Houston, There Isn't A Problem....

The Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector’s Office settled a lawsuit this week with officials of the Texas Democratic Party after Democratic city attorneys stepped in to essentially reject the TDP’s allegations.

The lawsuit alleged that the GOP-controlled office unfairly rejected tens of thousands of voter registration applications, which the settlement showed was in fact, not the case.

In the settlement, representatives of the Tax Assessor-Collector’s Office admitted no wrongdoing, and fundamentally changed nothing about its operations. Nonetheless, the TDP claimed a victory, and the Houston Chronicle today praised the non-decision in an editorial.

“The whole point of this is that none of this needed a lawsuit to resolve,” Tax Assessor-Collector Leo Vasquez told TRN. “All this [settlement] amounts to is confirming what we were doing, and to spin it as anything else is ludicrous.”

The Chronicle notes several “changes” to tax office procedures, such as notification of voters whose applications were rejected within seven days. That deadline, Vasquez notes, is already in state law, and the Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector’s Office already complies with it. Similar “changes” are in fact confirmations of existing policy.

Vasquez notes that the office was defended by Harris County Attorney Vince Ryan and that negotiations to settle the suit were led – on Vasquez’ behalf, by special counsel John Odam, himself a former Harris County Democratic Party Chairman.

“If they had seen a problem in what we were doing, I can’t believe that they would have represented us like they did,” Vasquez said.

Legitimate or Frivolous?

The suit alleged that the office – with multiple ties to the GOP – was summarily rejecting applications of Democratic voters. Texas, however, does not register voters by party, and applications do not indicate the preference of the person applying. The only way for the office to do what was alleged would be to find some proxy for Democratic affiliation – voting precinct or Hispanic Surname. None of this was even alleged to have taken place.

Instead, the Texas Democratic Party’s lawsuit focused on smoke – 67,000 applications rejected – and insisted that there was fire to back it up, and when the sides sat down, it turned out there was nothing to it.

The actual number of voter registration applications rejected in this period was 67,554, of which almost all were found to be incomplete – and thus the office had no discretion in the matter – the applications had to be rejected, according to state law.

Of that number, only 3,518 applicants were ruled ineligible – a percentage almost identical to the number rejected in Texas’ next-largest county, Dallas.

Of the remaining applications, over 80 percent were rejected because applicants failed to include a verifiable identification number (such as a drivers’ license or Social Security Number), did not include a date of birth, did not confirm U.S. citizenship, or used an improper address. Many applications simply were not signed, and even if the office had wanted to accept these applications, they were not allowed under state law to do so.

“Their whole point is that we were too strict in following the law,” Vasquez said. “But if they don’t want us to do that, we need them to tell us which parts of the law should be followed or not.”

Not a single improper rejection

In the 2009 legislative session, Democrats beat back a proposal for a Voter ID with the mantra that it wasn’t needed because not a single case of voter impersonation could be produced by Republicans supporting the measure.

By that standard alone, the TDP’s case failed. Not a single registration was rejected by the Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector’s Office improperly, and no evidence was shown that anyone was denied the right to vote.

The Texas Democratic Party’s attorney in the past has also sued the Texas Secretary of State and the Dallas Elections Commission for similar reasons, and those cases, similarly were tossed out.

The lawsuit, then, accomplished nothing but to deliver a public relations black eye to the office, which, given that history, looks strongly like the aim of the case in the first place. A compliant media led by the Houston Chronicle, however, never looked skeptically into the motives of the lawsuit, but instead focused its investigative efforts on the tax office.

They zeroed in on office employee Ed Johnson, an assistant voter registrar who also ran a side business selling voter data to Republican campaigns. But even what they alleged was not in fact illegal. Johnson – who has since left the office – was not using any insider information, nor was there a conflict of information in running a moonlighting business. Many voter registrars around the country, for example, also work for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) on the side.

The Houston Chronicle also failed to disclose that the paper itself buys and sells the exact same database that Johnson bought and sold. Over two months ago, Texas Republic News asked a Houston Chronicle reader ombudsman to comment on this conflict of interest, and a comment was never received. 

To the extent that the whole episode may have been orchestrated to establish a presumption of guilt in the public mind, presumably to aid in future election contests, this potential end was clearly abetted by the Chronicle’s misrepresentation of the outcome of the case. 

There quite simply isn’t any “there” there. The case didn’t even accomplish the legal task of “discovery of evidence” because all the data that the TDP sued over was, in fact, public record, and could simply have been obtained through an open records request, not required a lawsuit.

But Texas Democratic Party spokesman Boyd Ritchie claimed credit for a victory.

“It’s a shame that the Texas Democratic Party has been forced to go to court time and again to do what our state and local officials should be doing – protect the right to vote,” he said. Then, quoting a man who won election to the U.S. Senate in 1948 in one of the most notorious cases of voter fraud in American History, Ritchie added, “As a great Texas Democrat, President Lyndon B. Johnson said in 1965: ‘It is wrong–deadly wrong–to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country.’”

Vasquez said that his agency will work with anybody in Harris County – regardless of party affiliation – who wants to register more eligible voters in the state’s largest county.