Press release from Sen. Paul Bettencourt:
Texas SOS issues first election law opinion in five years due to mistakes by Harris County Voter Registrar Comes on the heels of Voter Registrar Ann Harris Bennett disenfranchising 250+ voters in Baytown
HOUSTON – Senator Paul Bettencourt (R-Houston) today presented an Opinion by the Texas Secretary of State, the first one released in five years, and sent a letter calling on the Harris County Registrar to follow the law as outlined by the highest election official in the state. The Opinion is regarding a voter challenge by Senate District 7 resident Alan Vera and the procedural mistakes made by Harris County Voter Registrar Ann Harris Bennett (D-Houston) and Harris County Attorney Vince Ryan’s (D-Houston) office. Mr. Vera’s challenge showed multiple examples of voter registrations at post office boxes, or commercial property addresses, which opens up the voter roll to fraud with people registered and voting in areas in which they do not live.
“The integrity of the voter roll is paramount to the entire electoral process,” said Senator Bettencourt. “My constituent, Mr. Vera, asked me to request this opinion and I agreed because the law is clear and his voter challenge should not have been thrown out.”
The challenge covered over 4,000 voter registrations as not meeting the residency requirements as stated in Section 1.015 of the Texas Election Code. Following the filing of the challenge, Harris County Voter Registrar, Ann Harris Bennett, erroneously put over 1,000 voters on the suspense list, creating serious confusion before the August Harris County Bond Election. The County Attorney’s Office advised the challenge was not valid as it lacked “personal knowledge” that the registrations were inaccurate and ended the challenge.
“The voter registration residency challenge that I filed should have activated a very simple, administrative process within the registrar’s system as clearly laid out in the Texas Election Code,” said Alan Vera. “Instead, the process spelled out in the law was mishandled by the voter registrar and was further bungled by the Harris County Attorney. That is why I went to my State Senator to ask for help.”
The opinion from the Texas Secretary of State stated that “personal knowledge” could include “…knowing from experience and observation that those (voter registration) addresses are commercial properties or other properties that are not generally residences…” Given the opinion from the Secretary of State, Mr. Vera’s challenge does meet the requirement of “personal knowledge” as required by the election code.
“Having people registered in bulk where they do not live opens up the opportunity for a candidate or party to pack a targeted district,” added Harris County Clerk Stan Stanart. “The voter roll should represent where people actually live.”
Most recently, as reported by Houston area media, 250+ residents in the City of Baytown could be given the wrong ballots in the November election as Ms. Bennett failed to update boundary lines to include recently annexed areas. Additionally, unanswered questions continue to remain about her court fight, spending taxpayer money, regarding her refusal to remove non-citizens from the voter roll. (https://bit.ly/2BC0wQI). “Public confidence in the voter roll can only be restored by Voter Registrar Bennett properly following the law,” concluded Senator Bettencourt.
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Coincidentally:
Undocumented immigrant voted in Bexar County for more than 20 years
An undocumented Mexican immigrant who lived for years in a rural San Antonio suburb pleaded guilty Thursday to charges of fraud and identity theft, admitting he used a stolen identity to vote in several elections.
Enrique Salazar Ortiz, 63, would not tell federal agents how many times he had voted using the name of former San Antonio resident Jesse H. Vargas Jr., but Salazar did admit casting a ballot in the 2016 general election, according to the plea agreement.
But Bexar County records show a man with Vargas’ name and date of birth voted in every general election for the past 24 years, county elections administrator Jacque Callanen said Thursday.
“He’s been voting since at least 1994,” Callanen said. “Vargas” also voted in the 2008 Democratic primary, she said.
And again:
Former Democratic Party leader paid women in alleged Tarrant voter fraud ring, AG says
A Fort Worth woman recently indicted on voter fraud charges paid others involved in the scheme with funds provided by a former Tarrant County Democratic Party leader, court documents filed this week say.
After learning about a state investigation, Leticia Sanchez — one of four women arrested and indicted on voter fraud charges — allegedly directed her daughter to send a text message to others in the scheme, urging them not to cooperate with investigators, state officials say.
The allegations are made in the state’s notice of intent to introduce evidence in Sanchez’s criminal case, where state officials say she was among those who collaborated to vote for certain down-ballot candidates with a number of north side residents’ mail-in ballots.
The notice, filed Tuesday, states that Sanchez engaged in organized criminal activity in collaboration with her three co-defendants; Stuart Clegg, a former executive director for the Tarrant County Democratic Party; and others.
And another:
Texas Dems ask noncitizens to register to vote, send applications with citizenship box pre-checked
The Texas Democratic Party asked non-citizens to register to vote, sending out applications to immigrants with the box citizenship already checked “Yes,” according to new complaints filed Thursday asking prosecutors to see what laws may have been broken.
The Public Interest Legal Foundation alerted district attorneys and the federal Justice Department to the pre-checked applications, and also included a signed affidavit from a man who said some of his relatives, who aren’t citizens, received the mailing.
“This is how the Texas Democratic Party is inviting foreign influence in an election in a federal election cycle,” said Logan Churchwell, spokesman for the PILF, a group that’s made its mark policing states’ voter registration practices.
The Texas secretary of state’s office said it, too, had gotten complaints both from immigrants and from relatives of dead people who said they got mailings asking them to register.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott vowed to investigate.
“If true there will be serious consequences,” he said.
(click here to read on washingtontimes.com – interestingly, it appears that no major media outlet in Texas covered this)
Nothing to see here, move on. Voter fraud doesn’t exist. At least that is what Democrats say.
Tom says
David: Of the 4,000 challenged voter registration applications you mentioned, the Republican tax assessor (who registers voters) said 1,700 were mistakenly placed in suspension because of the Republican Party’s complaint and they were cleared up within a few days. Even if all 4,000 should have been disqualified, that is a tiny percentage of the 2.3 million voters in Harris County.
Voter registration in Harris County has been under Republican tax assessors for years, including Sen. Bettencourt who, you will recall, resigned as tax assessor some years ago only a short time after being re-elected to a new four-year term so he could go into the business of representing taxpayers challenging property valuations.
Oh, yeah, the reason the tax assessor is the voter registrar is because the tax collector was the person who collected the poll tax before that was outlawed.
The Fort Worth case you cite involved mail-in ballots, not fraudulent registration, according to the Star-Telegram story you linked to. We’ve had that same problem in Harris County but the cases were not prosecuted. And, Harris County had Republican district attorneys from 1979 until 2017. This is the first general election we’ve had a Democratic DA since 1978, when Carol Vance was DA.
Should those mail in ballot cases in Harris County have been prosecuted. Damn right. But they weren’t even after stories appeared about the scheme in the Chronicle. Why weren’t they prosecuted? Ask Johnny Holmes.
There always will be some people who register who aren’t eligible. But, the problem of voter registration works both ways. In 2000, the Florida secretary of state had a private company compare voter registration records with prison records and disqualified tens of thousands of voters whose names on the voter rolls were similar to ex-convicts.
Yes, the voter rolls should be carefully vetted. Only eligible persons should be allowed to vote. That’s a given. And in this day of computers we can do things like compare voter registration lists with death certificates to purge dead folks from the voter rolls. But this isn’t 1948, when LBJ supposedly stole the Democratic senatorial nomination by 87 votes due to fraud in a single precinct, the infamous Box 13.
I have no doubt that the 1960 presidential election was stolen by voter fraud in Texas and Illinois. But that was almost 60 years ago. Since then, there have been few cases of vote fraud filed in this country and every study shows that voter fraud is a very tiny percentage of those who vote.
We ought to be spending our energy trying to getting eligible voters to register and getting them to the polls.
David Jennings says
Tom, there’s always that one guy that doesn’t pay attention in class. The current Tax Assesor Collector is Ann Harris Bennett, an incompetent Democrat. Apply that new knowledge to the rest of your comment. And pay attention in class!
DJ
David Jennings says
Also, that stolen election was LBJ’s Senate election.
https://www.nytimes.com/1990/02/11/us/how-johnson-won-election-he-d-lost.html
You better watch out, the nun is going to rap your knuckles if you don’t start paying attention!
Tom says
Box 13 wasn’t stolen. All 120+ of those voters lined up in alphabetical order and signed the voter roll in John Connally’s handwriting. And, yes, Nixon probably won in 1960 but in his most presidential moment he decided not to contest because it would harm the country.
Whatever else you think of Nixon, he deserves great credit for that decision. He put country first.
David Jennings says
LOL. No acknowledgement of not paying attention in class, just deflection. Thanks for reading.