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Excellent article! And so right on. The “blame Joe Voter” theme is bothersome, especially as these same folks doing the accusing give a free pass to privatization of the vote tabulation mechanism and believe a centralized computerized voter registration database (also privatized or in the control of partisan secretaries of state) will end all problems encountered on election day. It’s hogwash. The centralized database will disenfranchise more voters in the upcoming elections than lack of machines. Not only will they (private voting corporations/supporters of GOP & wealthy elitist Dems too) control the vote count, but they’ll control who gets to vote. The provisional ballot was another band-aid that failed miserably to protect voting rights.

A centralized database will provide them with an easier way to manipulate voting stats as well. As they tried to claim that 9 million “value voters” came out in support of Bush in 2004, they were hard pressed to find the stats to support the claims. Well, it’ll be much easier for them to say change party affiliation from now on, and they of course have targeted the
Hispanic vote (easily identified by last name in many cases) as they want California real bad next time around. California’s Secretary of State Kevin
Shelley helped prevent the “upset” in 2004 by removing thousands of Diebold electronic voting machines last April from the election for having
installed “uncertified software” without approval, which may have cost him his job (he resigned March 1 after coming under fire in December for supposedly
mismanaging federal election funds; he has not been charged with breaking any laws).

Received Mar. 15 in reply to CounterPunch article on “The Fix-It Guys and their Electoral Filters”. See more of Kat’s work at http://www.donotconcede.com/

Why are the Rich Districts Helping the State
Rush to Appeal the School Funding Case?

By Greg Moses

IndyMedia Austin / Houston / NorthTexas / LA / NYC
CounterPunch / ILCAonline / Global Resistance Network / Dissident Voice

The lower court ruling in the Texas school funding case needs to be modified to more strongly protect rights to equitable funding for property-poor districts, argued the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund (MALDEF) in a December motion. But on inauguration day, the property-rich districts suddenly joined forces with the state to move jurisdiction to the Texas Supreme Court. Why is MALDEF being left behind?

In late December, Texas media headlined the State Attorney General’s announcement that he would go directly to the Texas Supreme Court to overturn a trial-court order for reform in school funding. On that same day, the same media did not report on a motion filed in the trial court by MALDEF asking for an even stronger ruling.

And this week, as well-fed Texans feted their first family in Washington, the pattern of selective perception continued. On Wednesday, as the high rollers of Texas power tightened their ties and buffed their boots for a pre-inaugural orgy of schmooze, the State Attorney General repeated his request for a fast track hearing before the Texas Supreme Court. And all those things made headlines.

But with the news agenda hijacked by inaugural or anti-inaugural activities on Thursday, the property-rich districts in the school funding trial broke ranks with their poorer cousins at MALDEF and asked the Texas Supreme Court to get double busy for them, too. As this story goes to press, there is no mention of this significant event in the usual places Texans look for hot buzz.

So that makes two times in two months that the State Attorney General was crowned king of the media battle against school funding reform in Texas, getting all His Majesty’s Ink, without even a fair or balanced notice, not even in nine-point type, that something else is going on.

“I’m surprised altogether by the State and the West Orange Cove Plaintiffs efforts to circumvent the laws we have in place,” says MALDEF attorney David Hinojosa, speaking by telephone from his San Antonio office Friday evening.

While MALDEF and other allies for equity were openly cheering the original trial-court ruling that ordered the state to reform its school funding during the upcoming legislative session in Austin, a closer reading revealed that the judge had written a small puzzle.

At one point in the Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law handed down on Nov. 30, District Judge John Dietz found that the state fails to provide constitutionally guaranteed education to Texas children because “the current funding capacity of the Texas school finance system, in conjunction with the inequitable access to revenue in the system, does not provide property-poor districts with sufficient access to revenue” (FOF 294). This phrasing suggests that not only is the state funding too low to be constitutional overall, but also that the property-poor districts can’t get their hands on their constitutionally equitable share.

About 20 pages later, however, the judge says that “a structural disparity in access to revenues, that, while not reaching the level of a constitutional violation at this time, still puts property-poor districts at a financial disadvantage when compared to Chapter 41 districts [the legal definition of a property-rich district under Texas law]” (FOF 435). Which is to say, what? That “inequitable access” to funds among property-poor districts is pretty bad, but not really a constitutional concern for Texas at this time? In its Dec. 28 motion to the trial court, MALDEF asks to have this language revised.

All through this latest round of the school funding trial, property-rich districts allied with property-poor districts because both sides said out loud in court that they supported each other’s claims. The property poor districts agreed to the property-rich argument that Texas needed more money overall in absolute dollars. If this argument prevailed in court the property-rich districts would get to raise and spend more money from their gilded tax bases at home.

In return for this kind of support from the property-poor side, the property-rich districts gave lip service to the claim that inequities between rich and poor districts also deserved the court’s attention. Any court-ordered increase in overall revenues should be accompanied by enough re-distribution of wealth to keep the tax bases equitable, so said the rich-district attorneys in court.

Smells like catfish bait in August when the property-rich districts suddenly join the state’s effort to get inside the jurisdiction of the all-Republican Supreme Court, as MALDEF is trying to finish up its equity advocacy at the trial-court level. The rich districts already have the ruling they need from the trial court, don’t they? They’ve got their constitutional issue in the pocket that mandates more overall funding at higher tax rates. Why do they suddenly need to speed up the appeal?

“The issue of equitable access to revenues for maintenance and operations funding has yet to be fully rendered by the trial court, yet the property-rich districts think certain issues should be yanked up by the Supreme Court?” asks Hinojosa in a question punctuated by 500 years of exasperation.

Hinojosa wears his tired voice like a black-tie tuxedo some days, and he was formally weary in tone and cadence as he talked about the one-two punch of Wednesday-Thursday motions filed by state attorneys and rich districts who are suddenly rushing into each other at the Supreme Court door.

It’s plain as day to us lowly observers of Texas politics that a deal has been cut to enrich the richies and cut the poor folks out at the final buzzer. It’s the only theory that makes sense. Only thing at this point for us know-nothings is to ask: is it a done deal yet? When everybody gets back from the parties in Washington, we’ll see. But you won’t get the headline from the usual media publishers, so please stay tuned.

Meanwhile the solidarity chant of the moment seems pretty clear to me: finish the trial court business you black-boot Texas lawyers, before you go the appeal.

Notes:

(1) motions filed by the Texas Attorney General and the West Orange Cove Plaintiffs are available in pdf format at the Downloads section of the Texas Civil Rights Review: http://texascivilrightsreview.org/phpnuke
<br
(2) the above article was modified on Jan. 23 to add a top paragraph and a revised title to earlier releases.

National Edition of ‘Why Andy Taylor Should Have His Law License Revoked’, posted at ILCAOnline

By Greg Moses
Editor, Texas Civil Rights Review

Texas attorney Andy Taylor set out to prove that illegal and fraudulent voter behaviors were the main reasons behind the November election defeat of a Republican incumbent in a West Houston race for the Texas House. But according to archives of original documents that Taylor submitted in support of his case, it appears that he willfully ignored plain evidence that a number of voters were more likely victims, not perpetrators of wrongdoing. He went after them anyway.

Several voters of Nigerian descent discovered when they tried to vote in the November elections, that they had been fraudulently re-registered into a neighboring House District. Sometime in late 2003, someone had submitted new registrations for these voters, placing them into a legislative district that would soon involve a candidate of Nigerian descent. The candidate lost to an incumbent in the Democratic primary election.

During public hearings in the election contest that he brought to the legislature on behalf of his client Talmadge Heflin, Taylor argued that these African-American voters who preferred Democrat Hubert Vo should have their votes tossed out because they were cast in a legislative district other than where the voters were registered.

Yet, anyone with access to the original documents in the Heflin-Vo election contest (including Taylor himself, who submitted the docs in the first place) would have been able to plainly read the explanation that “fraudulent addresses” for voters of Nigerian descent had been allegedly submitted by someone other than the voters. In fact, the assertion was twice stated in carefully written explanations on envelopes for provisional ballots submitted by a husband-wife pair of voters.

The provisional ballots were approved by Harris County election officials who accepted that the voters should be considered as properly registered. And legislative Master of Discovery Will Hartnett (R-Dallas) also ruled the ballots to be legal. Hartnett explained in the election hearing that he had taken the time to call up one of the voters and discuss the predicament.

While it appeared to someone viewing the hearing that Hartnett was being exceedingly perceptive in his discovery of a pattern of fraud against the voters, in fact he was just reading what was plainly written, not once but twice, on the evidence submitted by Taylor. This plainly stated explanation, which was accepted by Harris County officials and Hartnett, never stopped Taylor from trying to suppress the votes of these African-American voters nevertheless, along with their votes for Vo.

The significance of this finding is that Taylor (the same attorney who defended the heavy-handed redistricting of the Texas Congressional map in 2004) continued to pursue allegations in a public hearing that a number of Nigerian-American voters (4-9 cases according to my preliminary estimate) had cast illegal ballots, even as he placed exculpatory evidence on the record that plainly indicated they were victims not perpetrators of fraud.

By pursuing his allegations against these voters in the context of a rare legislative election contest, Taylor used his law license to call down the power of the state to pursue certain voters under threat of arrest, when he had every reason to suspect they were innocent from the start. If the law is going to jealously guard Taylor’s right to pursue election irregularities, should it not just as jealously guard the rights of voters against willful and obnoxious harassment by agents of the law?

Taylor’s bad faith attack on these African-American voters counts as a Civil Rights infringement in two ways. First, it was an effort to criminalize voters of color by deliberately overlooking exculpatory evidence on the record. Second, it counts as a bad faith effort to overturn the election of a candidate of color. Using the power of law to harass voters of African descent in an effort to unseat a candidate of Vietnamese descent, accusing all parties of fraud when your own evidence indicates they have done nothing wrong, this is offensive, outrageous, indecent, and should cost Andy Taylor his license to practice law in Texas.

Note: The Texas Civil Rights Review contacted Andy Taylor via voice mail on Thursday afternoon and invited him to reply. As of Saturday morning, he had not responded.

Got an email tip about Indiana. Democrats staged a walkout there, too, and the Secretary of State spreads more baseless suspicions (Read More).

Google found this March 3, 2005 legislative report from Indiana Rep. Bob Kuzman (D-Crown Point):

House Bill 1439 also sounds deceptively simple. It requires voters to provide a photo ID before being allowed to vote on Election Day. In reality, this proposal is designed to intimidate voters, particularly senior citizens, minorities and people on
lower incomes.

With the type of voter identification system contained in House Bill 1439 in place, I believe that Election Days in Indiana will be similar to what people in Ohio had to endure last November: waiting for hours to cast a vote. In Iraq, a person simply had to put his or her finger in a bowl of ink in order to vote. Do we really think that we should place more
restrictions on voters than they do in Iraq?

I supported an effort that would have enabled voters to offer other pieces of identification – such as utility bills, vehicle registration or Social Security cards – in order to vote. Those efforts were defeated.

Jim Shella of WISH-TV (Indanapolis) reports on March 10, 2005:

Republicans in the Indiana House of Representatives have now revived both of the bills that led to last week’s walkout by Democrats, causing one Democrat to walk out of a committee hearing Thursday.

That walk-out took place in a hearing on the bill that would require voters to show a photo ID. One Democrat objected to both the bill and way the committee meeting was being conducted.

The hearing on the voter ID bill had to be moved to the House chamber when 200 members of the United Auto Workers union showed up to protest. They believe the bill is designed to discourage elderly and low-income voters who may not have a driver’s license.

“If it’s gonna be a law that affects everybody it has to be fair for everybody,” said Connie Thurman, UAW.

Supporters insist the measure is designed to reduce voter fraud. Currently, registered voters are only required to sign in.

Secretary of State Todd Rokita says it’s possible to sign in more than once and therefore vote illegally even though he couldn’t cite a case where it has been done. “Why should we wait to become a problem state? Clearly Washington was, clearly Florida was, clearly New Mexico was… to address the situation,” he said.

“I think it’s just a ploy to erode voter confidence and erode the number of people who take part in the process. It amounts to a poll tax,” said Rep. Mae Dickinson (D-Indianapolis).

When it appeared the committee was about to take a vote, Democrat Craig Fry of Mishawaka objected. “A driver’s license is a privilege and voting is a constitutional right. You can’t do this,” he said.

Fry left and no vote was taken. The committee is now scheduled to vote on the voter ID bill next week.