issues. The second main reason for rejection was late returns. Overall, 11.6% of ballots were rejected in the county.

[…]

Early rejection rates hovered between 30% to 40% but dropped as thousands of voters worked to safeguard their votes, often by visiting county elections offices after their ballots were flagged for rejection. Hundreds of other voters canceled their mail-in ballots and opted to vote in person instead, according to county data.

That included more than 300 voters in El Paso County who had initially requested absentee ballots but voted in person, with several voters surrendering their ballots at polling places. The county ended the election with a 16% rejection rate, throwing out 725 votes — 94% of them because of the ID rules.

“In the 2020 primary, we rejected 39 ballots,” Lisa Wise, the elections administrator in El Paso, said ahead of election day when the county had flagged more than a thousand ballots for review. “You don’t have to be a math wizard to see it.”

But the opportunity to resolve rejections — or to alternatively head to a polling place — was out of reach for some voters. County officials have said mail-in voters often include people for whom voting in person can be a challenge or who are unable to travel to the county elections office, which for voters in some counties can be a long distance away.

Voters facing a rejected ballot because of ID issues were also directed to the state’s new online tracker to try to validate their information, but technical issues with the tracker’s setup shut out nearly a million registered voters from even accessing it.

Under state law, a voter must provide both a driver’s license number and the last four digits of their Social Security number to log in to the tracker; both numbers must be on file in their voter record even though voters are required to provide only one number when they first register to vote.

Despite the secretary of state’s office’s efforts to backfill ID numbers in the state’s voter rolls, more than 700,000 voters lacked one of those ID numbers on their voter records as of Dec. 20. Another 106,911 voters didn’t have either number.

It’s likely not all of those voters are eligible to vote by mail, but the barrier risked hindering enough of Kara Sands’ voters that she pulled references to the online ballot tracker from the guidance she was providing Nueces County voters. Sands, the Republican elected county clerk, said most of the older voters in her county first registered to vote with a Social Security number and that remained the only ID on file for them.

“Why am I going to send them [materials saying] ‘Go here to fix it’ knowing they can’t fix it?” Sands said in an interview ahead of election day.

See here for yesterday’s post about the Bexar County experience. We still need to know how this broke down by party – given that fewer Republicans chose to vote by mail, it’s extremely likely that more Democratic ballots were rejected, but it may be that on a percentage basis they were equivalent – and we still need to distinguish between rejected applications and rejected ballots, as well as who did and didn’t vote in person afterwards. I don’t recall seeing a figure about how many registrations lacked one or both of SSNs and drivers license numbers before now, so it would be good to know as well how many people who did fill out the ballot correctly, with the proper voter ID information, were still rejected because the state database was incomplete. I could see that as a basis for another lawsuit, with the goal of halting all further rejections until the state can prove that its database is fully up to date, but that might be moot by November, and I don’t know what other relief a voter could ask for.

The Associated Press takes a crack at this, and offers a bit of partisan data.

Although the final number of discounted ballots will be lower, the early numbers suggest Texas’ rejection rate will far exceed the 2020 general election, when federal data showed that less than 1% of mail ballots statewide were rejected.

“It took me three tries and 28 days but I got my ballot and I voted,” said Pamiel Gaskin, 75, of Houston. Like many rejected mail voters, she did not list a matching identification number that Texas’ new law requires.

For now, the numbers do not represent how many Texas ballots were effectively thrown out. Voters had until Monday to “fix” rejected mail ballots, which in most cases meant providing identification that is now required under a sweeping law signed last fall by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott.

New requirements include listing an identification number — either a driver’s license or a Social Security number — on the ballot’s carrier envelope. That number must match the county’s records. If a ballot is rejected, voters could add an ID number via an online ballot tracking system, go to the county’s election offices and fix the problem in person, or vote with a provisional ballot on election day.

County election officers say they worked feverishly to contact those voters in time, in many cases successfully, and a full and final tally of rejected ballots in Texas is expected to come into focus in the coming days.

But already, scores of mail ballots have been disqualified for good.

[…]

The AP obtained reports from 120 counties — nearly half of the 254 in Texas — through county websites and contacting all counties that had not posted a report publicly.

In Texas’ largest county, around Houston, Harris County officials said more than 11,000 mail ballots had been flagged for rejection as of March 2. But in the county’s preliminary report that is dated a day later, the number of rejected mail ballots was listed at 3,277. On Tuesday, Harris County Elections Administrator Isabel Longoria said she was stepping down following a bungled vote count.

Houston Democrats have been among the most outspoken over Texas’ new voting laws, which they say are designed to weaken minority turnout. But Republican-leaning counties struggled with the new rules as well.

In Parker County, which former President Donald Trump carried by a 4-to-1 margin in 2020, the county reported 250 mail ballots as rejected or pending out of 1,100 mail votes — about 23%. Along the Texas coast in Nueces County, which Trump narrowly won, the rejection rate was 8%.

According to the county reports, in the five counties won by Trump that had the most mail-in voters, a combined 4,216 mailed ballots were rejected or still pending after the day of the election, a rate of 21% of the total. In the counties won by Biden with the most mail-in voters, which include most of Texas’ biggest cities, a combined 11,190 votes were similarly rejected or pending, which amounted to 13%.

Kara Sands, the election administrator in Nueces County, said her office pressed voters to include more than one identification number as a guardrail against having their ballot rejected. But she said her office wasn’t inundated with voter frustration.

“We really didn’t get a lot of folks complaining about that,” she said.

Texas holds primary runoffs in May, and elections officials say their goal now is to educate voters to avoid a repeat next time. Christopher Davis, the elections administrator in Williamson County, said the final rejection rate of 11.5% was “by far the highest we have ever seen” in the county of more than 600,000 people.

“The hope is we knock down that rejection rate,” he said.

Interesting that those five deep red counties had a higher rate of rejection than the blue counties, though there were fewer total votes there. Likely that’s a function of the blue counties being more populous, though that also suggests that a greater percentage of total votes were affected in the red counties. For comparison, the AP story notes that a total of about 8,300 mail ballots were rejected in the 2020 election, which was out of 11 million ballots cast. Every way you look at it, this was an exponential increase.

And Talking Points Memo was also on this.

The rejection rates are staggering. In booming Collin County, for example, nearly 14% of mail-in votes were ultimately rejected, the election administrator there told TPM.

In Harris County, Texas’ largest and home to Houston, a whopping 6,888 ballots were ultimately rejected “as a direct result of Senate Bill 1,” according to a statement from the county to TPM — nearly 19% of mail-in ballots. By comparison only, 135 of the 48,473 votes cast in the 2018 primary were rejected, the statement said — three tenths of a percent.

“That is apocalyptic. It calls into question whether this is even a free and fair election,” said James Slattery, senior staff attorney at the Texas Civil Rights Project’s voting rights program. “The sheer, catastrophically high rate of rejections has been very bad.”

Unlike many others, [Monica] Emery was able to fix her ballot, filling out multiple forms to “cure” the error in the days following Election Day, and consulting with attorneys and election officials to make sure her vote counted. Finally, she received word from the county on Monday, on the last possible day to fix ballot issues, that her vote had been tallied. (Texas’ new online “ballot tracker” website apparently didn’t get the memo: It continued to label her ballot “rejected.”)

But Emery, a retiree in the Dallas area, was one of the lucky ones. She’s “perfectly healthy.” She lives near her polling place. She knows her county officials and they had the bandwidth to help her. And she had additional help from multiple lawyers who she’d contacted for help. But what about her son, a pilot in the Air Force currently living in the United Kingdom? What about her elderly friend down the road, living with long COVID? Would they have been able to handle a tricky rejection letter? Would they have received word that their ballots had been rejected in time? She doubted it.

Lawmakers, Emery said, “are making it harder than it needs to be to do a real simple thing like voting by mail.”

[…]

In Travis County, home to Austin, 16% of the roughly 11,200 mail-in ballots were initially rejected, and only half of voters were able to cure those rejections in time to be counted, said Victoria Hinojosa of the Travis County clerk’s office.

Almost three of four rejected ballots were from Democrats, and most rejected ballots had “ID issues,” Hinojosa told TPM.

In Williamson County, north of Austin, 11.5% of ballots were rejected in the final tally — “absolutely higher than anything we’ve ever encountered before,” Elections Administrator Chris Davis told Austin’s NPR station KUT. In El Paso County, the final rejection rate was about 16%, or 725 mail-in ballots, the Associated Press reported.

In Collin County, which includes a chunk of the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area and is experiencing meteoric population growth, the ballot rejection rate right after the election hovered around 15%, down from a peak of 25% at the beginning of voting. After the curing period, that number ticked down slightly to a 13.7% rejection rate, or 828 ballots rejected.

“Unfortunately, the concerns that we expressed during the legislative session turned out to be true,” said Grace Chimene, president of the League of Women Voters of Texas, which is part of a coalition of groups that sued over the law in September. “It’s very frustrating.”

“I can tell you, almost the whole thing is SB1-related,” Collin County Election Administrator Bruce Sherbet told TPM of the rejections. “If we had rejections before SB1, it was usually in the single digits.”

Sherbet said that nearly all of the rejections stemmed from missing ID numbers on the original voter file, ballot application or ballot itself. In some cases, older voters who’d aged out of driving tried to vote with their new state ID number, which didn’t match the old driver’s license number on their registration.

He lacked data on the party split, but said that it’s likely more Republican voters were hurt by the law’s new provisions, since roughly 1,600 more of them voted by mail in his county.

[…]

The chaos unleashed by the new mail-in ballot requirements was “very predictable,” Josh Blank, research director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, told TPM.

“The legislators were warned multiple times throughout hearings on these bills for the better part of a year that requiring voters to supply drivers license numbers or partial Social Security numbers, whichever of two you used to register to vote, would likely to be a problem for many Texans — especially given that most of the Texans who automatically qualify for mail-in ballots are over 65 and likely registered decades ago,” he said.

Less predictable is who exactly the confusing new requirements will hurt. While much of Republicans’ antagonism towards voting by mail stems from former President Donald Trump’s efforts to toss ballots in 2020, it’s not clear that knotting up the system will hurt Democratic voters more than Republican ones.

That “scattershot” strategy, Blank said, is due to the virtual nonexistence of voter fraud. It’s legislating a problem that doesn’t exist.

“It’s one thing to make unsubstantiated allegations of widespread fraud,” he said. “It’s another to reject hundreds of thousands of ballots, which is what Texas is on the path to do in November if this primary is any indication.”

As this story notes, the “ballot curing” process, in which voters whose mail ballots lacked the correct ID number had until Monday to fix them, likely will reduce the eventual total, which started at about 27,000. But doing that isn’t easy for everyone – some voters don’t have reliable Internet access, some can’t drive to the election administrator’s office, and so on.

Finally, because it took me longer than it should have to find this on Twitter, here’s most of the Harris County data I’ve been wanting:

Again, more Dem mail ballots overall, but a higher rejection rate among Republicans – 17.6% of all Dem mail ballots, and 22.0% of all GOP mail ballots. Still more Dem votes rejected, but in a scenario where the mail votes are distributed more evenly, like in 2018, that’s going to bite the Republicans. The Chron story that these tweets are based on is here. In response to a question from me, Scherer also reported that “13 people with rejected ballots ended up voting in person”, which obviously ain’t much. Makes me think that will be the cases around the state as well.

Of course, as I said yesterday and as noted in the AP story, we can do a lot to improve things for November, and we have the May primary runoff and special election to practice. But man, that will be an expensive and labor-intensive process, and it’s so completely unnecessary. You will note that Abbott and Sen. Bryan Hughes have been studiously avoiding the press on this, because what can they actually say? Or more likely, why would anyone think they cared? At least we have the rhetorical turf to ourselves for now. Whatever else we do, we need to get folks mad and motivated over this. Because – say it with me now – nothing will change until people lose elections over this crap. That’s the one sure thing we can do. Daily Kos has more.

Precinct analysis: Final 2022 primary vote totals from those counties of interest

At the end of early voting, I posted some totals from various counties around the state. I noted at the time it was an imprecise comparison since I included final 2018 turnout numbers as the comparison point for 2022 and said I’d update that table when voting was over. Well, voting is over, so let’s return to that table and see what we can see.


County       2018 Dem   2018 GOP  2022 Dem  2022 GOP
====================================================
Bell            7,282     18,149     9,089    20,912
Bexar          81,408     67,977    94,334    87,277
Brazoria       10,085     24,376    11,331    30,541
Brazos          5,131     12,365     4,611    16,430
Cameron        14,123      4,003    19,705    10,504
Collin         34,669     66,078    36,368    79,431
Comal           4,150     17,662     4,847    23,874
Dallas        123,671     80,583   126,203    86,551
Denton         27,025     49,474    27,340    68,104
El Paso        54,184     12,096    37,017    18,240
Ellis           4,243     15,906     5,376    18,536
Fort Bend      29,322     34,707    39,613    45,582
Hays           11,397     11,881    12,972    15,475
Hidalgo        37,739      7,050    37,309    15,042
Johnson         2,618     12,280     2,485    17,085
Lubbock         5,900     21,964     5,599    27,552
Maverick        6,300        111     6,653       623
Montgomery      9,701     48,921    10,585    71,451
Nueces         12,345     12,553    13,426    18,871
Smith           4,704     22,826     6,362    27,668
Starr           6,729         15     3,410     1,089
Tarrant        71,876    105,317    73,410   129,628
Travis        113,070     39,177   108,831    46,416
Webb           21,137      1,426    17,675     2,963
Williamson     25,681     35,675    26,067    47,431

The first thing you might notice is that the final numbers for Starr and Maverick counties are less than the final EV totals I had. How can that be? I double-checked the final EV totals on the SOS webpage, and they are now as they were then, 6,895 for Maverick and 5,188 for Starr. I may not know much, but I know that election totals go up, not down. How do I explain this?

I went and looked at the Starr County Elections page to see what I could find. What I found is that the turnout numbers they presented for the Democratic and Republican primaries are indeed different than what the SOS reported for the gubernatorial races, by a fair amount. While there were 3,410 votes cast in the Governor’s race on the Democratic side in Starr, and 1,089 on the Republican side, total turnout for Democrats was given as 6,456, with 1,444 as the total for Republicans. You can see if you scroll through that some races, like the CD28 Dem primary, got a lot more votes than the gubernatorial primary. I figured maybe the action was a bit heavier downballot, and that seemed to be true on the Dem side in that there were a lot more votes cast in the eight Justice of the Peace races. There were still undervotes, which were easier to comprehend as they were a lot closer to the “total votes” figures for each race, but if you added up all the votes in those eight JP precincts, you get the 6,456 and 1,444 figures cited.

Make of that what you will. The transition from the “actual total turnout regardless of who voted in what race” to the “total that actually voted in this race” was jarring, in this case because the undervote rate was so low. I have no idea what it might have been in 2018, so I can’t draw any conclusions. As for Maverick County, I couldn’t find a report from their website, just what the SOS had. Insert shrug emoji here.

Anyway. I didn’t have an agenda for this post, just an intention to keep the promise made before. I’ve got some other posts about primary voting in the works and will run those in the coming days.

CCA will take up the question of where Paxton’s securities trial should be

Time for an OG Paxton scandal update.

Best mugshot ever

The state’s top appeals court on Wednesday agreed to take up the question of where Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton should be tried for alleged securities fraud, a small victory for prosecutors pursuing the criminal cases against the Republican official.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals will settle whether Paxton’s trials should be held in Collin County, where the attorney general’s legal team would like to make their case, or in Harris County. Special prosecutor Brian Wice on Wednesday said a lower court decision to move the case to Collin County was a mistake.

“We’re confident today’s decision means the Court of Criminal Appeals will agree,” Wice said in a statement.

Paxton, a Republican, has been under active indictment for the majority of his time in statewide office.

[…]

In 2017, the cases against Paxton were moved after a judge previously presiding over the case agreed with prosecutors that they might struggle to get a impartial jury in Collin County, where the alleged crimes took place but also where Paxton lived and worked for decades.

Paxton’s lawyers took issue with the move to Harris County, which is more liberal politically. They challenged the decision by arguing that the judge’s time presiding over the case had already expired when he made it. In summer 2021, a Houston appeals court agreed with Paxton that Collin County was the proper venue for the cases against him and that any subsequent trials should be held there.

The prosecutors asked the Court of Criminal Appeals to reconsider that decision. It put the move on hold last year, and now will formally take up the issue and make the final decision on where the trials should be held.

See here for the previous update. If we’re lucky, maybe we’ll get a final determination about where the trial will be some time this year, though that’s probably too optimistic. In any event, this is now what appears to be the last obstacle in place before the trial itself can occur. If the original indictments of Ken Paxton were a person, it would now be old enough to be in first grade. Let’s hope we get a resolution to all this before it goes to high school.

2022 primary early voting statewide

Turnout information for early voting for all counties is available on the Secretary of State website. They used to only have this for the 30 most populous counties, which skewed things in a Democratic direction, but a law passed in 2019 required the data to be made available for all counties. Now that early voting has been completed, let’s see what the totals looked like in other counties of interest around the state.

Unfortunately, we can’t make a direct comparison for some of the counties I was interested in because as noted the SOS only has EV data for thirty counties. So what I did instead was collect the final turnout information for the 2018 Senate primaries in both parties. What that means is that the data below is a bit skewed, since we’re comparing EV turnout to overall turnout. Even there, “overall turnout” is a bit misleading since there are always undervotes, and the data I’ve captured for 2018 doesn’t include that. The 2022 numbers includes everyone who showed up, the 2018 data only has the ones who voted in their Senate races. It’s the best I can do. Here’s what it looks like:


County       2018 Dem   2018 GOP  2022 Dem  2022 GOP
====================================================
Bell            7,282     18,149     4,550     9,574
Bexar          81,408     67,977    60,033    50,025
Brazoria       10,085     24,376     6,809    20,323
Brazos          5,131     12,365     2,241     7,902
Collin         34,669     66,078    20,784    43,779
Comal           4,150     17,662     3,040    13,530
Dallas        123,671     80,583    66,109    38,928
Denton         27,025     49,474    14,683    37,288
El Paso        54,184     12,096    20,320     9,199
Ellis           4,243     15,906     2,479     8,136
Fort Bend      29,322     34,707    25,646    28,275
Hays           11,397     11,881     7,316     8,210
Johnson         2,618     12,280     1,224     8,175
Lubbock         5,900     21,964     3,267    17,184
Montgomery      9,701     48,921     6,052    41,596
Nueces         12,345     12,553     6,682     9,962
Smith           4,704     22,826     3,933    15,481
Tarrant        71,876    105,317    38,674    70,021
Travis        113,070     39,177    58,329    23,357
Williamson     25,681     35,675    14,558    26,672

For the most part, nothing terribly exciting. Overall Democratic turnout is about 627K, about 62% of the 2018 Senate race total of 1.04 million. Republicans are at about 1.02 million, or about 66% of the way to the 1.55 million they had in their Senate primary. While I talked about the “premier races” driving turnout statewide in the last entry, conditions in an individual county can vary. High profile and/or expensive races for Congress, County Judge, or other local offices can have an effect. Different counties have different patterns for how much of the vote is cast early versus on Election Day. We also have to consider the effect of SB1 on mail ballots. So far this year there have been 49,888 Republican primary ballots cast by mail, compared to 71,329 for the Dems. We don’t know the total figures for 2018, but a look at the top 30 county numbers makes it clear that Republicans used mail ballots a lot more four years ago.

So overall I don’t see too much that stands out. The one place that is a bit remarkable is El Paso, where Democratic voting is down quite a bit from 2018. We know that Beto was a big draw overall in El Paso, more so in the general, but remember that in 2018 there was also the primary to succeed Beto in Congress, and it was a fairly expensive race that featured then-County Judge and now Rep. Veronica Escobar. I suspect that drove some people to the polls as well.

What about the South Texas/Rio Grande Valley counties that shifted red in 2020? Here’s the same sample I looked at before, updated for the 2022 numbers:


County       2018 Dem   2018 GOP  2022 Dem  2022 GOP
====================================================
Cameron        14,123      4,003    14,500     6,455
Hidalgo        37,739      7,050    31,924    10,398
Maverick        6,300        111     6,895       440
Starr           6,729         15     5,188       969
Webb           21,137      1,426    13,384     1,499

Definitely more participation on the Republican side, exceeding the final 2018 totals in all five counties, though overall those numbers are still quite low compared to the Dems. Democratic numbers in Cameron and Maverick have also topped their 2018 counterparts, and are not far behind in Hidalgo and Starr. I’m a little puzzled by Webb, since that’s the center of the CD28 primary battle, but maybe that’s a mostly-vote-on-Election-Day place. We’ll see tomorrow. Have you voted yet?

The only constant is change

This DMN story is about the wave of changes to the various legislative caucuses in North Dallas, but if you pull the lens back just a little, you can see how universal it is.

Proponents of term limits complain that elected lawmakers often overstay their welcome.

That’s not the case these days in the Texas House, where turnover is occurring across the state. In North Texas, the 2022 elections could bring an array of new faces to the House and Senate.

When the Legislature convenes in 2023, there will be eight new members of the House. And a new senator will replace the retiring Jane Nelson of Denton County. Statewide, 28 House lawmakers have retired or left their seats to run or another office. Five senators are not running for reelection, including several moderate Republicans, including Kel Seliger of Amarillo and Larry Taylor of Friendswood.

The story goes on to list the folks from the Metroplex – mostly Dallas, Tarrant, Collin, and Denton counties – who are retiring or running for another office in 2022, and it’s a long list. But as we’ve discussed, there’s always a fair amount of turnover following a redistricting year, and there’s a lot more natural turnover in elected office than you might think.

My case in point: Here’s your list of federal and state election winners in 2012 from Harris County. Following the 2022 election, this is how many new names there will be:

– Six of nine members of Congress are gone, with only Reps. Al Green, Mike McCaul, and Sheila Jackson Lee remaining.
– All three SBOE members will be gone, as Lawrence Allen is running for HD26 this March.
– At least six out of eight members of the State Senate will be gone, with only Sens. Whitmire and Huffman still on the ballot. To be sure, two of those people are now statewide office holders, and one is on Commissioners Court, but this is about turnover. All three of their seats are now held by someone else.
– At least sixteen of the 24 State House members will be gone. Only Reps. Alma Allen, Gene Wu, Armando Walle, Senfronia Thompson, Harold Dutton, Ana Hernandez, Mary Ann Perez, and Hubert Vo are on the ballot.

If you want to take it one step further, note that four out of five members of Commissioners Court are gone, with the fifth (Jack Cagle) likely to be voted out this November. All holders of executive office, all members of the HCDE Board of Trustees, and nearly every District Court judge is new since then as well.

To be sure, some of the holdovers have been there for a long time. My point is that they’re a pretty rare exception, and that the norm is for most legislators to serve a couple of terms and then either lose an election or move on to something else, which may be another political office and may be something outside of electoral politics. This is one of the many reasons why I disdain term limits. Our very real lived experience shows that they are not necessary.

The flip side of this, as a companion story notes, is that turnover means that a fair amount of legislative and subject matters knowledge goes away when a veteran lawmaker moves on, voluntarily or otherwise. But that’s life, and as someone who has been in the corporate world for a couple of decades, I can tell you that the world will keep spinning. New people will get their chance, and generally speaking they’ll be fine, even if they do things differently.

Now if you want to complain that the kind of Republicans being elected these days in place of the Jane Nelsons and Larry Taylors and Kel Seligers and so forth are a couple of notches below them in terms of knowledge, seriousness, deportment, and a whole host of other qualities, you’ll get no argument from me. That’s a different problem, and it’s going to take both the election of more Democrats and a return to something approaching sanity and respect for democracy among Republicans as a whole to solve it.

Please watch over the fraudit

Good idea.

A group of Democratic members of Congress from Texas has sent a letter to the Department of Justice requesting that it closely monitor the ongoing election audit in four Texas counties. Last September, Texas Republicans began an audit in Harris, Tarrant, Dallas, and Collin counties at the behest of Donald Trump. The former president urged Gov. Greg Abbott to review the results in spite of the fact that he won the state in an election the Texas Secretary of State’s Office called “smooth and secure.”

“We have serious concern that this audit may be an attempt to invalidate properly cast ballots in the 2020 Presidential election,” read the letter, which was addressed to Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Kristen Clarke. We ask that your office closely monitor and work collaboratively with Texas state officials to ensure this audit does not unfairly erode any Texan’s ability to choose their leaders through the ballot box.”

The letter noted particular concern about the new Secretary of State overseeing the audit, John Scott. As an attorney, Scott assisted Trump’s unsuccessful attempt to overturn the election results in Pennsylvania. “This newly announced audit raises serious impartiality and fairness concerns given Mr. Scott’s previous work seeking to invalidate authentic election results and Governor Abbott’s history of peddling false election claims,” read the letter.

The letter was signed by Reps. Colin Allred, Lizzie Fletcher, Filemon Vela, Eddie Bernice Johnson, Veronica Escobar, Sylvia Garcia, Joaquin Castro, Lloyd Doggett, Al Green, and Marc Veasey.

If the DOJ does follow the letter’s request, it won’t be the first time it’s tangled with Texas over its election practices. In November, the DOJ filed a lawsuit against the state for its assault on voting rights.

[…]

The results of the initial phase of the Texas election audit have already been released and, unsurprisingly, they show few issues and no evidence of widespread fraud.

See here for the most recent update. Once more with feeling: There is no reason to trust John Scott. Corner him like a rat in a cage, and do not let anything about this boondoggle get spun. The DMN has more.

Fraudit fizzling

Who could have ever predicted this would be a big ol’ nothingburger?

The Texas secretary of state’s office has released the first batch of results from its review into the 2020 general election, finding few issues despite repeated, unsubstantiated claims by GOP leaders casting doubts on the integrity of the electoral system.

The first phase of the review, released New Year’s Eve, highlighted election data from four counties — Harris, Dallas, Tarrant and Collin — that showed few discrepancies between electronic and hand counts of ballots in a sample of voting precincts. Those partial manual counts made up a significant portion of the results produced by the secretary of state, which largely focused on routine voter roll maintenance and post-election processes that were already in place before the state launched what it has labeled as a “full forensic audit.”

On Friday, Samuel Taylor, a spokesperson with the secretary of state’s office, said the review was needed “to provide clarity on what issues need to be resolved for the next elections.”

But Remi Garza, president of the Texas Association of Election Administrators, said there wasn’t anything in the review’s first set of results that raised any alarms for him.

“There doesn’t seem to be anything too far out of the ordinary with respect to the information that’s provided,” said Garza, who serves as the election administrator in Cameron County. “… I hope nobody draws any strong conclusions one way or the other with respect to the information that’s been provided. I think it’s just very straightforward, very factual and will ultimately play a part in the final conclusions that are drawn once the second phase is completed.”

According to the state’s review of the counties’ partial manual counts, which they are already required to conduct under state law, there were few differences between electronic and manual ballot tallies — and counties were able to justify those inconsistencies.

See here for the previous update. Boy, nothing says “we want people to see this news” like putting out a press release on the Friday afternoon of a holiday weekend. In each case cited here, there was a literal handful of vote count differences, and the reason each of the tiny discrepancies was already known. And this is in four counties that totaled over four million ballots cast in 2020. It’s hard to imagine a cleaner or clearer result.

The state’s progress report for phase one of its audit also included data related to regular maintenance of the state’s massive list of registered voters — it surpassed 16.9 million in November 2020 — that goes beyond its four-county review. But some of the figures highlighted by the state either appear to be faulty or remain unverified.

For example, the secretary of state’s office noted it had sent counties a list of 11,737 records of registered voters it deemed “possible non-U.S. citizens.” But the Tribune previously reported that scores of citizens, including many who registered to vote at their naturalization ceremonies, were marked for review.

Although it has yet to finish investigating the records, the state also included an unverified figure of 509 voter records — about 0.0045% of the 11.3 million votes cast in November 2020 — in which a voter may have cast a vote in Texas and another state or jurisdiction. The state said the work of reviewing those records to eliminate those that were “erroneously matched” because of data issues wouldn’t be completed until January.

The state also highlighted the investigation of 67 votes — about 0.0006% of the votes cast in the 2020 general election — cast by “potentially deceased voters.” This review also has not been completed.

In its report, the secretary of state emphasized that the removal of ineligible or deceased voters from the voter rolls “in and of itself does not indicate that any illegal votes were cast.”

What they almost always find in the latter case is that the voter died after their vote had been cast. In a state with millions of people, that sort of thing happens. I would expect that in most of the former cases, closer inspection shows that the votes in question were actually cast by different people. Accurate name-matching is a tricky business. As for the “non-citizen voter purges” the state regularly tries and fails to do with any accuracy, well, just keep that in mind whenever the state of Texas or any of its officials make claims about voting irregularities. The motivation to find bad things blinds them to such a degree that any bad things they find are inherently tainted by the nature of their search. Only by removing that motivation, and thus enforcing a careful and deliberate process, can any claims be considered credible.

Precinct analysis: The new SBOE map

Previously: New State House map, New Congressional map

I probably care more about the SBOE than most normal people do. It’s not that powerful an entity, there are only 15 seats on it, and their elections go largely under the radar. But the potential for shenanigans is high, and Democrats had about as good a shot at achieving a majority on that board as they did in the State House in 2020. Didn’t work out, and the new map is typically inhospitable, but we must keep trying. And if this nerdy political blog doesn’t care about the SBOE, then what’s even the point?

You can find the 2012 election results here and the 2020 results here. I didn’t use the 2016 results in my analysis below, but that data is here if you want to see it.


Dist   Obama   Romney Obama%Romney%     Biden    Trump Biden% Trump%
====================================================================
01   247,686  187,075  56.2%  42.4%   378,468  283,822  56.3%  42.2%
02   228,834  185,412  54.6%  44.2%   291,278  291,716  49.4%  49.4%
03   264,311  232,068  52.5%  46.1%   388,240  305,696  55.1%  43.4%
04   308,644  120,097  71.2%  27.7%   403,177  148,981  72.2%  26.7%
05   300,483  239,166  53.8%  42.8%   570,541  301,308  64.1%  33.8%
06   181,278  386,445  31.5%  67.1%   368,830  466,577  43.5%  55.0%
07   224,393  362,617  37.8%  61.1%   340,566  472,253  41.3%  57.3%
08   176,409  303,391  36.3%  62.4%   298,068  395,563  42.4%  56.3%
09   199,415  406,195  32.5%  66.3%   283,337  493,792  36.0%  62.7%
10   169,390  393,365  29.6%  68.6%   303,528  543,023  35.2%  63.0%
11   190,589  395,936  32.0%  66.5%   340,611  492,562  40.2%  58.2%
12   189,192  408,110  31.2%  67.3%   370,022  505,840  41.6%  56.8%
13   335,799  130,847  71.2%  27.7%   441,894  151,002  73.5%  25.1%
14   165,093  377,319  30.0%  68.5%   316,606  503,706  38.0%  60.4%
15   126,093  440,745  21.9%  76.7%   162,347  533,181  23.0%  75.5%

You can see the new map here, so you can visualize where these districts are. The current and soon-to-be-obsolete map is here, and my analysis of the 2020 election under that map is here.

You might note that none of the new districts look all that crazy. For the most part, the districts encompass entire counties. It’s mostly a matter of which counties are joined together. A good example of that is SBOE12, which used to be Collin County plus a slice of Dallas. In the days when Collin was deep red, that was more than enough for it to be safe Republican, but now that Collin is trending heavily Democratic – SBOE12 was a four-point win for Joe Biden last year – that won’t do. Now SBOE12 is a sprawling district that still has all of Collin but now a smaller piece of Dallas, the top end of Denton, and a bunch of smaller North Texas counties that had previously been in districts 09 and 15. In return, the formerly all-rural district 9 picks up about a quarter of Dallas, in a mirror of the strategy we’ve seen in the other maps to put heavily Democratic urban areas in with deeply Republican rural ones, to neutralize the former. District 11, which had previously been pieces of Dallas and Tarrant plus all of Parker and is now all of that plus Hood and Somervell and part of Johnson counties, is another example.

The other strategy that we see echoes of here is the more careful placement of dark red suburban counties. SBOE6, which used to be entirely within Harris County, is now hiked up a bit north to include a generous piece of Montgomery County, much as was done with CD02 and SD07, to flip it from being a Biden district back to a Trump district. Ironically, this has the effect of making SBOE8, which used to have all of Montgomery plus a lot of the counties east of Harris, more Democratic as it now wears both the eastern and western ends of Harris like earflaps. (Mutton chops also come to mind as I look at the map.) SBOE8 also picks up a piece of bright blue Fort Bend County, which had previously been in district 7. Meanwhile, over in Central Texas, SBOE5 jettisoned Comal County after it could no longer keep that district red; Comal wound up in district 10, which excised all of its Travis County population in return.

As far as the numbers go, there’s not much to say. Whether Democrats can win five or six districts will depend in the short term on whether they can hold district 2, which is actually a bit more Democratic in this alignment. In the longer term, districts 6, 8, 11, and 12 could all become competitive. District 3 is no more Democratic than any of those are Republican, but as you can see it trended a bit more blue over the decade, and it’s anchored in Bexar County, which should keep it from falling. 2022 is the one year when every district is up for re-election, and that will tell us something about how the trends we saw in 2020 are going. Maybe we’ll need to re-evaluate the prospects for change in this map, or as we’ve said before, maybe we’ll end up cursing the evil genius of it all. I mean, even as SBOE6 moved strongly towards Dems, the deficit to make up is still 100K votes. Nothing is going to come easy, if it comes at all.

Fraudit update

Yes, it’s still a thing.

Texas Secretary of State John Scott announced late Friday that his office has presented an “exhaustive” document request to Dallas, Tarrant, Collin and Harris counties as part of an audit of 2020′s election.

Scott’s office also announced that phase one of the audit is nearing completion, with a summary of findings expected to be made public by the end of December. The document request marks the beginning of the second phase of the audit, according to a news release from the secretary of state’s office.

The request, sent to election administrators at each of the counties, asks for the counties to provide information including a full accounting of mail-in votes and provisional votes, any reported chain of custody issues as well as complaints that those offices might have received regarding the 2020 presidential election.

[…]

Following Friday’s announcement, James Slattery, a senior counsel at the Texas Civil Rights Project, called the document request from the secretary of state’s office a “fishing expedition.”

“No other words to describe these unbelievably wide ranging document requests than ‘fishing expedition,’ ” Slattery said on Twitter. “It’ll tie these offices up in knots just as the primary season begins, diverting crucial resources from helping voters navigate all of 2021′s election law changes.”

See here, here, here, and here for the background. I think James Slattery pretty much nails it, so let me note instead that Collin and Tarrant counties were apparently caught off guard by the initial call for the fraudit.

Now, an investigation by the watchdog American Oversight has brought back communication records and documents that show election officials in Collin and Tarrant counties were caught on their heels when the audit was announced, and that they apparently had no idea what the process meant.

In one of the emails American Oversight obtained, Collin County Election Administrator Bruce Sherbet informed employees that the audit would kick off in November.

(Does the timing feel a bit funny to you? Well: “Governor Abbott, we need a ‘Forensic Audit of the 2020 Election,’” Trump wrote in an open letter to Abbott. “Texans know voting fraud occurred in some of their counties.” A little more than eight hours later, boom: an audit is born.)

Texas Director of Elections Keith Ingram had informed Sherbet of the upcoming probe, despite having previously told the Collin County elections administrator that the vote had been both “smooth and secure.”

On Sept. 24, Collin County Commissioner Darrell Hale wrote back to Sherbet and Collin County Administrator Bill Bilyeu. “What is the story?” he asked. “What’s going on?”

“Just heard about it last night,” Sherbet replied. “Not sure of any details.”

Later, Hale confessed to an inquisitive constituent by email, “We are curious on the details ourselves.”

[…]

After the Texas Secretary of State’s Office announced the audit, Tarrant County Elections Administrator Heider Garcia urged election officials not to comment publicly until they figured out what exactly was going on and knew “what they need from us,” the email communications American Oversight obtained show. Garcia urged the officials to forward any media inquiries to him.

The American Oversight story is here. They say they intend to get similar documents from Harris and Dallas counties about their initial response to the fraudit request. I’ll keep an eye out for them.

Cracking Asian-American communities

The Trib explores what the new Congressional maps did to Asian-American communities, mostly but not exclusively in the Houston area.

When Texas lawmakers redrew congressional maps following the 2020 census, they split up Asian American populations in both Harris and Fort Bend counties.

One district line, winding between a local car wash and bar, severs most of the Korean neighborhoods, grocery stores, restaurants and a senior center from the community center itself, which now hangs on the edge of one congressional district while most of its members reside in the next district over.

“It’s like (lawmakers) don’t even know we are here,” said Hyunja Norman, president of the Korean American Voters League, who works out of the center. “If they were thoughtful, they could’ve included the Korean Community Center in (our district). But it’s like they are ignorant of us, or they just don’t care.”

As the Asian American and Pacific Islander population has grown and continued to mobilize politically, especially in the midst of rising hostility and targeted attacks, the community’s desire for representation in Texas and U.S. politics has become stronger. But many now feel their political aspirations became collateral damage in Republican efforts to draw political districts designed to preserve partisan power.

Although they make up only about 5% of Texas’ total population, Asian Texans accounted for a sizable portion of the state’s tremendous growth over the past decade. Nearly one in five new Texans since 2010 are Asian American, according to the census. They were the fastest-growing racial or ethnic voting group in the state, increasing from a population of about 950,000 in 2010 to nearly 1.6 million in 2020.

[…]

In Fort Bend County — which has ranked as the most diverse county in the country multiple times — Lily Trieu’s parents grew scared of even routine errands like grocery shopping or filling their gas tanks. They were afraid to wear masks in public.

And when Asian Americans in the U.S. House of Representatives introduced a resolution condemning the Atlanta shootings, almost every Texas Republican voted against it, including Fort Bend County’s U.S. Rep. Troy Nehls.

“This is why representation matters,” Trieu told Texas lawmakers when she testified at redistricting hearings. “This is why splitting our community to dilute our votes is directly denying our opportunity to receive that representation.”

[…]

Previously, more than 9% and 11% of the eligible voter populations in CD-7 and CD-9, respectively, were Asian American. But under the approved plans, CD-7 would increase to 17% Asian American population, covering Houston suburbs, while CD-9 would decrease to 9% Asian population — shifting the majority into one district and lessening its power in another.

A majority of the Asian American population in the suburbs also got redrawn into CD-22, a mostly rural district, decreasing its percentage of the Asian population from more than 15% to 10%.

CD-22 also now includes all of Sugar Land, which is the most Asian town in Texas.

Similar manipulations took place around Dallas. In Collin County, lawmakers approved a map for CD-4 that takes most of the Asian community across Frisco and Plano and attaches it to a district stretching north to the Oklahoma border.

Asian American voters, who would have made up 10.8% of the vote in their old district, comprise just 5.6% of their new one.

Chanda Parbhoo, president of South Asian American Voter Empowerment of Texas, said she had organizations members — mostly from Collin County — submit almost 50 written testimonies against the proposed maps during redistricting hearings.

It still didn’t feel like it was enough, Parbhoo said.

“It makes it really difficult for the (South Asian) community, an emerging political entity, that we haven’t had years of experience (with redistricting),” Parbhoo said. “As soon as a map comes out, then I’ll have to try to explain it to my community, like, ‘This is what’s not fair. These are the numbers.’ Everything moves so fast that the process doesn’t really allow for people to absorb it and to be able to ask questions.”

Ashley Cheng, lead organizer of the Texas AAPI Redistricting Coalition, also testified multiple times as lawmakers redrew voting districts and said the community has various issues at stake that a continued loss of representation will exacerbate.

Cheng said translating documents for Asian American voters is vital for the community to participate in voting. She said during the winter storm, many emergency alerts were only in English and Cheng’s mother, who does not fluently speak English, was left without information at her house.

“We are in a time of history where we’re really rising up as a community and making sure that our political voices are heard,” Cheng said. “Part of that is because our lives are being threatened. There’s been a heightened sense of Islamophobia in the last few years, heightened anti-Asian hate because of all of the political rhetoric around COVID. We have so much in common in a need for representation.”

Those Asian-American communities that are now stuck in CD04 had previously been in CD03, which even after redistricting is becoming more Democratic but which has been moved backwards in the process. The most recent lawsuit filed against the redistricting plans, which has now been combined with most of the other lawsuits, had a focus on Asian-American communities and concerns, though as this story notes the courts have not previously recognized Asian-Americans as a minority population in need of protection at the voting booth. I doubt that will change now, but all you can do is try.

Fraudit funding

It’s bullshit all the way down.

GOP leaders on Friday approved shifting $4 million in emergency funds for the Texas secretary of state’s office to create an “Election Audit Division” at the agency, which will spearhead county election audits as required by the state’s new election law set to take effect next month.

The additional funding, first reported by The Dallas Morning News, was requested by Gov. Greg Abbott earlier this week and approved by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, House Speaker Dade Phelan and the Republican budget-writers of the two chambers, state Sen. Jane Nelson, R-Flower Mound, and state Rep. Greg Bonnen, R-Friendswood.

In a Nov. 18 letter to Patrick and Phelan, Abbott said the emergency shift in money — which is coming from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice — was necessary because the secretary of state’s office “does not currently have the budget authority to adequately accomplish the goals sought by the Legislature.”

Friday’s news comes as the secretary of state’s office has a “full forensic audit” of the 2020 election underway in four of Texas’ largest counties: Dallas, Harris, Tarrant and Collin.

It also comes after the GOP-controlled Legislature passed a new election law this summer that further tightens the state’s election rules with a host of changes, such as a ban on drive-thru voting and new rules for voting by mail.

The new law, which is facing legal challenges, also requires the secretary of state’s office to select four counties at random after each November election and to audit all elections that happened in those counties in the prior two years. Two of the counties that undergo the audit must have a population of more than 300,000, while the other two must have a population lower than that.

In a statement later Friday, the secretary of state’s office referenced both its 2020 audit and future audits required under the new state law, saying that the latest funds would be used for “additional staff to oversee audit activities,” such as “verifying counties’ removal of ineligible voters from the rolls … and ensuring compliance with state and federal election laws.”

See here, here, and here for the background. Just a reminder, most of the counties with 300K or more people were carried by Joe Biden, while the large majority of counties with less than 300K were won by Trump. This particular division is less egregious than what Republicans originally wanted, but it’s still designed to put more scrutiny on Democratic counties. Who wants to bet that most of the “problems” they find are in exactly those counties? The Chron has more.

In the meantime, our new not-to-be-trusted Secretary of State is out there promoting the fraudit with the idea that it’s the only way to “restore voters’ confidence in the strength and resilience of our election systems”. Let me stop you right there, pal: The reason some people have lost faith in the election system is because the guy who lost the last election has been vocally and repeatedly lying about it being “stolen” from him, and demanding that his minions conduct these fraudits for the express purpose of sowing fear, uncertainty, and doubt. He continues to tell the same lies, which are eagerly believed by his rabid followers, despite losing every lawsuit filed and the Arizona fraudit finding exactly nothing and all of his lies being repeatedly debunked. Why should the rest of us have any faith in an audit being done by people who fraudulently claim there is fraud?

ACLU and others sue over new redistricting maps

The count is now seven.

Civil rights groups filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday challenging new Texas state legislative and congressional district plans as unconstitutional racial gerrymanders violating both the Voting Rights Act and the U.S. Constitution. The suit details an inadequate redistricting process that lacked transparency and led to discriminatory voting maps that dilute the political power of communities of color, particularly Black, Latino, and Asian American & Pacific Islander (AAPI) voters.

The Southern Coalition for Social Justice (SCSJ), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Texas, and the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF), brought the case on behalf of the Fair Maps Texas Action Committee, OCA-Greater Houston, the North Texas Chapter of the Asian Pacific Islander Americans Public Affairs Association, Emgage and 13 individual plaintiffs in the United States District Court for the Western District of Texas, Austin Division.

“Texas’ latest gerrymanders seek to blunt the rightful political power of fast-growing populations of Latino, Black and Asian American and Pacific Islanders voters by carving up the chance to elect their preferred candidates to the United States Congress, the Texas House of Representatives, and the Texas Senate,” Allison Riggs, Co-Executive Director and Chief Counsel for Voting Rights with SCSJ. “This intentional discrimination of voters of color in clear violation of the VRA and U.S. Constitution cannot stand.”

The Fair Maps Texas Action Committee includes the ACLU of Texas, Clean Elections Texas, League of Women Voters of Texas, Our Vote Texas, National Council of Jewish Women-Greater Dallas Section, Texans Against Gerrymandering, and Common Cause Texas.

“Today, the Fair Maps Texas Action Committee is honored to join our partners from across the state to challenge the unconstitutional district maps recently passed by the State of Texas. Lawmakers have willfully ignored the rich diversity of our growing state and have instead chosen to draw maps that discriminate against voters of color,” said organizations from the Fair Maps Texas Action Committee in a joint statement today. “From the very start of this legislative process, we worked to bring diverse people together so that all marginalized communities receive fair representation. Despite our best efforts to advocate for a fair and open redistricting process, the politicians in charge chose to shut the public out in order to force through blatantly gerrymandered maps. Now, we will take action together to challenge these unlawful maps because our democracy is threatened.”

[…]

The complaint specifically seeks to remedy discriminatory districts in many of Texas’ fastest-growing cities and suburban areas, where the political power of communities of color is exploited to the benefit of more conservative white areas. For example, the lawsuit identifies how Texas’ state House maps unfairly crack AAPI voters in Fort Bend and Collin counties among multiple districts, while House Districts 54 and 55 in Bell County brazenly split the city of Killeen, where 40% of residents are Black. The complaint also focuses on state Senate and congressional maps where new districts in the Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston metros intentionally divide AAPI, Black, and Latino voters. The suit also points out that Texas’ congressional maps create two new majority-white districts in a state where 95% of population growth stems from communities of color.

That’s from the ACLU press release. I’d gotten an email with a notice of the video conference they had about this on Tuesday, but as of Wednesday the only news story I saw about this was this one in Newsweek. Sometimes these things take a couple of days for that. Anyway, you can see a copy of the complaint here. It is limited to Congress and the two legislative chambers, so no claims about the SBOE.

The other litigation so far includes the Gutierrez/Eckhardt suit, the LULAC/MALDEF suit, the Voto Latino suit, the two MALC suits, and most recently the Senator Powell lawsuit over SD10. All but one of the MALC lawsuits, which is specifically about State House districts in Cameron County and alleges a violation of the county rule, are in federal court. I believe this is the first one to include a focus on Asian-American voters, but I’d have to go back and take a closer look at the other complaints. Beyond that, I would be really excited to have an attorney who has some familiarity with the law in this area take a look at all these actions and tell me how they are different and whether any of it matters as far as the courts are concerned. Until then, this is what we know. Reform Austin, which also rounds up all the lawsuits, has more.

Precinct analysis: The new State House map

Like it or not, we have new State House districts. We may as well acquaint ourselves with them. The coverage we’ve had so far has focused on the 2020 election numbers to say whether a district will be red or blue or (in a limited number of cases) purple. I think that we need to see more data than that to get a full picture. I’ve spent a bunch of time on this site looking at how districts changed over the course of the past decade. This post will do the same for the new State House districts. I may do the same for the other types of districts – we’ll see how busy things get once filing season opens – but for now let’s look at how things are here.

We now have a full set of election data for the new districts. All of the data for the new State House districts can be found here. I am using election data for these years in this post: 2012, 2014, 2016, 2018, and 2020

If you want to remind yourself of what the map looks like, use the district viewer, which allows you to zoom in all the way to street level. What would have happened in the last decade if we had had this map in place following the 2011 session?

2012 – 59 seats won by Obama
2014 – 51 seats won by Davis
2016 – 64 seats won by Clinton
2018 – 66 seats won by Beto
2020 – 65 seats won by Biden

This shows a couple of things. One is just how bad a year 2014 was. Two, how effective the 2011/2013 map was for the conditions that existed at the time. Note that with this map, the big shift towards the Democrats happened in 2016, not 2018. I have to wonder how things might have played out in 2018 and 2020 if that had been our experience. After that, it gets a lot more static. I’ll tell you which districts were won by Beto but not Clinton, and which district was won by Beto but not Biden, later in this post.

Enough setup. You’re ready for some numbers, right? I know you are. I’ve broken this down more or less by region, and am including districts that are within 20 points in the 2020 results.


Dist  Obama  Romney Obama%Romney%    Biden   Trump Biden% Trump%
================================================================
014  14,134  29,676  31.5%  66.1%   30,840  38,146  43.5%  53.8%
020  19,803  40,618  31.9%  65.4%   44,651  58,876  42.2%  55.6%
045  20,079  21,248  47.0%  49.8%   48,915  32,987  58.4%  39.4%
052  16,708  28,942  35.7%  61.8%   44,974  49,046  46.7%  51.0%
054  18,164  22,668  43.9%  54.7%   26,960  31,067  45.5%  52.4%
055  17,348  26,906  38.5%  59.8%   30,054  36,826  43.9%  53.8%
118  21,895  25,284  45.7%  52.8%   36,578  34,584  50.6%  47.9%
121  25,850  47,798  34.5%  63.8%   50,133  52,533  48.1%  50.4%
122  21,516  48,130  30.4%  68.1%   50,094  59,855  44.9%  53.7%

Call this the “Central” region – HD14 is Brazos County, HDs 20 and 52 are Williamson, HD45 is Hays, HDs 54 and 55 are the infamous “donut” districts of Bell County, and the other three are Bexar. Couple things to note, as these themes will recur. One is that if there’s a district you think might belong but which isn’t listed, it’s probably because it just doesn’t qualify as a “swing” district any more. A great example is HD47 in Travis County, which was a 52-47 district for Mitt Romney in 2012. In 2020, however, it was won by Joe Biden by a 61-36 margin. HD45 is more or less the same, but I included it here as a borderline case.

Looking at the shifts, it’s not too hard to imagine the two Williamson districts moving into (back into, in the case of HD52) the Dem column, in a future election if not this year. Note also that HD118 was once a red district. It’s one of the two that Beto flipped and which Biden held. Sure, it’s accurately described in all of the coverage of the special election runoff as being more Republican than the current HD118, but one should be aware of the direction that it has traveled. I won’t be surprised if it outperforms the 2020 number for Dems in 2022. (No, the result of this special election runoff doesn’t change my thinking on that. It’s not the first time that Republicans have won a special election in HD118.)

Not all districts moved so dramatically – that parsing of Bell County looks like it will be durable for the GOP, at least at this time. The other two Bexar districts were a lot more Democratic at the Presidential level than they were downballot, so one has to wonder if the splits we see here are entirely about Trump, or if they will be the leading edge for Dems as the 2016 Trump numbers were in places like CD07 and all of the Dallas House districts that Republicans once held.


Dist  Obama  Romney Obama%Romney%    Biden   Trump Biden% Trump%
================================================================
034  28,030  19,409  58.4%  40.4%   32,171  26,232  54.4%  44.3%
035  19,519   5,678  76.7%  22.3%   22,629  16,478  57.3%  41.7%
036  21,416   7,022  74.5%  24.4%   26,905  19,328  57.6%  41.4%
037  21,580  17,109  55.2%  43.7%   27,740  26,576  50.6%  48.4%
039  23,219   8,076  73.5%  25.6%   27,861  18,679  59.2%  39.7%
041  20,882  15,585  56.6%  42.2%   33,385  25,616  56.1%  43.0%
074  25,903  16,270  60.5%  38.0%   31,415  28,538  51.7%  46.9%
080  26,122  16,344  60.9%  38.1%   27,099  29,572  47.3%  51.6%

Here we have South Texas and the Valley, where things are not so good for the Dems. Again, the districts you don’t see here are the ones that are not swing districts; check out the linked numbers to see for yourself. HD41 was pretty stable, and I will note that the current version of HD74 was carried by Trump, so the new map is a bit friendlier to the Dems, at least for now. HD80 is the Beto district that Biden lost, and as with every other Latino district we’re just going to have to see how it performs in a non-Trump year. If State Rep. Alex Dominguez, the incumbent in HD37, does indeed primary Sen. Eddie Lucio, that puts another Dem seat squarely in the danger zone. (Modulo the pending litigation, of course.)


Dist  Obama  Romney Obama%Romney%    Biden   Trump Biden% Trump%
================================================================
033  16,134  40,104  28.2%  70.1%   35,618  53,384  39.3%  58.9%
057  13,506  30,350  30.3%  68.0%   36,387  47,660  42.6%  55.8%
061  15,178  34,157  30.3%  68.1%   43,274  50,795  45.2%  53.0%
063  20,983  40,571  33.5%  64.8%   42,303  47,444  46.4%  52.0%
065  18,851  36,946  33.3%  65.2%   43,265  51,231  45.1%  53.4%
066  19,348  41,191  31.5%  67.0%   43,902  51,608  45.2%  53.1%
067  16,268  32,870  32.6%  65.7%   39,889  47,769  44.6%  53.5%
070  23,926  36,395  38.9%  59.2%   45,111  35,989  54.7%  43.6%
084  17,622  30,644  35.8%  62.3%   25,604  36,144  40.7%  57.5%
089  18,681  39,334  31.6%  66.6%   39,563  49,499  43.5%  54.5%
093  13,971  29,638  31.6%  67.0%   34,205  45,799  42.0%  56.2%
094  23,934  46,010  33.6%  64.6%   37,985  45,950  44.4%  53.8%
096  22,912  42,668  34.5%  64.2%   39,472  48,073  44.4%  54.1%
097  21,540  40,721  34.0%  64.4%   38,218  46,530  44.3%  53.9%
099  17,899  33,551  34.2%  64.2%   31,245  43,999  40.8%  57.5%
106  12,893  30,578  29.2%  69.3%   38,447  50,868  42.4%  56.2%
108  26,544  58,932  30.7%  68.1%   54,481  55,364  48.9%  49.7%
112  24,601  44,320  35.2%  63.4%   44,881  45,370  48.9%  49.4%

So much action in the Multiplex. HD33 is Rockwall and a piece of Collin. HDs 61 and 70 are Collin, HD57 is Denton. I have lumped HD84 in here as well, even though it’s Lubbock and it remains on the fringe, but I don’t care. We will make a race out of that district yet! HDs 108 and 112 in Dallas are also much more Republican downballot than they were at the top, and while I think they will eventually fall, it’s unlikely to be in 2022. HD70, by the way, is the other district that flipped Dem in 2018.

Everywhere else I look, I see districts that are about as competitive as the formerly Republican-held districts of Dallas County were circa 2012. (Note how none of them have made an appearance in this post.) Look at how huge those splits were a decade ago. A decade in the future, either we’re going to be grimly hailing the evil genius of this gerrymander, or we’re going to be chuckling about Republican hubris and how if they’d maybe thrown another district or two to the Dems they could have saved themselves a bucketful of losses.


Dist  Obama  Romney Obama%Romney%    Biden   Trump Biden% Trump%
================================================================
025  16,141  33,014  32.4%  66.2%   29,441  43,675  39.7%  58.9%
026  14,574  36,701  32.4%  66.2%   37,863  47,532  43.7%  54.8%
028  15,831  33,229  31.9%  67.0%   36,213  46,580  43.1%  55.4%
029  18,280  37,848  32.1%  66.5%   32,787  46,758  40.6%  57.9%
126  18,574  47,202  27.9%  70.7%   35,306  50,023  40.8%  57.8%
127  19,674  45,760  29.7%  69.1%   38,332  53,148  41.3%  57.3%
129  21,321  45,292  31.5%  66.9%   38,399  51,219  42.2%  56.2%
132  13,399  31,974  29.1%  69.5%   35,876  46,484  42.9%  55.6%
133  21,508  45,099  31.8%  66.7%   40,475  42,076  48.4%  50.3%
134  34,172  42,410  43.7%  54.3%   66,968  38,704  62.5%  36.1%
138  20,133  40,118  32.9%  65.6%   37,617  42,002  46.6%  52.0%
144  17,471  16,254  51.1%  47.6%   25,928  20,141  55.6%  43.2%
148  20,954  19,960  50.4%  48.0%   34,605  24,087  58.1%  40.5%
150  14,511  34,552  29.2%  69.6%   34,151  45,789  42.1%  56.5%

Finally, the Houston area. HDs 25 and 29 are Brazoria County, HDs 26 and 28 are Fort Bend. The now-in-Fort-Bend HD76 slides in here as another former swing district, going from 51-48 for Romney to 61-38 for Biden. I threw HD134 in here even though it’s obviously not a swing district by any reasonable measure in part because it was once the epitome of a swing district, and because damn, just look at how far that district shifted towards Dems. The open HD133 is unfortunately another one of those redder-downballot districts, so even though it’s an open seat don’t get your hopes up too much for this cycle. Maybe later on, we’ll see.

I’m fascinated by HD144, which like HD74 is now slightly more Dem than it was under the existing map. I guess Republicans had other priorities in the area. As for HD148, it’s a little jarring to see it as a genuine swing district from 2012, though it barely qualifies as of 2020. Rep. Penny Morales Shaw has complained about the changes made to her district, not just geographically but also by reducing that Latino CVAP by almost ten points. Finally, I will note that while the GOP shored up HD138, it’s another district that used to be a lot redder than it is now. Again, we’ll just have to see how resilient that is. That “genius/hubris” divide will largely come down to places like that.

I hope this helped shed some light on what these districts may be going forward. As always, let me know what you think.

The fight for free speech continues at Collin College

What awful leadership that place has.

A year ago, Texas history professor Lora Burnett fired off an angry tweet from her private social media account about then-vice president Mike Pence. It landed during the vice presidential debate, prompting news coverage from conservative media, an angry response from at least one Texas lawmaker and a series of disciplinary actions from her employer, the publicly funded Collin College in North Texas.

This week, Burnett, who was eventually terminated from her job at Collin College, a community college in McKinney, filed a federal lawsuit against the college, its president, H. Neil Matkin, and the board of trustees.

In the Tuesday filing, she claims that the school’s decision not to renew her three-year contract was retaliation for those comments, as well as her public criticism of the school’s COVID-19 reopening plan, and violated her First Amendment rights.

In her lawsuit, Burnett argues that Collin College leaders use “a custom or practice of terminating professors who speak out on matters of public concern” and that the school’s practices are unconstitutional.

“Government employees have the right to have their own politics,” Burnett told The Texas Tribune in an interview this week. “I express my views on Twitter on my own time on a personal account and it has nothing to do with my job. I was not speaking for the college. I was not teaching at the time.”

Burnett is the second former professor to file a free speech lawsuit against the college in federal court in the past two months. In September, another former professor, Suzanne Jones, filed a lawsuit claiming the school did not renew her contract because of her comments about the school’s COVID-19 reopening plan and her involvement in a local chapter of the Texas Faculty Association, a statewide group that has no collective bargaining rights like a union.

[…]

The two lawsuits are the culmination of more than a year of conflict between Collin College administrators and a total of four professors who have also publicly criticized the school for its COVID-19 response throughout the last school year. Only Burnett and Jones opted to sue.

A third professor, Audra Heaslip, also did not receive a contract renewal last year. She told the Tribune that she made a “difficult personal decision” not to sue the college.

A fourth professor remains employed at the school but received a disciplinary warning from the college in August for criticizing its response to the pandemic on social media, Burnett’s filing states.

Collin College, a community college that serves more than 52,000 students northeast of Dallas, has faced criticism for disciplining the professors for their public comments of the school’s COVID-19 response over the past year.

Burnett and others had criticized Matkin for downplaying the severity of the pandemic and for leadership’s lack of transparency about positive cases on campus. The school did not publicly post the number of COVID cases on campus until after the death of an employee and a student from the virus.

I briefly mentioned the past cases at the end of this post. The Dallas Observer has been following this saga closely, and you should read their related stories for the background. It’s a big reminder that whenever you hear the likes of Ted Cruz or Greg Abbott whine about “cancel culture” or how social media is so mean to conservatives, they never ever refer to or give a damn about people like Lora Burnett or Suzanne Jones or Audra Heaslip. Indeed, it was a wingnut member of the House that initially led the charge against Burnett. This kind of thing is not just happening here, and it’s getting increasingly scary. But hey, someone said something mean about Mitch McConnell once, so it really is a both-sides thing. The DMN has more.

The Lege is now 3/4 done with redistricting

All but the Congressional maps are done. They’re just plowing through it.

The Texas Legislature is nearing the end of its work to incorporate a decade’s worth of population growth into new political maps — pressing forward with efforts to cement GOP dominance of the statehouse and deny voters of color a greater say in who gets elected.

In the final stretch of a 30-day special legislative session, the Republican majorities in the House and Senate on Friday almost simultaneously signed off on new political maps for the opposite chamber, sending them to Gov. Greg Abbott, also a Republican, for his signature. The votes were largely procedural as neither chamber made any changes. It’s customary for each chamber to defer to the other in drawing up maps for its own members, but both must give them a vote.

By a vote of 81-60, the House granted approval to a Senate map that would draw safe seats for Republican incumbents who were facing competitive races as their districts diversified over the last 10 years.

The Senate gave an 18-13 vote to a House map that would fortify the Republican majority of the 150 districts, bolstering those that had grown competitive over the last decade and devising new battleground districts.

The House also signed off on a new map for the Republican-controlled State Board of Education, which sets standards for Texas public schools. Still left on the docket is a House vote on a redraw of the state’s congressional map that would largely protect incumbents in Congress while reducing the number of districts in which Black and Hispanic residents make up the majority of eligible voters. That vote is expected Saturday.

If adopted, the maps could remain in place for the next 10 years, though it’s all but certain that they will face legal challenges that could result in changes.

[…]

Sixteen Republican incumbents will be drawn into safe districts for reelection, while two Senate seats being vacated by Republicans would almost certainly go to new GOP candidates over Democrats next year based on the percentage of voters in the district who voted for Donald Trump over Joe Biden in last year’s presidential race.

Democrats would also likely lose Senate District 10 in North Texas, represented by Sen. Beverly Powell of Fort Worth. That would shift the Senate’s partisan makeup from the current 18 Republicans and 13 Democrats to 19 Republicans and 12 Democrats under the proposed map.

Voters of color in the district, which sits entirely in Tarrant County, have banded together with white voters over the last decade to elect their candidates of choice. Its eligible voters are 21% Black, 20% Hispanic and 54% white.

But under the proposed map, SD 10’s Black and Hispanic populations are split into two other districts with majority-white electorates.

The voters who remain in the newly drawn District 10 would also see major changes. Black and Hispanic voters in urban areas of south Fort Worth would be lumped in with seven rural counties to the south and west that would drive up the district’s population of white eligible voters to 62% while diminishing its population of voters of color.

Tarrant County House Democrats warned that federal courts had ruled that a similar attempt to redraw the district last decade was discriminatory. They offered multiple amendments to keep District 10 entirely in the county.

[…]

The House’s new map also pulls back on Hispanic and Black voters’ potential influence in electing their representatives.

The map brings the number of districts in which Hispanics make up the majority of eligible voters down from 33 to 30. The number of districts with Black residents as the majority of eligible voters would go from seven to six. Meanwhile, the number of districts with a white majority among eligible voters would increase from 83 to 89.

The map moved through the Senate chamber without any discussion, save for an earlier objection from state Sen. Eddie Lucio Jr., a Democrat from the Rio Grande Valley, during a Senate Redistricting Committee meeting Friday morning.

Lucio denounced a revision to the map that would carve up predominantly Hispanic communities in the Rio Grande Valley in service of creating a new competitive House district in the typically blue region. The change, forced by a member who does not represent the affected districts, blindsided the House members from the area.

“Members, this is my fourth redistricting session,” Lucio told other members of the committee. “In my time in the Legislature, I have never seen such blatant disregard for the process.”

Meanwhile, Republicans shot down Democratic proposals to create new opportunities for Hispanic or Black Texans to control elections.

State Rep. Todd Hunter, the Corpus Christi Republican serving as the House’s chief map-drawer, has previously argued the map “achieves fair representation for the citizens of Texas” while complying with federal law.

The redraw will ultimately aid Republicans’ ability to control the chamber for years to come.

The House map creates 85 districts that would have favored Trump at 2020 levels of support and 65 that would have voted for Biden. The current partisan breakdown of the House is 83 Republicans and 67 Democrats, though Trump only won 76 of the current districts in 2020.

See here and here for some background. The speed with which these maps have been approved is I believe one part there being basically no changes proposed in the other chamber, and one part a sense of urgency on the legislators’ part to get the hell out of town already. I can hardly blame them for that, but in the end it’s up to Greg Abbott.

On the subject of litigation over these maps, on claims of racial discrimination and voting rights violations, I remain pessimistic about the likelihood of any redress from the courts. Not because I think the maps are fair and accurately reflect the population, but because I have no expectation that this Supreme Court will countenance any voting rights claims. We could still do something about that at a federal level, but until Senators Manchin and Sinema let go of their bizarre obsession with the filibuster as it is currently defined, that ain’t going anywhere.

That said, I am reasonably optimistic about the potential for gains in the State House, if not in 2022 then in the coming years. The Chron story on the passage of these maps is a reminder of why.

The new Texas House map will protect Republican control by shedding Democratic-leaning areas where the party has lost support and moving those to blue districts while shoring up red ones.

That give-and-take is evident in west Harris County where two red districts, represented by Republican state Reps. Mike Schofield of Katy and Lacey Hull of Houston, are redrawn to include red-leaning precincts from Democratic state Rep. Jon Rosenthal’s nearby district; Rosenthal’s district will get blue-leaning areas now represented by the two Republicans.

As the state’s demographics change, however, there are only so many reliably red areas from which to pull. That meant for some districts, the best Republicans could do was make changes to benefit incumbents.

For example, the Energy Corridor district represented by state Rep. Jim Murphy, a Republican who is not seeking re-election, would give up some GOP precincts to Hull. Former President Donald Trump won Murphy’s district by 4 percentage points in 2020, but under the new map, that margin would drop to 2 points.

You’ve seen me make a version of this argument in previous posts. In the House, unlike the other maps, the Republicans were constrained by the county rule, which did not allow them to extend mostly rural districts into urban and suburban counties to dilute their Democratic communities. That forced them to draw a large number of districts with a relatively modest margin for Donald Trump, and the large majority of them are in counties where the trends have been moving strongly in a Democratic direction. Things can certainly change, and any given election can favor one party or the other, but overall that seems like a highly unstable equilibrium for the GOP.

The fourth map is of course the Congressional map. The Senate approved a map a few days ago, and the House committee approved it with no changes, as House Redistricting Chair Todd Hunter insisted that any amendments be made on the House floor. That puts them in position to be done with the entire business by the time the session ends, though I expect there to be a big fight when this map comes up for debate. The proposed map does some truly outlandish things to break up urban counties and communities of color, which I’m sure will draw a ton of heat and more threats of litigation from Dems. I expect them to get the job done, though if there are changes it will have to go back to the Senate for final approval. If it needs to go to a conference committee, that will almost surely require a fourth special session to finish it off. God help us all. Daily Kos has more.