Dateline Houston

Dateline Houston is confused.

Texas Republicans are passionately concerned about so-called voter integrity. Ensuring this integrity has spurred legislation, court battles, and private citizens’ groups taking up only-probably-metaphorical arms against hordes of evildoers who might somehow steal elections from conservatives in a place that hasn’t elected a Democrat to statewide office since 1994.

So why wouldn’t the state welcome even more integrity-minded poll monitors?

“We just wouldn’t, okay?” Dateline Houston imagines Attorney General Greg Abbott snapping before returning his attention to a hand mirror onto which he’d pasted a picture of Anderson Cooper.

Until very recently, Republicans were the only ones mobilizing against alleged electoral shenanigans. In the interest of preventing a dubiously documented and apparently deeply ineffective rash of election fraud, Texas Republicans wrote and passed the voter ID law that only coincidentally disenfranchises traditionally Democratic groups, and which Attorney General Greg Abbott has failed to prove in court is not racist. The Republican-controlled Legislature also changed how counties identify voters who may have died, which led—again only coincidentally—to the potential deletion of many living voters who, statistically, were more likely to have been Democrats. A lawsuit is underway.

And then there’s True the Vote. TTV is a poll-watching project of the King Street Patriots, a supposedly nonpartisan Houston group spawned during the tea party orgy of 2009. In the 2010 elections, True the Vote trained and dispatched about 1000 volunteers to mostly minority neighborhoods to hunt voting irregularities and stare down would-be defrauders. As the Observer’s Patrick Michels reported, “[they] combined to send 800 complaints of improper voting to Harris County officials, who investigated a few but ended up taking no legal action. …While it generated little evidence of voter fraud, the King Street Patriots’ effort did result in complaints about voter intimidation and breached ethics, a lawsuit from the Texas Democratic Party, and an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice.”

To review: the party that hasn’t lost a statewide election in 18 years finds itself so besieged by election-stealing leftist lawbreakers that they have dedicated serious time and money at every level of their organization to curb it.

Of course, when anybody questions this—particularly if the sentence starts, “But, statistically…”—these patriots clutch their life-sized plush bald eagles and fall to the floor, shuddering with apoplexy, whispering, “freedom…”

The most recent freak-out was when a United Nations-affiliated group of election monitors announced it would send a total of 44 observers to the entire United States to watch for voter suppression, just as they have for years, at the invitation of the United States, and do all over the world.

In Texas, the fertilizer totally hit the ventilation system.

Attorney General Greg Abbott bewailed the UN invasion most concisely in a tweet: “UN poll watchers can’t interfere w/ Texas elections. I’ll bring criminal charges if needed. Official letter posted soon. #comeandtakeit”. On Wednesday, he explained to Reuters, “They act like they may not be subject to Texas law and our goal all along is to make clear to them that while they’re in Texas, they’re subject to Texas law, and we’re not giving them an exemption.”

In response, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) pinky-swore not to buy beer before noon on Sunday.

Then Abbott admitted that, actually, he was afraid the OSCE could do exactly what True the Vote, by many accounts, does. “Our concern is that this isn’t some benign observation but something intended to be far more prying and maybe even an attempt to suppress voter integrity,” he told Reuters.

Maryland Democrat Elijah Cummings, a ranking member of the U.S. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, says True the Vote does just that. On October 18, Politico reported that Cummings had sent two letters to True the Vote asking for documents and citing reports that there “is mounting evidence that True the Vote’s aggressive poll monitoring tactics are being closely coordinated with the Republican Party” and has, in the words of one report, “a highly partisan and political agenda to deny African Americans and Latinos, specifically, the right to vote.”

With so much hand-wringing about poll-watching, one wonders what they’re all watching for. How do you spot fraudulent voters? What do they look like?

Well, in a very recent local case, the fraudster looks like a Republican precinct chairman who was running for a seat on the Fort Bend County Commissioner’s Court. Records show that Bruce Fleming voted both in person in Sugar Land and by mail in Pennsylvania—an actual swing state where a single fraudulent vote really could make an actual difference—in 2006, 2008, and 2010.

Catherine Englebrecht, founder and president of True the Vote, lives in Fleming’s Precinct 1. She and TTV were not responsible for uncovering Fleming’s alleged fraud.

For the November elections, True the Vote has long maintained it wants to send two million eyeballs to the polls. Considering that they seem to be many hundred thousands short of their goal, you’d think they’d want all the help they can get.

 

Dateline Houston cannot adequately communicate how vivid and disturbing the Houston Press’s new cover story profiling Lloyd Oliver is. You’ll just have to read it. Oliver, of course, is the guy who spent $325 in the Democratic primary for Harris County District Attorney campaigning against a highly qualified favorite—and won by 3000 votes. A lawyer with a checkered past, Oliver has run unsuccessfully for several offices, often as a Republican, because he says it drums up business for his law practice. Harris County Democrats tried to boot Oliver from the ticket for saying he would have voted for the incumbent DA, a Republican who lost in the primary, but Oliver took the issue to court and prevailed.

Because Oliver is a, how you say, local character, mirth ensued. Briefly.

Then, September 28, Oliver appeared on the Houston PBS political forum “Red, White and Blue” and was asked to clarify a remark he made publicly in March, that domestic violence victims should “maybe learn how to box a little better.” Confronted with his own words, Oliver didn’t backtrack. “There are some people,” he explained, “[and] I don’t understand it, but part of their making love is beat up one another first.”

Dateline Houston doesn’t think Oliver understood A Streetcar Named Desire.

Oliver went on to say that domestic violence cases should be prosecuted less often, so that taxpayer money and jail space can be reserved for “baby rapers” and the like.

It shouldn’t require explanation that domestic violence, and the prehistoric attitude that abuse is a private problem that doesn’t require or deserve public resources, is abhorrent. But by the by, October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, and according to Harris County Domestic Violence Coordinating Council, Harris County sees more victims killed by abuse than any other county in the state.

Really, Oliver’s stand on this issue but scratches the surface of the political melanoma that is his candidacy. Here’s a tiny sample more from the Press feature:

“[Oliver] compliments women frequently on whatever ‘fine aroma’ they may be wearing. He characterizes certain teenage girls as ‘sticking out every which way you can imagine.’ … He is wary of Seattle because of all the ‘queers holding hands’ and the ‘rag heads.’ He loves soup. And his opinion of the local Democratic leadership? ‘Frustrated homosexuals.’”

Practically everyone who’s paying attention is worried that Oliver could win if enough people vote straight-ticket Democrat, which is perhaps likelier in this presidential election year. Oliver’s opponent, Republican Mike Anderson, “said an Oliver victory could spark a mass exodus of as many as 100 of the 240 prosecutors in the District Attorney’s Office,” according to the Houston Chronicle.

Dateline Houston hopes to learn, and soon, that Oliver’s whole candidacy and persona are part of a Borat-like farce intended to illustrate the dangers of an uninformed, partisan electorate. But if that turns out not to be the case, this show is definitely not funny anymore.

 

 

When Dateline Houston reported on Harris County’s deeply flawed “dead” voter purge, in which the county—under state instruction and then duress—risked disenfranchising thousands of legitimate voters in the interest of election integrity, the Houston Chronicle had already pointed out that a disproportionate number of those affected were minorities. At the time, Dateline Houston wasn’t aware of anyone coming out and saying the purge was motivated by racial or partisan bias. Well, now someone has.

First, the quick-and-dirty history. (Long snarky version here.) The state regularly uses various data to determine if a voter has died and should have her registration canceled. Last session, the Texas Legislature passed a bill that dramatically expanded (and, it seems, polluted) that list. About 77,000 Texans got letters in the mail asking if they were dead, and saying their voter registration would be canceled if they didn’t write back. Harris County residents got 9,000 of those letters. When Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector Don Sumners heard immediate complaints from living voters, he said no one here would be purged until after the election and more investigation. To coerce Harris County into compliance, the state froze the county’s voter registration funding. Four not-dead-yet voters sued, and the whole affair was dropped until after the election.

To Dateline Houston, it seemed Sumners was defending all voters by stopping the operation as soon as it proved defective. But not to LULAC.

The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) joined seven voters Thursday in filing a federal lawsuit against Harris County and Sumners, alleging that he “targets the Latino and black communities in his voter purging by ZIP code,” said Attorney Luis Roberto Vera, Jr., LULAC’s general counsel, to the Houston Chronicle.

That makes LULAC’s accusation sound like a straightforward, moustache-twisting deletion of Garcias. Actually, what the suit alleges are a few piecemeal forms of discrimination only loosely tied to the recent voter purge, plus the overarching observation that the voter application rejection rate from 2009 to 2012 was higher for Latinos and black voters than for Anglos, and higher in majority Latino and black neighborhoods than majority Anglo neighborhoods.

The suit alleges this effect is deliberate, “undertaken with a racially discriminatory intent to deny or abridge the right to vote of African-American [and]…Latino persons.”

LULAC alleges that Sumners is denying voter applications because the voter’s residential address might be a commercial address, despite a 2009 settlement with the Texas Democratic Party where Harris County specifically promised that they wouldn’t do that. Sumners also allegedly rejected hundreds of applications for failing to include “all the required information,” despite the fact that the 2009 settlement included a fairly short list of basic information that had to be “legibly [provided]” for registration. LULAC also says that “all the required information” is too vague a grounds for rejection, and that Sumners’ decision not to send his staff to collect the voter registrations from new citizens at Houston Area Naturalization Ceremonies constituted a change in procedures that required federal pre-clearance under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

Finally, LULAC objects to Sumners’ failure to notify the 9000 Harris County residents who got “Are you dead?” letters that their registrations would not be canceled even if they failed to confirm their perpetuance.

It’s worth noting that House Bill 174, which expanded the perhaps-dead voter list by requiring the secretary of state to incorporate data from the Social Security “death master list,” passed with only one opposing vote and did get federal pre-clearance.

In response to the LULAC suit, Sumners’ office put out a press release that can be objectively described as snotty. It begins: “Here we go again. Another unwarranted political lawsuit.”

The release, written in the first person apparently by Sumners, says LULAC’s accusations are a retread of the previous suit, baseless and politically motivated. He’s obviously not rejecting voters for commercial addresses, he says, because a True the Voter recently sent him a “challenge” list of hundreds of registered voters with commercial address whom she wanted removed. Of course, this isn’t as strong a defense as it initially seems, because LULAC is not alleging that Sumners is cancelling all voter registrations from commercial addresses. They allege that Sumners is cancelling more commercial-address registrations from minority neighborhoods than Anglo ones. So the fact that a True-the-Voter can come up with hundreds of commercial-address voter registrations doesn’t prove that LULAC is wrong. If those addresses turned out to be in predominantly Anglo neighborhoods, it could prove them right.

Sumners also points out that nobody, dead or undead, is getting purged before the November elections, which also sounds like a strong defense at first. But that’s not what LULAC’s suit is about. It’s about, in part, the failure of Sumners’ office to notify people that they won’t be purged in the same official capacity as he told them they would be. Sumners’ retort also focuses only on the last two months, and doesn’t address the LULAC claim that racially disproportionate purges have been occurring since 2009.

Finally, Sumners says that the naturalization ceremony claim is “totally wrong and easily disproven,” though he doesn’t say how.

If the system works, the courts will establish who’s right in this he-said-they-said conflict. Place your bets in the comments section. But to Dateline Houston, the most important player in the Harris County zombie voter scandal is only mentioned in passing the in the dispatches from these two sides.

In the second paragraph of Sumners’ “pfft, check out this guy” press release, he notes, “The Secretary of State is not named as a defendant” in LULAC’s suit. The Texas legislature, after all, found time to pass into law the big changes that risked so much disenfranchisement, all to stop the four dead-voter-impersonators that cast ballots in this year’s run-offs. But the Secretary of State’s office is the one that froze Harris County voter registration funding for refusing to purge voters even after it became obvious to all involved that the new dead list was fatally flawed.

While LULAC mud-wrestles Harris County, who will point fingers at the state?

 

Today, Houston is struggling with the shooting death of yet another unarmed citizen at the hands of the Houston Police Department. It is the fourth shooting of an unarmed person, and the third death, since July 9.

Just past midnight this (Thursday) morning, 38-year-old Kenneth Releford allegedly kicked in the front door of his neighbor’s home in south central Houston, assaulted the two boys and an elderly man living there, and left.

A lengthy Houston Chronicle article published early this afternoon took its account from John Cannon, a Houston Police Department spokesman. It reports that Releford “hit” the elderly man and that the son said the man “was not hurt when [Releford] tried to hit him.”

“Cannon said the elderly man and the juveniles who were allegedly attacked were not seriously injured and were treated at the scene,” the Chronicle wrote. But when the police statement on the event arrived this afternoon, it said that Releford “sexually assaulted one of the juvenile males.”

The family later said Releford had never bothered them before, and said they didn’t know why he’d attacked them, though they believed he may have had mental health problems.

Releford went home and HPD arrived. The officers went to Releford’s house and he came out on his porch, allegedly with his left hand behind his back. Releford screamed at Officer J. Rosemon, who’s been on the force for less than two years, and advanced on him as the officer retreated, keeping his left hand behind his back and ignoring commands to stop and show the hand, according to the Houston Police account.

Officer Rosemon fired twice, hitting Releford, who proved unarmed.

HPD paramedics arrived and Releford fought with them—another suggestion that Releford was mentally ill. He was pronounced dead at Ben Taub General Hospital.

Late last month, HPD came under strictly metaphorical fire for an officer’s fatal shooting of a mentally ill, unarmed double-amputee in a wheelchair.

Earlier in September, an HPD officer shot, but did not kill, another unarmed citizen with a history of mental illness. And in July, an HPD officer shot and killed an unarmed man whom the officer said was not responding to commands but whom two witnesses said was cooperating.

In September, one HPD officer also shot at, but missed, an unarmed alleged beer thief in the back of a car who made a “quick move.” Another officer shot two suspects in a car fleeing after a bar fight.

A July 30 report in the Houston Chronicle observed that shootings of HPD suspects were on the upswing, having doubled compared with the same period the previous year. Department officials, and the Houston police union, said the trend was “likely cyclical.”

On Monday afternoon, former Houston Police Department officer Abraham Joseph was sentenced to life in prison for two counts of aggravated sexual assault by a public servant. Joseph, while in uniform and on duty, pulled over a waitress on her way home from work, handcuffed and raped her. Joseph was found guilty on Thursday afternoon after the jury of five women and seven men deliberated for less than eight hours. During the sentencing phase of the trial, three other waitresses testified that Joseph had done the same to them over four months in 2010 and 2011.

Everything about this is sick, of course, but if anything could make it worse, it’s that Joseph knew the waitresses from having stalked them at their workplaces and knew they were undocumented immigrants. According to the prosecution, Joseph counted on their vulnerability to deportation to keep them quiet.

Abuses of sex and power were also revealed at the Harris County Sheriff’s Office last week. On Friday afternoon, Sheriff Adrian Garcia held a press conference to announce the results of an internal affairs investigation that led two deputies and four civilian detention officers to leave or lose their jobs. The probe found sexual misconduct between jail staff and other employees and between jailers and inmates. Garcia declined to give more details about the findings, but said the inmates involved were “numerous” adult women, that the offenses occurred in laundry rooms, and that the fired supervising deputy was aware of but did not stop the behavior.

Garcia didn’t specify that inmates were having sex with jailers in return for favors or contraband, but did say the investigation began in August of last year after an inmate was found with outlawed tennis shoes. “Then the ball of yarn began to unravel,” Garcia said.

A Houston Chronicle review of disciplinary records showed that since 2007, more than 20 Harris County Jail employees have been suspended without pay or fired for sexual misconduct with inmates, providing contraband, or both.

Since taking office in January 2009, Sheriff Garcia has fired, reprimanded or suspended employees at a greater rate than his predecessor, Sheriff Tommy Thomas. Sheriff Garcia told the Texas Observer that this wasn’t due to an increase in wrongdoing but rather an emphasis on discipline. When he took office, Garcia says, “there was a culture that this particular case [the recent firings] pointed to. But we’re dealing with that and we’re making it abundantly clear that this activity is not to be tolerated.”

Sheriff Garcia said that the Harris County District Attorney’s office would determine whether the fired employees would face criminal charges.

Houston Police Department Chief Charles McClelland has also fired slightly more officers during his first three years than his predecessor did in the same time period, 63 versus 58, though he has disciplined roughly the same amount, almost 1,300.

Civil rights activists say it’s not nearly enough. Chief McClelland was on the defensive in September over his decision “not to fire a police sergeant and three traffic officers he recently suspended for unnecessarily listing themselves as witnesses on hundreds of traffic tickets,” per James Pinkerton of the Chronicle. “They did so to get overtime for testifying in municipal court. Payroll records show the four earned $943,000 in overtime since 2008.”

“We certainly will not tolerate any kind of criminal or illegal behavior,” Chief McClelland said at the time. “But I have to weigh, can these officers be productive police officers and members of this organization again?”

At HPD, even those who are fired, suspended, or reprimanded by their superiors usually don’t suffer the full consequences. According to Ray Hunt, president of the Houston Police Officers’ Union, HPD disciplinary actions are overturned or reduced about 60 percent of the time.