Tarrant County

In support of Crystal Mason

The same month Tarrant County officials announced the creation of an election integrity task force, a group of 14 bipartisan prosecutors threw their weight behind an effort to acquit the woman at the center of a high-profile voting fraud conviction in the county.

Crystal Mason, a Tarrant County resident, was sentenced to five years in prison for casting a provisional ballot in the 2016 election. Mason, who was on supervised release for a federal felony, was ineligible to vote, and while her ballot was never counted, Tarrant County prosecutors charged her with illegal voting. Mason has maintained that she did not know she was ineligible and her case has gained national attention among the media and civil liberty advocates.

Now, Mason is appealing her conviction for a second time in front of the Second Court of Appeals in Fort Worth, after the state’s highest appeals court told those judges to reconsider their previous decision.

Their decision did not take into account whether Mason knew she was ineligible.

A bipartisan group of former state and federal prosecutors, organized by the States United Democracy Center, filed an amicus brief Feb. 14 in support of Mason’s appeal. Among the signees is Sarah Saldaña, former U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Texas and former director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“I had this visceral reaction to the injustice manifested in the decision, No. 1, to prosecute, but also the ultimate conviction,” Saldaña said. “It’s obvious that this whole issue of intent was not charged in the jury charge. … That to me was very offensive, particularly as a former prosecutor, and particularly as the principal decision maker in North Texas, at the time when I was U.S. attorney.”

Mason’s intent is a key aspect of the amicus brief’s argument. The signees call her prosecution “outside the bounds of any reasonable exercise of prosecutorial power,” and point to wording in Texas’ illegal voting statute that requires voters have “actual knowledge” that they were committing a crime by voting.

Without enforcing the actual knowledge requirement, the signees argue Texas voters will be afraid to vote at all for fear of accidentally running afoul of voting laws.

“Ms. Mason’s prosecution sends the troubling message that casting a provisional ballot carries a serious risk, with a consequent chilling effect on the use of provisional ballots,” the prosecutors wrote. “This chill would likely disproportionately impact minority voters, who tend to cast more provisional ballots.”

See here and here for some background. There’s hope after that CCA ruling, but even if her conviction is overturned, Tarrant County could choose to try her again. And then there’s this:

Statewide, efforts by Republican lawmakers to make illegal voting a felony again are gaining steam. It’s currently a misdemeanor, after lawmakers passed Senate Bill 1 in 2021; the bill, among other things, lowered the penalty for illegal voting conduct.

Rep. Craig Goldman, R-Fort Worth, filed House Bill 397 to reverse that change. Sen. Bryan Hughes, who represents East Texas, filed a companion bill in the Senate, which was referred to the state affairs committee for review Feb. 15.

One of the Republican legislative goals for this session is to ensure there is a steady stream of Crystal Masons in the future. Overturning this conviction can’t do anything about that. Oh, and this is what actual voter suppression looks like. There are other ways to do it as well, but when it happens it’s very clear what it is.

More on the lawsuit against Paxton’s deranged ballot access opinion

Jan 25th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

There are actually three counties suing him, not just the one I had originally noted.

The only criminal involved

At least three Texas counties — Tarrant, Williamson, and Harris — have sued Attorney General Ken Paxton and are asking a judge to strike down a legal opinion he released last year that says anyone can access voted ballots right after an election. The lawsuits allege Paxton’s opinion violates state and federal law, contradicts his own previous direction on the issue, and exposes local election administrators to potential criminal charges.

For decades, the attorney general’s office advised counties that voted ballots were to be kept secure for 22 months after an election, a timeframe mandated by federal law and Texas state election code. But only months before the November 2022 general election, even though neither law had changed, Paxton released an opinion saying the documents could be released to anyone who requested them, almost right after the ballots were counted.

Now, counties and election officials across the state are stuck. They can follow Paxton’s new opinion — which is only a written interpretation of the law — and potentially open themselves up to criminal penalties for violating state law, or they can defy the state attorney general and open up themselves to costly lawsuits.

That’s why now the counties are asking a judge to step in and settle the question.

Paxton’s office did not respond to emails requesting comment. Paxton so far has filed a response only to Tarrant County’s lawsuit, which was filed in October and was the first of the three challenges. Paxton’s office denied the county’s claims.

Experts say the move by three different counties to challenge the Texas attorney general’s legal opinion speaks to the complicated position it has put local election officials in. His opinion, they say, has caused chaos, and has no basis in state law.

“These counties don’t have a choice. They have to worry about whether Ken Paxton is going to take action against them,” said Chad Dunn, an Austin-based attorney and an expert on Texas election law. Dunn said Paxton’s opinion “is laughable. The election code is clear. I’ll be just shocked if the state court system ends up agreeing with Ken Paxton and the ballots are public.”

[…]

The Texas attorney general’s office, including Paxton’s own administration, has affirmed this interpretation of the law since the 1980s. The practice of keeping the ballots preserved and confidential for 22 months, experts say, prevents the documents from being tampered with or compromised and protects the documents’ reliability in case there’s a request for recount or other election challenges.

Paxton released his opinion in August after a request from state Sen. Kelly Hancock and state Rep. Matt Krause, both Republicans, who said members of the public and legislators desired “to audit the outcome of Texas elections.” In a footnote, Paxton acknowledged that the attorney general’s office had issued a previous opinion in 1988, before he took office, saying unauthorized access to the ballots during the preservation period is prohibited. But the new opinion offers no clear explanation of his decision to change a decades-old precedent.

Paxton’s office “does not have the authority to make or change the law; that is a responsibility that solely rests with the Texas Legislature,” Tarrant County’s lawsuit says.

Paxton’s new opinion does not address the potential criminal exposure of election officials, who could be charged with a misdemeanor amounting to $4,000 in fines or up to a year in jail, or offer a clear timeframe of how quickly election clerks must provide the records to requesters.

“The Election Code provides a few limited circumstances where the custodian has express authority to access ballots prior to the 22-month expiration. Responding to [public information] requests is not one of those circumstances,” the Williamson County lawsuit says.

The three lawsuits are technically challenging Paxton’s Public Information Act decisions — which experts say is not an uncommon practice — and not his legal opinion directly. In order for counties to be able to challenge an attorney general’s opinion in court, the counties must have “standing and show a reason why it affects” them said Bob Heath, an Austin-based election and voting rights lawyer and a former chair of the opinions committee of the Texas attorney general’s office. The counties are doing so through the Public Information Act challenges that are based on Paxton’s decision, which Heath says is “wrong.”

“That’s a way to get to this opinion, and the opinion obviously poses a real problem for counties or for election administrators and county clerks,” Heath said.

See here, here, and here for the background. I don’t have much to add to what I’ve already said, I’m just waiting to see when the court will issue a ruling. After that, it’s a matter of what the Supreme Court will do. I have some hope, but these days that always has to be tempered with extreme anxiety. Stay tuned.

Yep, still no voter fraud found

Dec 21st, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

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.

State and county election result relationships: Tarrant County

Dec 12th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

In years past, Tarrant County was a pretty close bellwether for election results in the state of Texas. From 2004 through 2016, the closeness of their Presidential numbers with the statewide numbers was eerie. But since 2018 the talk has been about how Tarrant is on the verge of turning blue, which puts it at least a little to the left of the state as a whole. As I did before with Harris County, I thought I’d take a closer look at how statewide candidates have done in Tarrant County compared to the state overall, to see what it might tell me. We start as we did with Harris in the distant past of 2002:


2002                 2004                   2006
State Tarrant  Diff   State Tarrant  Diff   State Tarrant  Diff
===================   ===================   ===================
43.33   41.27 -2.06   38.22   37.01 -1.21   36.04   34.80 -1.24
39.96   38.53 -1.43   40.94   37.36 -3.58   29.79   31.07  1.28
46.03   42.63 -3.40   40.77   38.06 -2.71   37.45   37.06 -0.39
41.08   37.76 -3.32   42.14   39.15 -2.99   37.23   36.99 -0.24
32.92   30.86 -2.06                         37.01   36.41 -0.60
41.48   37.94 -3.54                         40.96   40.67 -0.29
37.82   34.85 -2.97                         41.79   40.86 -0.93
41.49   39.02 -2.47                         41.73   40.52 -1.21
40.51   37.55 -2.96                         44.89   42.79 -2.10
41.54   38.73 -2.81                         43.35   41.56 -1.79
41.89   38.49 -3.40								
43.24   39.74 -3.50								
45.90   42.26 -3.64								
39.15   35.90 -3.25								
42.61   39.20 -3.41								
40.01   36.92 -3.09								
										
Min   -3.64           Min   -3.58           Min   -2.10
Max   -1.43           Max   -1.21           Max    1.28
Avg   -2.96           Avg   -2.62           Avg   -0.75

You can read the earlier posts for the explanation of the numbers. The bottom line is that in early to mid Aughts, Tarrant was more Republican overall than the rest of the state. As was the case with Harris, there was a step in the Democratic direction in 2006, with the chaotic multi-candidate Governor’s race providing the first Democrat to do better in Tarrant than in the state, but it was still about a point more Republican than overall.


2008                  2010                  2012
State Tarrant  Diff   State Tarrant  Diff   State Tarrant  Diff
===================   ===================   ===================
43.68   43.73  0.05   42.30   40.98 -1.32   41.38   41.43  0.05
42.84   42.52 -0.32   34.83   34.97  0.14   40.62   40.41 -0.21
44.35   43.39 -0.96   33.66   33.90  0.24   39.60   39.20 -0.40
43.79   43.47 -0.32   35.29   35.24 -0.05   41.91   41.40 -0.51
45.88   44.16 -1.72   35.80   35.83  0.03   41.24   40.31 -0.93
44.63   43.51 -1.12   36.24   35.64 -0.60				
45.53   43.81 -1.72   37.26   35.39 -1.87				
43.75   42.49 -1.26   37.00   35.97 -1.03				
                      35.62   35.17 -0.45				
                      36.62   36.05 -0.57				
										
Min   -1.72           Min   -1.87            Min   -0.93
Max    0.05           Max    0.24            Max    0.05
Avg   -0.92           Avg   -0.55            Avg   -0.40

Still slightly on the Republican side as we move into elections that feel more familiar to us – as I’ve said before, looking at those elections from 2002 through 2006 is like visiting a foreign country – and you can see how dead on the Tarrant Presidential numbers were. Tarrant was a bit more Republican in the judicial races than in the executive office and Senate races, but otherwise not much else to say.


2014                  2016
State Tarrant  Diff   State Tarrant  Diff
===================   ===================
34.36   36.13  1.77   43.24   43.14 -0.10
38.90   41.08  2.18   38.38   38.62  0.24
38.71   39.53  0.82   38.53   38.43 -0.10
38.02   38.91  0.89   41.18   40.49 -0.69
37.69   38.67  0.98   39.36   39.58  0.22
35.32   36.49  1.17   40.05   39.75 -0.30
36.84   38.14  1.30   40.20   40.91  0.71
37.25   38.43  1.18   40.89   40.59 -0.30
36.49   38.02  1.53				
37.60   38.41  0.81				
36.54   38.00  1.46				
						
Min    0.81           Min   -0.69
Max    2.18           Max    0.71
Avg    1.28           Avg   -0.04

I wouldn’t have guessed that 2014 would be the year that Tarrant County officially became (slightly) more Democratic than the state as a whole, but here we are. Maybe because 2014 was such a miserable year, maybe because Wendy Davis was the Dem nominee for Governor, maybe it was just time. It wasn’t quite the start of a trend, as things snapped back a bit in 2016, but a threshold had been crossed.


2018                  2020                  2022
State Tarrant  Diff   State Tarrant  Diff   State Tarrant  Diff
===================   ===================   ===================
48.33   49.93  1.60   46.48	49.31  2.83   43.81   47.24  3.43
42.51   43.75  1.24   43.87	46.18  2.31   43.44   47.36  3.92
46.49   47.25  0.76   43.56	45.25  1.69   43.62   46.80  3.18
47.01   48.11  1.10   44.49	46.71  2.22   40.91   44.33  3.42
43.39   44.70  1.31   44.08	46.14  2.06   42.10   44.90  2.80
43.19   43.99  0.80   44.76	47.23  2.47   43.63   46.72  3.09
46.41   47.37  0.96   44.35	46.50  2.15   40.51   43.83  3.32
43.91   44.85  0.94   45.18	47.38  2.20   41.81   45.14  3.33
46.83   47.86  1.03   44.70	47.03  2.33   42.87   46.36  3.49
46.29   47.44  1.15   45.47	47.91  2.44   43.55   46.75  3.20
46.29   47.68  1.39                           43.02   46.48  3.46
45.48   46.24  0.76                           42.74   46.22  3.48
45.85   47.14  1.29								
										
Min    0.76           Min    1.69            Min    2.80
Max    1.60           Max    2.83            Max    3.92
Avg    1.10           Avg    2.27            Avg    3.34

And thus, despite the small hiccup of 2016, the ball moved ever forward. It would be easy to look at the Tarrant County results in 2022, especially at the top, compare them to 2018 and 2020, and declare that Tarrant had backslid, but as you can see that would be a misreading of the data. I’m going to step a little out on a limb here and say that Tarrant will be Democratic at a Presidential level again in 2024, and there’s a good chance that will be true elsewhere on the statewide ballot as well. Going by the average gap in 2022, two other Dems would have carried Tarrant County in 2018. If the trend we see here continues, getting to about 45% statewide would probably be enough to win Tarrant in 2024. Please feel free to point at this and laugh at me if this turns out to be wildly off base. Until then, I’ll do this same exercise for a couple more counties, just for the fun of it.

Our property tax system is soooooooo awesome!

Nov 26th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

How awesome is it? So awesome you don’t even have to live here to get a tax break.

Herschel Walker, the former Dallas Cowboys running back and Republican candidate running for a U.S. Senate seat in Georgia, is slated to get a tax break on his $3 million residence in a Dallas-Fort Worth suburb — potentially running afoul of Texas tax law.

According to Tarrant County property and tax records, Walker claimed a homestead exemption on his four-bedroom home in Westlake in 2021 and is expected to do so again this year — even after he registered to vote in Georgia last year. Walker has since voted in two elections there, CNN reported.

The exemption saved Walker more than $1,200 on his property tax bill last year, records from the Tarrant County tax assessor-collector show, and would net him more than $1,500 in savings this year.

Walker’s Texas homestead exemption might also raise questions about his Senate run in Georgia. He is in a runoff with U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock, the Democratic incumbent, in a race to determine just how tightly Democrats will control the Senate for the next two years. The U.S. Constitution requires officeholders to live in the state in which they’re elected.

Under Texas law, homeowners can claim a homestead exemption — which exempts a certain amount of a home’s value from taxation — only on their primary residence. But homeowners may continue to claim the exemption if they “do not establish a principal residence elsewhere … intend to return to the home … [and] are away less than two years,” according to the state comptroller’s office.

Walker bought the house in Westlake in 2011, according to Tarrant County appraisal records. He has claimed the exemption on his Texas home since 2012, records show, allowing him to pay a lower tax bill toward the city of Westlake and Keller Independent School District. School districts make up the bulk of any given Texas homeowner’s tax bill.

So, um, anyone feel like filing a complaint? I can only imagine what a spectacle an attempt to enforce the law in this instance might turn into. The DMN has more.

On comparing counties from 2018 to 2022

Nov 19th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

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.

What will Tarrant County do this year?

Oct 30th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

Hoping for a blue result at the top and at least closer races below it, but we’ll see.

Eight years after voting for Gov. Greg Abbott, Angela Martinez found herself waiting in line Tuesday to snap a photo with Beto O’Rourke, his challenger in this year’s nail-biting gubernatorial contest.

Martinez, a 33-year-old marketer for a pediatric home health agency, has never identified as strictly liberal or conservative, she said, and sometimes feels like “a walking contradiction.” If there’s a spot for her on the traditional political spectrum, she hasn’t found it. When she voted for Abbott in 2014, Martinez identified with what she saw as the then-attorney general’s Christian family values.

But since then, Martinez has soured on Abbott. She feels Abbott didn’t do enough in the wake of the deadly winter freeze in February 2021 to prevent the state’s electrical grid from collapsing should a similarly catastrophic weather event hit Texas in the future. As someone who values “the sanctity of life,” Martinez is uneasy about the state’s blanket ban on abortions that took effect after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade earlier this year.

“My mother had the freedom (to seek an abortion), my aunts had the freedom,” Martinez said while waiting to meet O’Rourke at the University of North Texas Health Science Center in Fort Worth. “Why shouldn’t we?”

Voters in Tarrant County, the state’s last major urban county dominated by Republicans, just barely broke for Democrats at the top of the ticket in the last two elections — O’Rourke won there during his 2018 Senate bid and so did President Joe Biden two years ago — stoking Democrats’ hopes that the path to the governor’s mansion, and the end of their decadeslong exile from statewide office, goes through Tarrant. Boosting those hopes is infighting this year among Tarrant County Republicans — who insist the party is united.

The year that O’Rourke carried Tarrant during his near-miss bid to unseat U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, Abbott won the county by more than 66,000 votes and nearly 11 percentage points — outperforming every other statewide Republican on the ticket.

Four years later, Abbott’s team is “confident” the governor will win Tarrant County once more, Abbott’s chief strategist Dave Carney told reporters last week while acknowledging the county is competitive. “It’s going to be a battle,” Carney said.

At his campaign stop at the UNT Health Science Center, O’Rourke expressed optimism that 125,000 people who have been added to the county’s voter rolls since he ran in 2018, combined with discontent over the power grid failure during last year’s winter storm, the state’s abortion ban and Abbott’s response to school shootings would help deliver him the county.

“Abbott has given us a huge, huge opening” in Tarrant County, O’Rourke said. “So many people are looking for the common ground and the common sense that’s been missing from our state government.”

But as Democrats express optimism because of O’Rourke and Biden’s victories, Republicans continue to dominate down-ballot races in Tarrant County — a sign of the GOP’s enduring dominance here.

“They have now a little bit of history that suggests that Democrats might be able to win in Tarrant County,” said James Riddlesperger, a political science professor at Texas Christian University. “On the other hand, there has not been a countywide Democrat elected for county office in Tarrant County in this century.”

Statewide Democratic candidates in 2018 and 2020 slightly outperformed their cumulative margins in Tarrant County. In 2018, the small number of local countywide candidates did a tad better than the statewide slate as a whole, scoring in the 47-48% range. In 2020, the same slight improvement was still there among a larger collection of local countywide candidates, but they finished in the 46-47% range for the most part.

Tarrant, as noted before, had been a reliable bellwether of the state as a whole through the 2016 election, but as with the other large urban counties, and several of the large suburban counties, it became more Democratic than the state. It’s just that Tarrant started in a redder place than the others, so they still lag behind by a bit. I suspect they will again be slightly bluer than the state as a whole, but if there’s a step back from 2018 or 2020, that will be reflected in Tarrant’s numbers as well. I believe the larger trends will continue, whether this year is in line with that or not. I hope that means a blue Tarrant sooner rather than later – as we know, there are a plethora of State House districts that were drawn to be modestly red, and CD24 looms as the best future pickup opportunity – but whether that’s this year or not I couldn’t say.

We hit a new peak in voter registrations

Oct 27th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

It’s good to see, whatever it “means”.

Still the only voter ID anyone should need

Texas now has almost 17.7 million voters — 1.9 million more than four years ago, when Gov. Greg Abbott won re-election.

New voter registration totals from the Texas Division of Elections show the state’s voter rolls are continuing to grow even faster than the population. While the state’s population has grown about 7 percent since 2018, voter registrations have grown about 12 percent.

Nowhere has the surge been bigger than in Harris County, where 230,000 people have been added to the voter rolls since 2018. Tarrant and Bexar counties are next, with more than 130,000 more voters than four years ago. All three counties voted Democratic in the 2020 presidential election.

The result is that at least 1 of every 5 voters in Texas never cast a general election ballot in the Lone Star State prior to 2014 — a remarkable wild card in a state that had stable politics and a slow stream of new voters for a generation before that.

Some of the biggest percentage increases in voter registrations are coming from booming counties that voted Republican in 2020.

Comal County, just north of San Antonio, saw a 29 percent increase in voter registrations from four years ago — the highest growth percentage of any county in the state. Not far behind was Kaufman County, east of Dallas, which also grew by about 29 percent.

[…]

Since 2014, Texas has added 3.6 million voters — roughly equivalent to the populations of Wisconsin and Minnesota.

The increase can be traced to 2014, when a group of campaign strategists from President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign launched an effort they called Battleground Texas to build an army of volunteer registrars.

See here and here for some background, and here for historic data. It’s wild that this has accelerated so much in recent years – we’ve talked about how Harris County was basically flat for years prior to 2012. This will have to slow down, at least to equalize to the rate of population growth, but today is not that day.

The increase in voter registration is absolutely a factor in the recent surge in turnout. In 2014, with 14 million voters and 33.7% turnout, there were 4.7 million total ballots. With 17.7 million voters, 33.7% turnout would be almost 6 million votes. Needless to say, we expect a higher percentage turnout than that this year. If we get the 8.3 million voters we got in 2018, that’s 47% this year, while it was 53% in 2018. I don’t know what we’ll get and I’m not trying to make a projection, I’m just noting that we have a higher floor now.

I think you know the root cause of the problem, John

Oct 11th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

4 comments

I was fascinated by this Texas Monthly feature on Secretary of State John Scott, who is being pushed to reckon with the insane and dangerous levels of election denial and anti-democratic activism. I’m pretty sure he gets it, he just doesn’t want to say it or to suggest answers for it.

Take pity on John Scott. In October 2021, Governor Greg Abbott appointed the Fort Worth attorney as Secretary of State, Texas’s top elections official. He immediately found himself in the hot seat, targeted by voting rights activists aggrieved by what they saw as Republican-led voter suppression and by conspiracy theorists inflamed by former president Donald Trump’s claims of a stolen election. Scott, who had previously served under Abbott as deputy attorney general for civil litigation and COO of the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, told Texas Monthly at the time that his top priority was “bringing the temperature down.” This proved harder than he anticipated.

Scott’s first major task was to conduct a “full forensic audit” of the 2020 general election in the two largest Democrat-led counties, Dallas and Harris, and the two largest Republican-led counties, Collin and Tarrant. The audit was demanded by Trump—even though he won Texas by more than five percentage points—and had been agreed to, less than nine hours after Trump issued his demand, by the Secretary of State office (the top post was then vacant). The effort immediately drew scorn from both liberals, who denounced it as a capitulation to election deniers, and Trump himself, who complained that limiting the audit to four counties was “weak.”

Phase one of the audit examined voting-machine accuracy, cybersecurity, and potentially ineligible voters. Quietly released last New Year’s Eve, it found nothing unusual about the election. The results of the second phase, a more detailed review of all available records from the four counties, are scheduled to be released later this year.

The inability to please either liberals or conservatives has been the hallmark of Scott’s tenure. He drew bipartisan criticism for the high rejection rate for mail-in ballots (12 percent) during this year’s primary election—an all-too-predictable result of the confusing new vote-by-mail rules imposed by Senate Bill 1, which the Republican-controlled Legislature passed last year over vehement Democratic opposition. Scott’s attempt to fulfill SB 1’s strict voter list–maintenance requirements led his office to challenge the citizenship status of nearly 12,000 registered voters, at least some of whom turned out to be on the list by mistake. His office was sued by a coalition of voting rights groups, including the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which has called the list “a surgical strike against voters of color.” (The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit recently ruled that Scott did not have to divulge the list; the plaintiffs are deciding whether to appeal.)

[…]

With early voting for the November general election just weeks away, Texas Monthly decided to check in with the embattled Secretary of State. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Texas Monthly: The voting-machine test you attended in Hays County got pretty rowdy. What was that like?

John Scott: The local elections administrator in Hays County invited us down to film a public service announcement. It kind of devolved into a little bit of a question-and-answer session [with the activists]. I felt bad that it became disruptive to the process we were all there for. Part of my job is answering questions. But a lot of the people who have questions, it’s the misinformed and the uninformed.

The misinformed people seem like they really don’t care. They know something, and they’re going to stick to it no matter what you tell them. You can talk until you’re blue in the face. With the uninformed, we have to reach out and tell them the truth. Otherwise there will only be bad information circling around. The shouting eventually ended and they did calm down. I think there were several protesters who accepted a lot of what I was saying.

TM: Why do you think so many people are angry about these issues?

JS: I don’t know why. If I did, we would address it immediately. There’s a lack of information, and then there’s people out there filling that lack of information with stories that are simply not true. I have yet to hear about or meet any elections administrator in the state who is not trying to do a perfect job. We’re all humans, and so we’re all prone to error. It seems like, a lot of times, people latch on to those errors and ascribe motives. I don’t know how we stop that other than to continually address it. It’s like Whac-A-Mole.

[…]

TM: Earlier this year, the Brennan Center for Justice conducted a survey of election workers across the country. It found that one in every six workers has received threats because of their job. In Texas, the top three election administrators in Gillespie County recently resigned because of harassment. Tarrant County election administrator Heider Garcia received death threats after being the subject of a conspiracy theory involving his prior employment by voting-machine manufacturer Smartmatic. How big of a problem is this?

JS: It’s a huge problem. Heider and his deputy both carry guns now. They don’t bring them into polling places, because that’s illegal, but they have to have a gun on them. Which is pathetic—the fact that they’re in that much fear of their life, that it’s gotten that heated. I think it’s obscene. In Gillespie County I visited with the county judge and let him know we were here to help in any way possible, given the situation they had. Everybody over there had glowing comments about the elections administrator. She was somebody you would want as your neighbor, and somebody you’d want as your public servant in charge of elections.

I’ve gotten death threats; my folks in the elections division have gotten death threats. It’s become absurd, and I don’t know what’s caused it.

TM: What steps has your office taken to ensure election workers can safely carry out their duties?

JS: We tell each county that if they get threats of any kind to report it to their local law enforcement agency immediately. That’s what we did with our own death threats. This is insanity—you can’t have people receiving death threats for doing their jobs.

TM: You say you’re not sure why it’s gotten so intense. But surely former president Trump’s repeated claims of a stolen election have something to do with it.

JS: Any time the temperature gets turned up, it’s possible to have nuts making these statements. At least in our office, what I was told is that these threats long preceded the 2020 election. The Infowars guy [Alex Jones] has unleashed hell on our election people. This has been going on for many years. And I don’t want to give a free pass to people who are crazy enough to go out there and say they’re going to kill somebody because they’re doing their job. I don’t want to give them an excuse—”Oh, well, it’s because somebody said something.” No, that behavior is unacceptable under any scenario. Just because somebody said something, or they saw something on TV, that doesn’t excuse it.

“Pity” is not the word that comes to mind. I don’t care for John Scott, but I’ll admit to some sympathy for him. He’s facing the heat out there as well as the front-line county election workers, and that’s a lot more than any of our elected state leaders are doing. I take his point about misinformed versus uninformed voters as well, though it sure would be nice if someone like him were a much louder advocate for good information and putting a sufficient amount of resources into combatting that misinformation.

And look, this guy isn’t dumb. He knows what the problem is and who’s causing it, he just doesn’t want to call out his own team. It’s the opposite of courageous, but it’s human enough that I can at least see why he’s being so timid. But those county election administrators are out there getting pummeled, working insane hours, and generally burning themselves out, without any clear sign that the state has their backs. It’s not sustainable, not to mention inhumane and dangerous. How about loudly pushing for state resources to find, arrest, and prosecute people who are threatening these folks? How about urging the AG to look into curbing or at least slowing down these mountains of public record requests, especially from out of state activists, which are basically a denial of service attack on the counties? How about asking your buddy Greg Abbott to say something? There’s a lot John Scott can do even if he’s just an administrator himself. If I saw him doing more of it, even if “it” is just trying to get those with the real power to do something, I’d have a lot more respect for him.

Republicans for Collier

Sep 7th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

Two of them, anyway.

Mike Collier

Tarrant County Judge Glen Whitley, one of Texas’ most prominent Republican local leaders, is backing Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s Democratic challenger.

“The one person who I’ll support statewide that will get me a little in trouble: Mike Collier for lieutenant governor,” Whitley said on Y’all-itics, a WFAA politics podcast.

Whitley and Patrick have frequently clashed, and on the podcast Whitley slammed Patrick for waging “war on local elected officials.”

Just days after Whitley made the endorsement that crossed party lines, an out-going Republican state senator from Amarillo has followed suit. Kel Seliger plans to vote for Collier in November, a spokesperson for Seliger told The Texas Tribune. Seliger is one of the most senior Republicans in the upper chamber, but has also famously been at odds with Patrick. Neither Whitley nor Seliger are running for reelection.

At the center of Whitley’s disdain for Patrick is a bill shepherded by the lieutenant governor in 2019 meant to slow the growth of Texans’ property tax bills. The bill requires many cities, counties and other taxing units to hold an election if they wish to raise 3.5% more property tax revenue than the previous year, not counting the growth added by new construction.

But Whitley said the bill put Tarrant County in a tight position because property taxes are a major source of revenue for local governments. Meanwhile, Whitley said Tarrant County jails are housing more than 700 inmates that should be in state custody without additional funding from the state. The COVID-19 pandemic and the inability to make jail transfers contributed to state inmates being held in county jails, Community Impact reported.

“We’re paying 20 million plus a year because the state is not paying anything and yet they’re sitting down there talking about all the cash that they’ve got,” Whitley said.

For Seliger, his vote against Patrick this November comes after years of tensions with the lieutenant governor. Seliger is rare among Republicans in the upper chamber for his occasional willingness to go against Patrick. He has said he’s been punished for voting against a pair of the lieutenant governor’s top priorities in 2017, a bill aimed at restricting local governments’ abilities to raise property taxes and a program that would have subsidized private school tuition and home-schooling expenses. In the following session, Patrick stripped Seliger of his title as chair of the Senate Higher Education Committee. During a 2021 redistricting session, Seliger also voiced concern that Patrick was drawing his district to favor Seliger’s competitor.

[…]

Whitley said he is backing Collier because of Collier’s experience controlling budgets. Collier, an accountant and auditor from the Houston area, is a self-described “numbers guy.” Collier also worked as a landman for Exxon, which Whitley said indicated the Democratic nominee understood the oil business.

“And I just think he’s someone who understands local control. And that’s what I’m looking for,” added Whitley, who as county judge is the county’s top elected official and administrator. “We do everything. We’re the front door for basically all the federal and the state services that the state and the federal government passed laws for us to do.”

This is all nice to see, as is Dan Patrick’s little temper tantrum in response. I’ve said before (many, many times) that nothing will change until Texas’ government changes, and the fastest way for that to happen is for enough people to change how they’ve been voting. I generally don’t believe that endorsements move a lot of votes, but they can move a few, and they can also signal that something is in the air. We’ll know soon enough if this makes any difference – if nothing else, we’ll see what if any effect there is in the precinct data – but I’ll say this much: If Dan Patrick’s political demise can be traced even in part to a fight over local control and bad blood over redistricting, there’s not enough sugar in the world to emulate how sweet that would be. The Chron has more.

UPDATE: And today, outgoing Sen. Eddie Lucio endorses Dan Patrick. I am so glad we are seeing the last of that jackass.

Paxton finds a new way to be two-faced

Aug 27th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

I mean, what were we supposed to believe?

Best mugshot ever

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton stunned election administrators across the state last week when he released an opinion that, in theory, would allow anyone to access ballots almost immediately after they were counted.

Records show that, as recently as five days before the office released that opinion, it was providing the exact opposite guidance to counties.

“The information at issue is confidential for at least 22 months after election day,” a public records opinion from the office, dated Aug. 12, reads. “Accordingly, the district attorney’s office must withhold the information at issue.”

Then, five days later, Paxton released his new opinion. “Members of the public” the new guidance read, are welcome to inspect “voted ballots during the 22-month preservation period.”

“What a difference five days makes,” said Chris Davis, elections administrator in Williamson County.

The record shows that Tarrant County did not receive the opinion telling it not to release the ballots until Aug. 22 — five days after Paxton issued his new opinion. This left the county unsure of how to proceed, and by that time, it had already challenged the new opinion in court. Paxton’s office did not respond to questions about what, if anything, changed in the five day period between the contradictory opinions.

[…]

Tarrant County’s court challenge to Paxton’s new opinion was filed as part of an ongoing records dispute. Citing yet another opinion issued to the office this summer, this one dated July 26 and also instructing the county not to release ballots, attorneys for the county’s election department asked the judge to find Paxton’s new opinion “erroneous.”

“On August 17, 2022, the Attorney General issued a formal opinion concluding for the first time in almost 40 years that voted ballots are not confidential,” they wrote. “The Attorney General’s most recent interpretation is erroneous, and the Court should not follow it.”

In addition to the opinions issued to Tarrant County and dated July 26 and Aug. 12, records provided to Votebeat show Paxton’s office provided identical advice in opinions dated June 16 and Aug. 1.

“We have two documents coming from the same office saying opposite things,” Tarrant County Elections Administrator Heider Garcia told Votebeat. “We’ve got to figure out what’s the path we’re going to walk to do our job.”

Garcia has clear reason to be concerned about the ruling. Earlier this year, after the 22 month window for the March 2020 primary lapsed, a group of activists spent weeks inside his office examining the 300,000 ballots cast by Tarrant County voters. The request took Garcia weeks to fulfill, and then required a dedicated room with videotaped surveillance and a staffer’s supervision.

“You want it as safeguarded as possible in case you actually do have a criminal investigation or some sort of proceeding where [ballots] become evidence,” Garcia said. “Ballots are really easy to alter. You just grab a Sharpie and draw a line on them and now how do you know if it’s been altered or not? Having absolute protection on the physical document, to me, is extremely important.”

See here for the background. I cannot think of a good reason for the sudden turnaround, not to mention the chaos caused by the out-of-order delivery of the contradicting opinions in Fort Worth. The simplest explanation is sheer incompetence. Which would be a surprise given that office’s track record – they’re evil, but they’ve been pretty effective at it. If you have a better idea, by all means say so.

I trust that the irony of Heider Garcia’s words in that last paragraph aren’t lost on anyone. The single biggest threat to the security of the ballots is the idiots that demand to “audit” them, who have to be watched like hawks to ensure they don’t accidentally or deliberately spoil them. I hope that the madness this all represents is helping to drive home the message that Republicans are a clear threat to democracy, as the January 6 hearings and confidential-document-theft-a-palooza have been doing. There are plenty of other things to be talking about as well, from guns to abortion to LGBTQ rights to climate change and renewable energy, but we can’t lose sight of this one. Whatever it’s going to take to convince people they can’t trust the Republican Party as it now exists, we need to be doing it.

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

Aug 25th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

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.

Election officials and workers need our help

Aug 14th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

We’ve identified the problem. That’s good. Now let’s do something to fix it.

Misinformation about elections has led to violent threats against election workers in Texas and other states — including one who was told “we should end your bloodline” — according to a new report released by a House panel Thursday.

The House Committee on Oversight and Reform heard from one county election official in Texas that he received death threats after being singled out by out-of-state candidates who claimed the 2020 election was stolen. Those threats quickly escalated and eventually included his family and staff.

Tarrant County Elections Administrator Heider Garcia received social media messages including, “hunt him down,” “needs to leave Texas and U.S. as soon as possible,” and “hang him when convicted for fraud and let his lifeless body hang in public until maggots drip out of his mouth.”

The report said Garcia had to call law enforcement when his home address was leaked and calls for physical violence against himself and his family increased — eventually leading to threats against his children that included “I think we should end your bloodline.” Law enforcement determined that none of the threats broke the law, but they did provide coordination and additional patrol around his neighborhood.

The findings are the latest evidence of how former President Donald Trump’s unfounded claims that the 2020 election was rigged against him have taken root as they have been echoed by his supporters, including Texas Republicans who passed new voting restrictions last year.

The report comes as polling released this week indicates two-thirds of Texans who identify as Republicans still do not believe the 2020 election was legitimate. The June survey by the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin found 66 percent of Texas Republicans said they don’t believe President Joe Biden legitimately won the election. That was unchanged from February when they were asked the same question.

The report is part of a longrunning effort by congressional Democrats to push back on Trump’s claims and new voting restrictions in states, including Texas.

“Election officials are under siege,” said U.S. Rep. Carolyn Maloney, a New York Democrat who chairs the oversight panel. “They face growing campaigns of harassment and threats, all driven by false accusations of fraud.”

[…]

Garcia wrote that Sidney Powell, Trump’s former lawyer who sought to overturn the 2020 election, appeared on Fox News pushing bunk claims about voting machines turning Tarrant County blue. Garcia was also targeted by Michelle Malkin, a conservative commentator on Newsmax, and far-right website The Gateway Pundit.

Their attacks on Garcia came when Biden won the typically red county by 0.2 percentage points after Trump had led the initial count on election night, before late absentees and provisional ballots were included.

“What followed in the next 4 to 6 weeks was a terrible time of threats and concerns for the safety of my family, my staff and myself,” Garcia wrote.

The House panel in April sent letters to elections administrators in Texas, Arizona, Florida and Ohio asking how misinformation had impacted their work. The report’s findings are based, in part, on responses by Remy Garza, a Cameron County election official who is president of the Texas Association of Election Administrators.

Garza told the committee that during debates in the legislature over proposed changes to voting laws, public testimony frequently included “broad generalizations of alleged fraud” and “repeated misleading information about actions taken by the Harris County clerk responsible for the November 2020 election.”

Garza said the bills Texas Republicans passed were inspired by “false information” and were also sometimes impossible for elections administrators to implement. For instance, the state Legislature enacted a requirement for voting machines to produce a paper record without providing the necessary funds to cover the costs of converting existing equipment to comply, as well as other requirements that are not possible in counties that don’t have certain elections systems.

I have a hard time understanding how those threats against Heider Garcia’s family would not be considered violations of the law. If that’s the case, then the law needs to be updated, because we just can’t have that in a world where we also want free and fair elections run by competent people. Various provisions to offer protection to election officials were included in the voting rights bills that passed the House but were doomed by the filibuster in the Senate. I’m hopeful we’ll get an update to the Electoral Count Act of 1877 to shore up the weaknesses that Trump tried to exploit in 2020, but I seriously doubt that an amendment to include those election official protections could be added, for the same filibuster-related reasons. We’re going to need the same “hold the House and expand the Dem majority in the Senate” parlay to have some hope for this next year. I hope we can wait that long. The Trib has more.

Fraudit 2.0

Jul 29th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

6 comments

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.)

There was definitely an improvement in mail ballot acceptance for the primary runoffs

Jun 14th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

The last time I looked, I was largely unable to find any news stories about mail ballots and their rejection rates for the May primary runoff elections, with the exception of one story about Bexar County and how they were leading the field in getting rejection rates down to something akin to pre-SB1 levels. I still can’t find any stories about this, but it (finally) occurred to me that the new reconciliation reports that election officials now have to publish would contain the data I’m looking for. So with that in mind, off I went. I obviously don’t have the time to go looking everywhere, and some of those smaller county elections webpages are just awful, but I did have a look at a few places of interest.

Harris County, Democratic: 19,081 total mail ballots, of which 1,128 were rejected, for a rejection rate of 5.9%.

Harris County, Republican: 15,053 total mail ballots, of which 1,169 were rejected, for a rejection rate of 7.8%

That’s a clear improvement of the 20% rejection rate from March and the 12% rejection rate of the May special election. It’s still too high, but it’s not take-your-breath-away too high. And it pleases me no end to see Republicans have a harder time with it than Democrats. It’s unlikely to be enough to matter if that’s still the case in November, but it would be a rich piece of karma if more of their votes got tossed as a result of this malicious law.

Bexar County, Democratic: 11,919 total mail ballots, of which 15 (yes, fifteen) were rejected, for a rejection rate of 0.1%.

Bexar County, Republican: 5,856 total mail ballots, of which 33 were rejected, for a rejection rate of 0.6%.

Bexar is definitely the gold standard, the example for everyone else to emulate. And Dems did better here as well. Encouraging.

Travis County, cumulative: 10,224 total mail ballots, of which 222 were rejected, for a rejection rate of 2.2%.

Not all counties broke this out by party. The overall rate is low enough here to not sweat it too much. About 75% of the mail ballots overall were Democratic, so it’s likely that the Dem rejection rate was right around 2.2% – the Republican rate could have been a lot different without affecting the total too much.

Dallas County, cumulative: 10,708 total mail ballots, of which 176 were rejected, for a rejection rate of 1.6%.

Like Travis County, but slightly fewer rejections. Dems cast a bit less than 70% of the mail ballots.

Montgomery County, cumulative: 4,366 total mail ballots, of which 25 were rejected, for a rejection rate of 0.6%.

Republicans knew what they were doing here. They were 70% of mail ballots.

Fort Bend County, cumulative: 4,382 total mail ballots, of which 187 were rejected, for a 4.3% rejection rate.

Closest one yet to Harris. About two thirds of mail ballots were Democratic. Would have been nice to see the breakdown by party here.

Cameron County, Democratic: 1,323 total mail ballots, of which 3 were rejected, for a rejection rate of 0.3%.

Cameron County, Republican: 292 total mail ballots, of which 2 were rejected, for a rejection rate of 0.7%.

Wow.

So it’s clear there was a lot of improvement, and while Harris did a much better job there’s room for us to do better as well. It’s also important to remember that there are still a huge number of people who have not yet tried to vote by mail, so there’s no guarantee that the improvements will continue or be maintained. There’s still a lot of work to be done. But at least it looks like that work will have a payoff.

(PS – Not all counties had the reconciliation reports in a place that I could find. I looked for them for El Paso and Tarrant and came up empty. Might have just been me, but maybe their site design needs some work.)

On reporting election night results faster

May 20th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

6 comments

Not sure about this.

Ahead of next week’s primary runoff elections, Harris County officials are recruiting county staffers to help speed up the results by picking up ballots at polling locations and driving them to the county’s central count location. Harris County was the last of the state’s largest counties to finish counting ballots in an election held earlier this month, even with assistance from law enforcement officers who took on delivery duties.

In the past, the responsibility of delivering the ballots has fallen to election judges, the final task at the end of their 15-hour day. Starting with the May 7 election, law enforcement officers with the Harris County Constables offices and the Harris County Sheriff’s Office picked up the ballots and made the delivery instead. The change didn’t do much to cut down on reporting time. While Dallas County and Tarrant County sent complete results to the state shortly after midnight, Harris County’s results came in around 9:37 a.m. Sunday, according to the Texas Secretary of State’s office.

This week, Harris County officials plan to train and deputize full-time county staffers from various departments to take on those delivery duties, as well. An email sent to county staffers on Tuesday from Harris County Administrator Dave Berry and Harris County Elections Administrator Isabel Longoria requested volunteers to help expedite the process.

“What’s required? Drive to a single polling location and pick up two sets of voting equipment, from both the Democratic and Republican sides, for the May 24th Primary Runoff Election. Return the equipment to NRG and be greeted with snacks, water, and a big THANK YOU for your service,” officials wrote in the email.

Each participating law enforcement officer or county employee will be assigned on average two polling locations, which will cut down by half the total number of cars lined up at central count at the end of the night, according to a spokesperson with the Election Administrator’s office.

While all Texas counties must comply with the state election code regulations — which were modified significantly when Senate Bill 1 went into effect last year — the Election Day ballot counting process varies considerably depending on the county.

At a May 11 hearing with the House Elections Committee, Tarrant County Elections Administrator Heider Garcia told lawmakers his county speeds up results by using multiple dropoff spots on Election Night, instead of one central count location.

“Because we are a large county, we use regional dropoff locations for the poll workers to deliver the materials to us. If we had 350 poll workers queued up outside our office, election night would become election week,” Garcia said.

Rep. Mike Schofield, a Harris County Republican, told Longoria and committee members he was alarmed by Harris County’s plans to deputize county staffers to make deliveries.

“I would be very, very troubled to find out in November that we were just deputizing whoever the elections office thought it wanted to deputize to go touch my election results and bring them to the central counting station,” he said. “So let’s make sure that we know what the law is and that we’re following it because that’s not kosher. Or at least doesn’t seem kosher.”

According to the story, Keith Ingram of the SOS office said he disagreed with Harris County’s interpretation of the law in question. He’s not a lawyer and that’s not an official pronouncement, but that sounds to me like it’s maybe not the best plan to pursue, as there could be unwanted consequences from it. I will say, it’s not clear to me why this would be illegal. I can’t think of any reason why trained county staff would be any less reliable or trustworthy than election judges, who had to be trained by the same election office people to do the same thing. Maybe this is just a quirk of the law if in fact it is not in compliance with it, maybe there was some nutball conspiracy theory reason for county election workers to be not on the sanctioned list of vote-equipment-deliverers, or maybe there’s a legitimate reason that I’m not aware of. All I can say is that at first glance it’s not clear to me why it should be off limits.

That said, rather than risk a confrontation over this, maybe the multiple dropoff points plan is better, as that seems to be how other counties do it. I will confess total ignorance here about why that might not work for Harris County. Maybe it’s just not a thing we’ve done before and so we don’t have a workable plan in place. I’d say one of the first questions we should be asking the next Election Administrator is what they think about this.

There’s also this:

The Harris County GOP is urging Republican election judges to break with Harris County’s election night plan for next week’s primary runoff, arguing the county’s ballot delivery protocol violates the law. Earlier this week, Harris County officials sent an email to county staffers asking for volunteer drivers to help expedite the ballot counting process for the upcoming primary runoff. With hundreds of polling locations spread out over 1,700 square miles, the state’s most populous county has a history of delayed election returns.

In hopes of speeding up election results, the Harris County Elections Administrator’s office also used this plan earlier this month in the May 7 election — deputizing law enforcement officials and full-time county staffers to deliver ballots from the polling location to the county’s sole central counting station. However, the Harris County GOP is pushing back on that plan and instructing Republican election judges to drive ballots to central count themselves.

While the Harris County GOP is opposing the county’s ballot delivery plan, in an email to the Chronicle, party chair Cindy Siegel outlined strategies they would support in order to speed up election results. Those included better tracking of equipment and improved training for staffers receiving ballots.

Their key recommendation: “Include multiple drop off locations around the county with livestream video of the drop off process.”

At the May 11 hearing, Tarrant County Elections Administrator Heider Garcia told lawmakers that’s the system they use to speed up results.

“Because we are a large county, we use regional drop-off locations for the poll workers to deliver the materials to us. If we had 350 poll workers queued up outside our office, election night would become election week,” Garcia said.

Under the tenure of former Republican County Clerk Stan Stanart, Harris County used four drop-off locations to count ballots. Stanart reassured voters the system of transmitting ballot counts was secure.

When the county clerk’s office flipped to Democratic control in 2018, the new County Clerk Diane Trautman intended to use multiple locations, as well, but scrapped the plan after the Texas Secretary of State’s office said the county would violate state law prohibiting the transmission of election results via the internet. Trautman told Commissioners Court in November 2019 she believed her system to relay results was legal, but rather than risk a lawsuit, Harris County would begin to count votes at a single location.

In this year’s primary election on March 1, Harris County used four drop-off locations to shorten the drive time for election judges, according to the Elections Administrator’s office spokesperson Leah Shah. She said they’ve returned to one drop-off location while trying to implement a program to reduce the need for multiple locations.

In response to the Harris County GOP urging judges to transport ballots themselves, Shah said the Elections Administrator’s office has sent out an email to GOP election judges notifying them that they can “opt in” to the county’s plan if they don’t want to drive the ballots themselves. Thirty-one GOP judges have opted in so far, according to Shah.

Someone is going to need to explain to me what Tarrant County is doing differently than what Harris County would have done under Diane Trautman’s plan. Having multiple dropoff locations makes sense to me, so let’s figure out what needs to happen from there and go forward with it. Make that a top priority for the next elections administrator. And again, election night reporting for the earlier May election was fine. If we have a similar experience on Tuesday night, that too will be fine.

Crystal Mason’s conviction to be reconsidered

May 12th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

Good news.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has told a lower appeals court to take another look at the controversial illegal voting conviction of Crystal Mason, who was given a five-year prison sentence for casting a provisional ballot in the 2016 election while she was on supervised release for a federal conviction.

The state’s court of last resort for criminal matters on Wednesday ruled a lower appeals court had wrongly upheld Mason’s conviction by concluding that it was “irrelevant” to Mason’s prosecution that she did not know she was ineligible to cast a ballot. The ruling opens the door for Mason’s conviction to ultimately be overturned.

Mason’s lawyers turned to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals after the Tarrant County-based Second Court of Appeals found that her knowledge that she was on supervised release, and therefore ineligible to vote, was sufficient for an illegal voting conviction. Mason has said she did know she was ineligible to vote and wouldn’t have knowingly risked her freedom.

On Wednesday, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that the lower court had “erred by failing to require proof that [Mason] had actual knowledge that it was a crime for her to vote while on supervised release.” They sent the case back down with instructions for the lower court to “evaluate the sufficiency” of the evidence against Mason.

[…]

In Wednesday’s ruling, the court held that the Texas election code requires individuals to know they are ineligible to vote to be convicted of illegal voting.

“To construe the statute to mean that a person can be guilty even if she does not ‘know[] the person is not eligible to vote’ is to disregard the words the Legislature intended,” the court wrote. “It turns the knowledge requirement into a sort of negligence scheme wherein a person can be guilty because she fails to take reasonable care to ensure that she is eligible to vote.”

The court on Wednesday ruled against Mason on two other issues. They rejected her arguments that the lower court had interpreted the state’s illegal voting statute in a way that criminalized the good faith submission of provisional ballots, and that the appeals court had wrongly found she “voted in an election” even though her provisional ballot was never counted.

See here, here, and here for some background. Of particular interest is that the recent voter suppression law played a positive role in this outcome.

Insisting they’re not criminalizing individuals who merely vote by mistake, Tarrant County prosecutors have said Mason’s case is about intent. The case against her has turned on the affidavit she signed when submitting her provisional ballot.

But the legal landscape underpinning Tarrant County’s prosecution shifted while the case was under review, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals noted.

Last year, the Texas Legislature included in its sweeping new voting law several changes to the election code’s illegal voting provisions. The law, known as Senate Bill 1, added new language stating that Texans may not be convicted of voting illegally “solely upon the fact that the person signed a provisional ballot,” instead requiring other evidence to corroborate they knowingly tried to cast an unlawful vote.

The Legislature’s change to the election code — along with a resolution passed in the Texas House regarding the interpretation of the illegal voting statute — are “persuasive authority” that the lower court’s interpretation of the law’s mens rea requirement was incorrect, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled on Wednesday.

Good. This isn’t over for Mason, as this is just about the appeal of her conviction. Even if the appeals court ultimately throws it out after reconsideration, Tarrant County could still pursue this case and who knows, they might be able to convict her again. It sure seems like the spine of the case against her has been removed, though. And no matter how you look at it, she has already suffered consequences far in excess of her original sin, however you measure it. Please let this be over for her. The Dallas Observer has more.

Sen. Powell ends her re-election bid

Apr 7th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Disappointing but understandable.

Sen. Beverly Powell

State Sen. Beverly Powell, D-Burleson, ended her reelection campaign Wednesday morning, citing an “unwinnable race” in a district that Republican lawmakers had redrawn to make a Democratic win impossible.

“Under the new map that will remain intact through November, the results of the 2022 election are predetermined,” she said in a video message published Wednesday morning. “Election prospects for any candidate who relies on a diverse voter coalition will be thwarted. So after a great deal of thought, prayer and consultation with family, friends and supporters, I have decided to withdraw my name from the ballot.

“I cannot in good faith ask my dedicated supporters to spend time and contribute precious resources on an unwinnable race,” she said. “That time and those resources are better spent on efforts that will advance our causes and on the continuing efforts to restore voting rights.”

In withdrawing her nomination, Powell all but gives the election to Republican nominee state Rep. Phil King of Weatherford. Sam Taylor, a spokesperson for the secretary of state’s office, said on Twitter that the Texas Democratic Party can only replace its nominee if Powell is withdrawing due to a catastrophic illness, no other party has a nominee, or she’s appointed or elected to another office.

[…]

Powell and a group of the district’s voters and civil rights organizations sued the state in federal court to block the map’s implementation for the March primary. But a three-judge panel in El Paso denied their request to block the map’s use in the primary, keeping it in place until later in the year when the panel will hold hearings on challenges to the state’s political maps for the Texas House, Senate, Board of Education and congressional seats.

Since the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, Texas has not made it through a single decade without a federal court admonishing it for violating federal protections for voters of color.

In her message, Powell said the newly drawn map will be in effect “for at least the November general election.”

Powell said she will continue to serve through the end of her term in January and will look for other opportunities to serve the public.

“Serving as your Texas state senator has been the honor of my lifetime,” she said. “Thank you for entrusting me with this sacred privilege.”

See here and here for some background. SD10 was easily the main Republican target in redistricting, going from 53-45 Biden to 57-41 Trump in the process. It’s likely to trend Democratic over this decade as it did over the previous one, but even an optimistic projection would suggest 2026 or 2028 before it might become competitive. I hate the idea of giving up on a district, even if it’s not winnable, on the grounds that local campaigns are a part of the overall turnout effort, but if the idea behind this is to do some triage and direct funds away from a race like this one, where an endangered incumbent could generate a lot of cash for their likely-to-be-doomed effort, and to ones with a greater chance of success, I can’t argue with it. I thank Sen. Powell for her service and hope that we have better luck with the lawsuit and the demographic trends. Reform Austin has more.

When a divorce helps to define a marriage

Mar 21st, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

4 comments

Interesting case.

A gay San Antonio man has filed for a divorce in which he seeks to prove a common law marriage existed with his former partner of 25 years when federal law prohibited same sex marriage. The law has since then been ruled unconstitutional by Obergefell vs. Hodges in 2015.

If he is successful in his divorce petition, Christopher Hoffman would be eligible for alimony and other benefits from his former partner Moises Ortiz. It would also mark the first time in Texas that a common law [informal] divorce would be granted to a same sex couple who were together prior to Obergefell.

The Texas Family Code provides two methods for establishing a common law [informal] marriage. The first is to “file a declaration of informal marriage with the county clerk. Tex. Fam. Code 2.40l(a)(l).” The second is by showing that “I) the parties ‘agreed to be married’; 2) that the parties lived together as spouses; and 3) that they ‘represented to others that they were married.’ Tex. Fam. Code 2.401 (a)(2).” Additionally, the partner seeking to establish the existence of a common law marriage “bears the burden of demonstrating the three elements by a preponderance of the evidence.”

According to court documents, Hoffman and Ortiz lived together for 25 years beginning in 1994. Hoffman filed for the common law divorce on July 19, 2019 citing adultery and mistreatment among other reasons. In responding to Hoffman’s assertion, Ortiz denies that a common law marriage existed, saying that he and Hoffman had only been roommates.

On July 30, 2019, Judge Mary Lou Alvarez of the 45th District Court of Bexar County found that Ortiz’s claim that he and Hoffman “were simply roommates that acted as partners to be incredulous testimony.” The judge went on to issue a temporary order requiring Ortiz to pay Hoffman $1,200 monthly for interim spousal support until a final jury trial’s verdict.

On January 22, 2021, Ortiz’s attorney filed a motion for a Declaratory Judgment which would have made a final, legally binding declaration that Hoffman’s petition was not valid.

Ortiz contended that there was no precedent in Texas state law to show that Obergefell applies retroactively to same sex couples. Hoffman’s attorney countered that there had been two incidents (Ford v. Freemen 2020 and Hinojosa v. LaFredo 2012) of courts in Texas recognizing “a pre-Obergefell same sex common law marriage. However no Texas appellate court has issued any binding authority on the issue.”

(Lambda Legal Senior Staff Attorney Shelly Skeen authored a brief in the Hinojosa v. LaFredo case.)

There are a couple of precedents I could cite for pre-Obergefell marriages later getting legally dissolved in Texas. Way back in 2010, a Travis County district court judge granted a divorce to two women who had been married in Massachusetts. Then-Attorney General Greg Abbott sued to undo the divorce ruling on the grounds that their marriage was not recognized by the state of Texas. That case went all the way to the State Supreme Court, which ruled against Abbott, upholding a Third Court of Appeals decision that Abbott didn’t have standing because he waited to intervene until after the original district court ruling. That ruling happened a few months before Obergefell, and SCOTx was emphatic that it was not saying anything about the constitutionality of same-sex marriage, just about the AG’s standing to intervene in that case.

In 2014, there was a divorce and child custody filing in Bexar County, also between two women who in this case had been married in Washington,. That one had been filed eight days before a federal judge ruled that Texas’s law against same-sex marriage was unconstitutional; this was the original Texas case filed by Cleopatra De Leon and Nicole Dimetman, and Vic Holmes and Mark Phariss. The judge in that Bexar County case later also ruled that Texas’s law against same-sex marriage was unconstitutional, basing her opinion on the federal case while specifying sections of the state’s Family Code as being illegal. She also cordially invited Greg Abbott to butt the hell out, which kind of makes her my hero. I don’t have any further updates on that case, so it’s my best guess that it eventually proceeded to a normal resolution in the courts.

Finally (yes, I went deep on this one; it’s a topic that fascinates me), there was a post-Obergefell divorce granted in Tarrant County, the culmination of a proceeding that had been filed in 2013. It appears that it was the SCOTUS ruling on same-sex marriage that spurred the case resolution for this one.

So with all that said, and with the usual proviso that I Am Not A Lawyer, I like plaintiff Hoffman’s chances, on the grounds that this is in every other way a pretty normal, boring divorce case that will ultimately be decided on the merits. It’s certainly possible that some bad actors might try to get involved in an effort to pursue a ruling that might draw a distinction between “traditional” marriage and same-sex marriage. I don’t know how that might happen, and I don’t know if it can happen if defendant Ortiz objects to their intervention, I just know that the there are definitely people who would like to intervene in this fashion and for this purpose, and I wouldn’t put it past them. Anyway, I’ll try to keep an eye on this one, just to see how it goes. The trial begins today, so we may know more soon.

Precinct analysis: Beto’s range in the 2022 primaries

Mar 15th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

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.

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

Mar 10th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

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.

2022 primary early voting statewide

Feb 28th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

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

Feb 28th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

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.

No restraining order in SD10 lawsuit

Feb 2nd, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

The March primary will officially proceed as scheduled.

Sen. Beverly Powell

A federal three-judge panel in El Paso on Tuesday denied a request by Tarrant County residents to block a reconfigured state Senate district from being used in the upcoming March primary election while they pursue a lawsuit arguing that Texas lawmakers intentionally discriminated against voters of color when they redrew its boundaries.

The legal challenge to Senate District 10 in the Fort Worth area offered the only avenue to alter the state political maps drawn last year by the Legislature before the primary election. The Republican-controlled Legislature used the once-a-decade redistricting process to draw maps solidifying the GOP’s political dominance while weakening the influence of voters of color.

Without a successful appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, the maps will remain in place until later this year, when the panel is expected to hold a trial to hear the large collection of challenges to the new maps for the state House and Senate, the State Board of Education and the state’s Congressional seats.

The plaintiffs — including Democratic state Sen. Beverly Powell, who represents SD-10 in its previous configuration — and attorneys for the state faced off in an El Paso courtroom last week during a four-day hearing before the three-judge panel. The plaintiffs were asking for a temporary injunction blocking the primary using the redrawn SD-10.

[…]

The state also argued it was too late to make changes for the March 1 primary, for which mail-in ballots have already started going out. In-person early voting begins Feb. 14.

The three-judge panel did not specify its reasons for siding with the state in its Tuesday order, saying those would be contained in a forthcoming opinion. The panel did note the state’s argument that an order to block the use of the redrawn SD-10 so close to the primary election would “fly in the face” of the Supreme Court’s previous warnings that lower courts should not make changes “on the eve of an election.”

See here and here for the background. I can’t say I’m surprised – we are less than two weeks out from the start of early voting, and mail ballots are being sent to those lucky few who have managed to fill out their applications correctly. Whether it was possible for the court to have acted faster than this I can’t say, but given where we are now, this was the most likely outcome. This lawsuit and the other federal and state suits will proceed later, and if there are any remedies offered they will happen no earlier than the 2024 election. Which means that if the plaintiffs do eventually prevail in this one, it will be too late for Sen. Powell, who is a big underdog in the current district. That sucks and it’s not fair, but it’s where we are. All we can do is move forward.

The SD10 redistricting lawsuit gets off to a rousing start

Jan 28th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

4 comments

I did not see this coming.

Sen. Beverly Powell

In a sworn declaration submitted as part of an ongoing federal court challenge, a senior Republican state senator with redistricting experience said he believes his party violated federal voting laws when it drew new boundaries for state Senate District 10 in the Fort Worth area.

“Having participated in the 2011 and 2013 Senate Select Redistricting Committee proceedings, and having read the prior federal court decision regarding SD10, it was obvious to me that the renewed effort to dismantle SD 10 violated the Voting Rights Act and the U.S. Constitution,” state Sen. Kel Seliger said in a declaration signed in November.

The statement from the Amarillo Republican emerged this week as part of a dayslong hearing before a three-judge panel considering a lawsuit that claims the district was intentionally reconfigured to discriminate against voters of color in Tarrant County.

[…]

Seliger chaired the Senate’s redistricting committee last decade, redrawing the state’s maps following the 2010 census when a similar attempt to reshape the district was found to be discriminatory. A federal court in Washington, D.C., ruled in 2012 that lawmakers had discriminated against voters of color in dismantling the district and cracking apart their communities. As a result, the Legislature went back to restore the district’s configuration.

Seliger affirmed his declaration in a video deposition taken earlier this month — portions of which were played in open court in El Paso this week — during which he also said that “pretextual reasons” were given for how political boundaries were decided during the 2021 redistricting process.

Seliger pointed to the redrawing of his own district in the Texas Panhandle as an example. The district was reconfigured so that it lost several counties from the region while picking up about a dozen on the southern end of the district, closer to Midland, from where Seliger had picked up a primary challenger. He ultimately decided against seeking reelection.

[…]

On Wednesday, Seliger told The Texas Tribune that his statement about the illegality of SD-10 was “more of a concern than it was an assertion” of whether there was a violation.

“When you draw a map that essentially takes out minorities or, in what was more the point, take out the chance that there would ever be a Democrat elected there, was there a violation?” Seliger said. “It’s not an assertion on my part because I’m not a constitutional lawyer, but that was my concern about Sen. Powell’s district — to take that district and completely change it and it still marginalized minorities in that district.”

He added that there was a “context” surrounding the drawing of SD-10 — even as Huffman asserted she had not paid any attention to racial data in drawing its boundaries — that requires lawmakers to consider race.

“The Voting Rights Act says if you can create a district in which a historically marginalized minority can elect a candidate of their choice, you must draw that district,” Seliger said. “You start with that principle in every single district.”

See here for the background. Basically, he’s saying that the Republicans did the same things that they did ten years ago that were cited as illegal under the Voting Rights Act by a federal court in 2012. That’s a strong argument that the district as drawn now is also illegal, though it’s hardly conclusive. The previous lawsuit was settled rather than taken to a verdict, so the state will probably just argue now that they shouldn’t have settled then. It’s a good and unexpected (for me, anyway) start for the plaintiffs, who for now are just trying to get something like the old district restored for the 2022 election, but we haven’t heard from the state yet.

SD10 lawsuit gets its hearing

Jan 25th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

The last possible obstacle to a March primary, and the first redistricting lawsuit to get a merits hearing.

Sen. Beverly Powell

A federal district judge in El Paso on Tuesday will preside over one of several challenges against the state of Texas and Gov. Greg Abbott after the Republican-led Texas Legislature redrew political maps following the 2020 U.S. Census.

And although this week’s hearing is limited in scope — it pertains to one state senate district in North Texas — attorneys said testimony could foretell what is to come later this year when a slew of other redistricting challenges are heard in a consolidated redistricting lawsuit.

U.S. District Judge David Guaderrama will hear a challenge to the redrawn political boundaries for Fort Worth’s state Senate District 10, currently represented by Democrat Beverly Powell. Powell and six Tarrant County residents filed the lawsuit in early November, alleging the new map purposely dilutes the voting strength of minorities.

“In each decennial redistricting cycle in modern history, Texas has enacted plans that federal courts have ruled to be racially discriminatory in intent and/or effect. Like clockwork, Texas has done so again,” the lawsuit asserts. “Remarkably, Texas has enacted the same racially discriminatory scheme to dismantle Senate District 10.”

[…]

Attorney Mark P. Gaber, who represents Powell and the other plaintiffs, said their case is scheduled ahead of the others this fall because they asked the judge to make a decision in time for the November 2022 General Election.

“The claims are that the drawing of the senate district was intentionally discriminatory by cracking apart Black and Latino voters. What we are asking the court to do is enter relief in time to affect the November 22 election,” he said. “So, we would put the district that exists now back in place and that would require some changes to the surrounding districts as well.”

Graber said this week’s hearing could foreshadow what to expect later this year.

“I imagine for one thing there is going to be testimony and that doesn’t go away. And that could be relevant to other claims as well,” he said. “We’ll probably get some legal ruling from the court that will affect issues beyond Senate District 10 in terms of what the court determines are the facts of law.”

See here for the background. The DMN has more details.

Of the federal redistricting complaints, Powell’s alone seeks an injunction and changes to the maps ahead of the March 1 primary elections. A panel of three federal judges set a September trial start date in the consolidated redistricting case. There’s also a challenge in Texas state court.

“A crucial fight is underway to preserve District 10 as a Tarrant County-based diverse district where minority voters and Anglos unite to elect their candidate of choice,” said Powell, who is suing as a private citizen and not in her official capacity, when she filed for reelection last month.

The previously Fort Worth-centric seat that had been contained inside Tarrant County grew at least tenfold in geographic size and added part of Parker County and all of Johnson, Palo Pinto, Stephens, Shackelford, Callahan and Brown counties.

It previously favored President Joe Biden by eight points, according to election returns. But the redrawn district would have gone for Donald Trump by 16 points, a 24-point swing that likely dooms Powell’s hopes for reelection.

Republicans say the maps are legal and fair. Lawyers for the state argued the Legislature acted according to partisan motivations, not racial ones, and warned that blocking the map would disrupt the 2022 elections already in motion.

“This case is about politics, not race,” state lawyers responded in a filing that was blunt about the GOP majority’s approach. “Their goal, as always, was to design to elect a Republican. And they succeeded, at least on paper.”

Texas argued the Tarrant County citizens’ claims fail because “the Legislature simply did not consider race for purposes of redrawing” District 10 except for compliance with applicable law.

[…]

To lock things in place until the lawsuit is resolved, Powell’s legal team asked the federal court to block the map, with respect to District 10, from being used in elections and to restore the district’s previous boundaries. The plaintiffs also asked the court to delay primary elections affected by that change, noting that lawmakers already approved a back-up primary schedule.

[…]

It’s unclear, if the court rules in favor of the plaintiffs on District 10, which other primaries would be delayed. The goal is to restore the seat with as few changes as possible to the rest of the map, said Matt Angle, founder and director of the progressive Lone Star Project.

I noted this hearing in yesterday’s post about the state of the state lawsuits, as those now will be held later (if they are not tossed by SCOTx) and will not have an effect on this year’s primaries. I don’t expect there to be any delays in the primaries this year. It’s possible that the three-judge panel, which has one Trump judge, one Obama judge, and the ever-present Jerry Smith, could issue an injunction, but ~~I doubt that the Fifth Circuit would let it stand, and if somehow that happened then SCOTUS would intervene~~ SCOTUS would get to have a say as well. (Yes, maybe I’m being cynical, but how is that a losing proposition these days?) Whatever does happen, it will have to happen quickly – we’ve already passed the deadline for mail ballots to be sent to military and overseas voters, and early in person voting for the primaries starts in less than three weeks. I’ll be keeping a close eye on this.

UPDATE: Made a correction to note that the appeals process from this three-judge panel goes to SCOTUS, not the Fifth Circuit.

Please watch over the fraudit

Jan 23rd, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

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

Jan 3rd, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

13 comments

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

Dec 22nd, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

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

Dec 14th, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

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.

Crystal Mason using SB1 to try to overturn her illegal voting conviction

Dec 13th, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

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Hope this works. It would be one small good thing to come out of that otherwise harmful law.

Crystal Mason, the Tarrant County woman whose illegal voting conviction has garnered national attention, is asking for a Texas appeals court to overturn her conviction under a new provision of Texas’ recently adopted election law Senate Bill 1.

Mason, 46, was sentenced to five years in prison for attempting to cast a ballot in 2016′s presidential election. At the time, Mason was on supervised release from a federal tax fraud conviction and was prohibited from voting in Texas.

Her lawyers with the American Civil Liberties Union this week filed a brief with the Texas Court of Criminal of Appeals citing the state’s new election law that took effect earlier this month in asking for her conviction to be overturned.

Tucked within SB 1 that was passed by the Texas Legislature in this year’s second special session is a section erasing criminal penalties for felons who attempt to vote without knowing that they were committing a crime. That portion of the law came about with Mason’s conviction in mind.

“SB 1 is a repudiation of Ms. Mason’s conviction and five-year sentence of incarceration,” the brief states.

[…]

Her attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union declined a request for comment. The Tarrant County District Attorney’s office, which prosecuted and has argued against overturning Mason’s conviction, said in an emailed statement that SB 1 has no bearing on Mason’s case.

“Even under the new law, she is guilty,” office spokeswoman Anna Tinsley Williams said. “She wasn’t convicted simply for casting the provisional ballot; she was convicted for casting a provisional ballot when she knew she was ineligible to vote. Knowledge of ineligibility is the key. This is not a case of mistaken voting.”

See here and here for some background. House Democrats had negotiated an amendment in the original bill during the regular session that would have retroactively covered Mason’s case, but it was taken out in the conference committee version by Senators on the committee, and that breaking of the faith was one of the catalysts for the initial quorum break during the regular session, which prevented the bill from getting a final vote. In the second special session, after House Dems had returned from Washington, a similar amendment was added to the House version of the bill, but it again ran into resistance in the Senate, with bill author Bryan Hughes the main obstacle. (How bad does Hughes look when even Briscoe fricking Cain was willing to add this provision to the bill?) If people can read the final version of the bill to include or not include Crystal Mason in its scope, then it’s at best a tossup what the CCA will do, and given their usual pro-prosecution bias, I can’t say I’m optimistic. But it’s sure worth the try.

Fraudit funding

Nov 22nd, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

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?

Sen. Powell sues over SD10

Nov 5th, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

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Number six and counting.

Sen. Beverly Powell

Tarrant County state Sen. Beverly Powell filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday against the state Senate redistricting plan, marking the latest court challenge to Texas’ Republican-drawn political maps that secure the GOP’s grip on power for the next decade but blunt the voting strength of nonwhite voters who fueled the state’s population surge.

The legal team for Powell and six other Tarrant County citizens argued the Texas Senate redraw dilutes minority voting strength in the Democrat’s district, in violation of the federal Voting Rights Act and U.S. Constitution, according to the suit filed in federal court in Austin.

The Senate’s redistricting plan dramatically transforms Powell’s Senate District 10 into a district favorable for a Republican candidate by moving much of the nonwhite population into a large swath of rural areas, including Parker and Johnson counties. Others are packed into the nearby Senate District 23 represented by Dallas Democrat Royce West.

“The adopted Senate map is a brutal attack on Tarrant County voters,” Powell said in a news release. “The map cracks historic Tarrant County minority neighborhoods and submerges hundreds of thousands of Tarrant County voters into rural counties and suburban districts. It is an intentional racially discriminatory scheme to undermine and destroy the voting rights of those I am elected to serve.”

[…]

The previous iteration of Senate District 10 was drawn by courts after a judge found it in violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The GOP-led redistricting effort this year put in place a district that changed District 10 from a Fort Worth-centric district inside Tarrant County to a sprawling district that increased in geographic size by at least tenfold.

It previously favored President Joe Biden by eight points, according to election returns. But the redrawn district would have gone for Republican Donald Trump by 16 points, a 24-point swing that likely dooms Powell’s hopes for re-election.

The remap shrinks the share of Hispanic, Black and Asian eligible voters in District 10 while increasing the share of white eligible voters, from 54% to 62%.

The plaintiffs’ attorneys asked the federal court to block the map, with respect to Powell’s district, from being used in any elections and to set in motion a plan for new boundaries. The suit names Gov. Greg Abbott and newly appointed Texas Secretary of State John Scott as defendants.

You can see a copy of the lawsuit here. The other litigation so far includes the Gutierrez/Eckhardt suit, the LULAC/MALDEF suit, the Voto Latino suit, and the two MALC suits. As a reminder, the current map with SD10 entirely in Tarrant County can be seen here, and the new map with SD10 sprawling out into multiple rural counties can be seen here. The question for the short term is whether one or more of these plaintiffs can get a temporary restraining order against one or more maps, thus potentially delaying the primaries. I don’t think that is likely to happen – there may be a TRO, but I would expect it to be stayed by the appeals court – but we’ll see. A press release from the Lone Star Project is here, and the Star-Telegram has more.

More redistricting stuff

Oct 2nd, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

Just a roundup of some redistricting stories. We’ll start with the DMN.

The new map, part of a process of redrawing legislative boundaries every 10 years, makes significant changes in North Texas, where Democrats likely will gain a seat held by Republican Jeff Cason. The district would move to an area made up of mostly minority voters.

But the Republican proposal also adjusts the southern Denton County district represented by Democrat Michelle Beckley to make it more favorable for a GOP candidate. Beckley has opted to run for Congress in 2022 against Republican incumbent Beth Van Duyne in Congressional District 24.

Meanwhile, the North Dallas district represented by John Turner would move west and become a majority Hispanic district in Oak Cliff and Grand Prairie. Turner is retiring after his term ends, and had he stayed, he would have been paired with a Republican Morgan Meyer.

In North Texas, Republicans had the goal of protecting their incumbents who could be in trouble during the next decade. They made alterations that now have the Dallas County seats held by Republicans Angie Chen Button of Garland and Meyer, who lives in University Park. The new maps place them in areas won in 2020 by Donald Trump, but only at a 50% to 49% margin. Those districts will remain battlegrounds as Democrats try to make Dallas County a blue oasis.

Republicans bolstered their Tarrant County seats, except for the one held by Cason, which will become more Democratic. Cason also was one of only two Republicans who voted against House Speaker Dade Phelan in January. And they made the Collin County districts represented by GOP Reps. Matt Shaheen and Jeff Leach stronger for a Republican, but as with the case in Dallas County, the Collin County seats will remain targets for Democrats.

“Republicans did their best to cement their majority and, from a partisan gerrymandering standpoint, they played this very smart,” said David de la Fuente, a senior policy analysts for the center-left group called Third Way. “They didn’t go overly aggressive for new pickup opportunities for themselves because they know that a lot of this growth that’s happening in Texas is growth that could benefit the Democratic Party, so they tried to stop losses more than anything else.”

[…]

Rep. Jasmine Crockett, a Dallas Democrats who represents District 100, which includes parts of southern and eastern Dallas County, as well as West Dallas, is upset that her district is slated to incur a radical drop in its Black population. Under the new maps, the number of voting age Black residents District 100 will drop from 34.6% to 27%. The white voting age population would increase from 22% to nearly 37%. Crockett’s voting age Hispanic population drops from 41% to 29%.

“They have taken the voice away from African Americans in my district and that’s a clear violation of the Voting Rights Act,” Crockett said. “They are spitting on the legacy of HD 100. They went too far.”

Most of the Black population lost by Crockett will be moved to the nearby District 104 that is represented by Dallas Democrat Jessica González. Her new constituents would include residents from the historic Joppa neighborhood, a community built by freed slaves. District 104 has largely changed, González said. The district now extends to Mesquite and Garland.

While she would pick up Black population from districts represented by Crockett and Rose, González said the number of eligible voters with Hispanic surnames would drop from over 50% to about 48%. That could be a Voting Rights Act violation, analysts say.

Crockett and González were vocal participants of the quorum break by House Democrats to stall a controversial elections bill.

“I’m not too shocked that it ended up being me they targeted,” Crockett said. “I kind of wear it as a badge of honor…It is still a safe Democratic seat, but partisan gerrymandering is legal and when you slice and dice communities of interests, you end up with a problem.”

State Rep. Toni Rose, D-Dallas, would also have the Black population in her district sharply reduced, and she would lose Paul Quinn College. Rose’s district would see a drop in Black voting age population–from 34% to 26%. The Hispanic voting age population in the district would rise from 58% to 63%.

Black residents represented 25% of the growth in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Well, that answers my question about what Rep. Cason did to offend the redistricting gods. Gotta say, I was under the impression that doing what was done here to Rep. Crockett’s district was called “retrogression” and it was a no-no under the Voting Rights Act. It’s not clear to me if that slicing and dicing was done for strategic reasons or just out of spite. Wait for the lawsuits, I guess.

Here’s the Chronicle:

“The map gives Republicans a slight advantage,” said Ross Sherman of the advocacy group RepresentUs, which works with the Princeton Gerrymandering Project to grade redistricting proposals. “This seems to be a trend this cycle: another map producing safe seats and insulating politicians from their constituents.”

The Gerrymandering Project gave the proposed House map a “C” in fairness for its GOP advantages. It’s the highest grade a Texas map has received so far, after proposals for congressional and state Senate maps earned “F” grades.

[…]

Speaking in general about the maps, GOP strategist Brendan Steinhauser said the Republicans tried to “lock in the gains” they earned during the 2020 election, rather than “be too aggressive” and shift blue seats their way.

The House seats currently are divided almost equally between districts that favored Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Joe Biden in 2020. The current map includes 76 Trump-led districts and 74 Biden-led districts, but the new map shifts that support to 86 in favor of Trump and 64 in support of Biden.

Texas grew by roughly 4 million people over the past decade, a surge driven almost entirely by people of color, especially Latinos. Updating the political maps is required every 10 years, to account for such shifts.

Still, the proposed House map reduces the number of majority-minority districts by voting age population. Previously, 67 districts were majority-white; the new map proposes 72 districts that have mostly white voters.

Those numbers change dramatically when evaluating estimates for adult citizens. Using those figures, the House currently has 83 majority-white districts, compared with 89 under the new map. And while the current districts include 33 with Hispanic majorities and seven with Black majorities, those numbers would fall to 30 and four, respectively.

“These maps do nothing but preserve the status quo at the expense of Black and brown Texans,” said Anthony Gutierrez, the executive director of the good-government group Common Cause Texas.

Same observation about the reduction of majority-minority districts. I mean, I get that the Voting Rights Act may as well be written on toilet paper with this Supreme Court, but it’s still theoretically the law of the land. The Republicans may have had more challenges with the State House districts because of the law that requires districts to be entirely within counties where possible, which prevented them from putting pieces of urban counties in the same district with rural counties, which was not the case for the Congress or State Senate maps. Again, I figure the lawyers will have a lot to say about all this when the dust settles.

Speaking of Congress:

In a strongly-worded letter, U.S. Reps Sheila Jackson Lee and Al Green said they oppose the Republicans’ proposed redrawing of their districts and say they were not consulted before the map was released to the public.

The map “makes radical and unneeded changes to the two local congressional districts that include the majority of Black voters in Harris and Fort Bend counties,” the letter to the Texas Senate Redistricting committee states.

There are massive changes for Harris County in the congressional redistricting plan the Texas Senate released earlier this week. The county would still have nine members of Congress, but the district lines would be dramatically altered to improve the re-election chances of current Republicans and create a new congressional seat that appears to have been drafted to ensure another Republican would be elected to Congress.

The map would have a dramatic impact on the districts represented by Jackson Lee and Green, changing who represents 200,000 mostly Black residents.

Jackson Lee’s 18th Congressional District would not only lose the Third Ward, but also downtown Houston, the University of Houston and Texas Southern University — most of those areas would instead be shifted to the 29th Congressional District, represented by Democratic U.S. Rep. Sylvia Garcia.

And the Republican map would put Jackson Lee’s home in Riverside Terrace into Green’s 9th Congressional District, meaning she would not even be able to vote for herself unless she moved. It would also put Jackson Lee’s main district office for the 18th in Green’s district, forcing her to move it.

“No other member of the large Texas delegation is so severely impacted by the proposed map,” the letter notes, pointing out at Jackson Lee’s 18th Congressional District has roots that tie back to Barbara Jordan, who in 1972 became the first Black woman to represent Texas in Congress.

I said before that Reps. Green and Jackson Lee would easily win the new districts as drawn, but what was done to them is clearly an insult. For Sen. Huffman to claim that no one got in touch with her about the maps she was drawing is disingenuous, especially when she knows what effect those maps are going to have. You have the power, you have the responsibility. Spare me the whining.

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