Don’t know how we missed this the first time around. But this morning I was clicking through link referrals to the Texas Civil Rights Review and found (via dogpile) this Irwin Tang profile of Hubert Vo at AsianWeek.Com.
Hubert Vo: Universal Immigrant (Jan. 14, 2005)
By Greg Moses
IndyMedia Houston / Austin / North Texas / NYC / LA
Texas Aggies love to say
that Highway Six runs both ways. At Beechnut St. in Houston, Highway Six runs into the rest of the
world.
Of 6,000 people living in the neighborhood at the Southeast corner of Highway
Six and Beechnut, 47 percent were born outside the USA. About half of them have become citizens,
according to the US Census Bureau (Census 2000, Tract 4539).
“Hubert Vo does represent
District 149,” says Rogene Gee Calvert, speaking by cell phone about the newly elected state
representative for the district that includes Highway Six between Interstate 10 and Beechnut. “It is a
district with many first generation immigrants like Hubert, and they feel like he understands their
issues.”
Calvert is president of the Houston 80-20 Asian American Political Action
Committee. During the campaign season, 80-20 endorsed Vo, knocked on doors for him, placed ads in
Asian media, and sent out campaign literature in five Asian languages. Now, with Vo’s slim electoral
victory being challenged in the Texas Legislature, Calvert is organizing to keep Vo in
office.
“We do not want to see his victory stolen away,” says Calvert. On Vo’s behalf,
Calvert is helping with a petition drive that aims to collect 10,000 signatures, and she is organizing
a delegation of Vo supporters that will appear in his behalf at the Legislature’s inauguration day,
Jan. 11.
According to sources close to Vo, the newly-elected rep is spending his days
with the people who elected him, listening again before he begins working in Austin.
“He
has an apartment in Austin, but he has his hands full back in the district,” reports our source. “His
schedule is as tight as it was in the campaign.” On Tuesday Vo attended a holiday party with the Alief
Super Neighborhood Council, a civic group that he belonged to before he decided to run.
“Oh, yes, I have seen him several times this month at different functions,” says 80-20 communications
chair Steven Pei. “He’s doing his homework.”
“It’s also important to stress that
Hubert has grassroots support from other communities as well,” says Pei. “Hubert has support among
Africans, African Americans, Hispanics, and Anglos.”
“We felt that Hubert represented
the community best,” says Calvert as she explains an endorsement process which requires a two-thirds
majority from 80-20 participants. “He has been successful in his own life, and he was running a
successful campaign. We took those to be good indications that he would also be a successful voice for
us in the legislature.”
80-20, explains Calvert, gets its name from a concept that
assumes any group of people will have 20 percent of its population loyal to one side of the political
spectrum and another 20 percent loyal to the other side. The challenge then becomes one of moving the
middle 60 percent to one side or the other to create an 80-20 bloc. In some races, 80-20 moves the
middle toward Republicans, in other races, like Vo’s, the middle moves toward a
Democrat.
In the legislature, Calvert and Pei want Vo’s help in passing a bill that would
give definition and funding to a Southwest Chinatown area East of Vo’s district. You can see a
colorful map of the area at, where else, chinatownmap.com (see link below).
“We want to
promote the area as a major tourist attraction,” says Calvert. But the area needs work first,
especially with lighting, police protection, and other infrastructure.
“Safety of the
community is the number one issue that keeps coming up at our meetings,” says Pei. “People want more
security in their neighborhoods.”
Meanwhile a source close to the Vo camp says that the
election challenge is “just chugging along” as the parties inspect about 200 names of voters that
Republicans allege cast illegal ballots.
“We have to see if their ballots were actually
illegal and who they voted for,” reports the source.
But it seems that a larger wisdom
should prevail when the challenge hits the chambers of the legislature. Does Texas want to understand
and develop the issues that work best for immigrants like Vo, create a Southwest Chinatown, and extend
Highway Six as a global highway that runs both ways? I don’t see why not.
Why not go
for Vo? It’s a simple thing to say, and a smart thing to do for Texas.
NOTE: 80-20
President Rogene Gee Calvert can be reached by cell phone at 832-723-4508.
See the map
of Southwest Chinatown
Selected as Lead Story for Harvey Kronberg’s Quorum Report, Feb. 1, 2005
So Many Eyes of Texas Watching, So Little Seen
By Greg Moses
CounterPunch / GlobalResistanceNetwork / ILCAonline
In live internet broadcasts last week, a Master of Discovery appointed by the Texas Legislature to investigate allegations of a stolen election in West Houston indeed found some ‘fact patterns’ that looked scandalous, but you can’t tell it by reading any press reports. The hearing was supposed to look for evidence of voter fraud committed by Democratic voters. Instead, every time one of these curious patterns emerged, it was a hint of possible fraud not by Democratic voters, but against them.
On Thursday for example, Master of Discovery Will Harnett (R-Dallas), a cum laude graduate from Harvard, noticed that several voter registrations in the West Houston area looked strangely alike. They were all dated late 2003, presented accurate mailing addresses, yet re-registered voters to addresses where they did not live. In effect, the series of fraudulent registrations ‘deported’ African American voters out of Texas House District 149 and therefore made the voters appear illegal when they attempted to vote in their usual precincts.
So when the defeated Republican incumbent in the District 149 race went looking for evidence of ‘massive voter fraud’ that would explain his embarrassing loss to a Vietnamese immigrant, he snared the names of these ‘illegal’ voters and brought them to the state capitol accusing them on live broadcast of voting where they did not live. Instead of proving these voters had cast illegal ballots, however, the Republican team of lawyers actually produced evidence of another kind.
Thanks to the careful eye that Hartnett cast upon the evidence, it appeared that someone was moving voters without their knowledge. Hartnett suggested the cards might be forwarded to the Harris County District Attorney. In press reports Friday, Saturday, and Sunday I have not been able to locate a sentence, much less a headline about Hartnett’s discovery of this criminal pattern.
On Friday Hartnett noticed another curious thing. As he examined original questionnaires that were supposed to be filled out by alleged illegal voters and notarized as depositions, he found two kinds of ink used to fill out the answers and two kinds of handwriting. Larry Veselka, the Yale-educated lawyer who represents the elected Democrat in the race, Hubert Vo, then noticed that handwritten ‘no’ and ‘NA’ answers on at least two questionnaires looked to be written in the same hand.
Again, nobody reported this alleged ‘tampering with evidence,’ especially not the state capitol press corps, who let this open-air revelation pass without even quoting the words that were mentioned in the broadcast. However, since the proceeding took place under the jurisdiction of Austin prosecutor Ronnie Earle, maybe reporters are simply waiting to quote him on the matter of ‘assisted depositions.’ Or maybe I’m trying too hard to find a sensible motivation for media behaviors.
Finally, Hartnett was caught grinning at the flexibility he found at the official website of the Harris County voter registrar, which changed its listing of more than one voter from legal to illegal sometime during early January, following consultations with Republican lawyers. Hartnett seemed perversely amused when lawyers for the defense showed him a web page confirming a voter registration, dated early January, as Republican lawyers submitted more recent web pages showing the voter was not registered. Sometimes this duel of conflicting web pages seemed enough for Hartnett to say that he just couldn’t be sure if the voter was illegal or not.
At one point Republican lawyer Andy Taylor openly admitted that when he was not satisfied with a listing he found at the web site, he contacted the registrar’s office, presented his own findings, and got voters kicked off the rolls so that he could submit revised web pages as evidence. That wasn’t mentioned in the press, either.
In the end, it appears that the Republican challenge not only failed to prove ‘widespread fraud’ among Democrat voters of West Houston, but actually served up a fine public record of practices by Republicans and unknown others that would suppress their rights.
But you had to be watching the hearings in their 19-hour entirety to know any of the above, because according to inscrutable laws of Texas journalistic selection, nothing of this sort has yet been counted as news. How could so many eyes of Texas be upon the hearing, and yet so little be seen? If this is the kind of reporting we get about publicly broadcast events, what kind of independent reporting can we expect during this legislative season session about anything happening off camera?
The Electionline Briefing of Dec. 2004 strikes a tone favorable to statewide registration as it reports that, “Statewide registration databases were used in 16 states
and the District of Columbia, making for a smoother election process by reducing the number of double registrants and better tracking voter movement between jurisdictions.” As we will see below, however, in Georgia “better tracking” may be the best explanation for why the state tossed out 70 percent of provisional ballots cast.
According to the electionline database the 16 states with statewide registration are: Alaska (1985); Arizona (2004); Connecticut (2005); Delaware (1990); Georgia; Hawaii; Kentucky (1973); Louisiana (1987); Massachusetts (1993); Michigan (1998); Minnesota; New Mexico; Oklahoma; South Carolina (35 years); South Dakota; and West Virginia.
Pennsylvania reports that 56 of 67 counties are covered so far.
Georgia offers an interesting example how the use of a statewide database may make it more difficult to get your vote counted. In Georgia, 70 percent of the state’s nearly 13,000 provisional ballots were tossed out. And electionline speculated that one reason for the high rate of rejection might be the use of a statewide database to more easily identify out-of-place voters (p. 5). The possibility that Georgia’s database resulted in more effective post-election “discipline” is just the kind of thing that worries us.
We would rather see a statewide database used to explain higher rates of participation and success in having votes counted. It is what we call the frontend-backend test of registration technology. Did the statewide database enable voters to more easily vote or did it enable state officials to more easily discount votes after they were cast?
MoPress 