Political Intelligence

dept. of immigration

Thanksgiving week, while most of us were stuffing ourselves, eight undocumented students at the University of Texas at Austin joined hundreds of others across the country in a hunger strike. They were willing to starve themselves to push Congress to vote on the DREAM Act, legislation that provides a path to citizenship for undocumented students who attend college or serve in the military. Julie, 30, said that she joined the strike because it was her last hope. She’s supported the bill since it was introduced in 2001 and has graduated with a master’s degree in nursing from UT-Austin. “I’m a 30-year-old woman now, and I’m still undocumented,” she said. “I want to practice as a military nurse, helping soldiers heal, but I can’t because I don’t have a Social Security number.”

The DREAM legislation would cover students up to age 35, like Julie. She saw the current lame-duck session of Congress as her last chance. She and the other hunger strikers hoped to convince Texas Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison to vote for the bill. (Hutchison supported the bill in 2007.) “We’ve done everything,” Julie said. “We’ve done calls, congressional visits, faxes and letters. We don’t have any more time to waste. Our lives could be decided on by the end of the year.”

listen to UT students talk about the DREAM Act

Every year, an estimated 65,000 undocumented students graduate from high school in the United States. Most students were brought to the U.S. by their parents at a young age. Some entered the country without documents; others overstayed visitor visas. At least a million students could become legal residents and eventually citizens if the DREAM Act passed.

At press time, it was doubtful that even starvation would move lawmakers to support the students. The legislation, which once had bipartisan support, lost nearly all Republican backing as the debate over immigration reform became increasingly polarized. Hutchison has said she’ll vote against the bill.

—Melissa del Bosque

 

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dept. of good fortune

The SBOE Giveth

When the State Board of Education met just before Thanksgiving, members kept in mind those of us who have little to be thankful about this year: our beleaguered state legislators. Almost every House member is feeling pressure from the nasty, raging speaker’s race, the budget shortfall and redistricting.

But lo and behold, the board came up with a gift sure to bring smiles to lawmakers. The board, usually known for making textbooks palatable to religious zealots and historical whitewashers, decided to send almost $2 billion to the Legislature to spend on schools, an unusually large amount. They had one request: that the Legislature use some of the money to buy textbooks that incorporate the board’s latest curriculum. While the state board determines how much money goes to the legislators, it’s up to the House and Senate to decide how to spend it.

With the budget this tight, there’s no guarantee the Legislature will buy the books, though publishers have already produced most of them. The texts would likely cost around $550 million, but the Legislature could use almost all the money to fund schools’ basic operations. That would help legislators balance other parts of the budget. 

The board has sent a unanimous letter asking that lawmakers pony up. Whether legislators fund new textbooks or not, students will get tested on the materials starting next year. If schools can’t prepare kids for the tests, it’s hard to see how the system will work.

The board is already helping the Legislature cut corners. Rather than order new books that meet the state’s latest standards, the board is commissioning “supplemental materials” to fill gaps between the old books and new standards. Expect more creative solutions as lawmakers come to terms with one of the biggest budget gaps in recent history.

—Abby Rapoport

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dept. of myth-busting

The Safe Place

If you believe the hype, El Paso should be one of the most crime-ridden cities in the country. It sits just across the river from Juarez, one of the most dangerous cities in the world. Quite a few politicians and commentators have warned about the escalating violence in Mexico “spilling over” into the United States. That hasn’t happened.

While there have been a few isolated incidents of drug-related violence, cities on the American side remain remarkably safe. Nowhere is that more evident than in El Paso, which recently became America’s “safest city,” according to a recent report by CQ Press, a Washington, D.C., publishing firm.

CQ Press ranked the safest and most dangerous cities by looking at 2009 FBI crime figures in six categories: murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary and car theft. El Paso, which had just 13 murders in 2009, had the lowest crime rate of any city with a population more than 500,000. (So far in 2010, El Paso has seen four murders, according to the El Paso Times; across the river in Juarez, there have been at least 2,700 killings this year.) CQ Press also ranked another border city, San Diego, among the five safest. It’s worth noting that the five most dangerous cities—Detroit, Baltimore, Memphis, Washington and Atlanta—aren’t exactly overlooking the Rio Grande. So much for the spillover.

—Dave Mann

 

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reality check dept.

Medicaid Meshugas

Texas is withdrawing from Medicaid. That’s what you might think, judging from the recent headlines. The notion that state lawmakers might opt out of the health insurance program for the poor—largely paid for by the federal government—has been one of the major stories in Texas politics since the Republican election night romp on Nov. 2. “No More Medicaid?” was the headline in the online Texas Tribune four days after the election. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram followed with a story headlined, “Conservative legislators in Texas seek to opt out of Medicaid,” and the Houston Chronicle wondered, “No Medicaid in Texas?”

These stories were based largely on speculative quotes from two elected officials: state Rep. Warren Chisum, a Panhandle Republican who’s running for speaker of the Texas House, and newly re-elected Gov. Rick Perry. They’ve suggested that Texas, facing a massive budget shortfall, could save billions by pulling out of Medicaid, forfeiting the $16 billion a year the state receives in federal matching funds and replacing it with a state program. You might wonder how the state could turn away $16 billion from the feds and save money. Neither lawmaker has provided details.

Both have their motivations, though. Chisum needs to win support from right-wing House members if he hopes to unseat current House Speaker (and fellow Republican) Joe Straus. Perry has a book to sell—Fed Up!—and a national profile to raise.

In the rush for a good story, few reporters have paused to ask if a Medicaid withdrawal is feasible or under serious consideration. In reality, it seems doubtful the Legislature could opt out of Medicaid, and Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst—who, unlike Chisum and Perry, will likely have a large say in the budget the Legislature creates next year—recently said as much.

Dewhurst released a statement that read, “In light of the revenue shortfall facing Texas, we need to take a serious look at any option that will help us balance the budget, but preliminary indications from the Texas Health and Human Services Commission indicate that opting out of Medicaid may not be the most cost-effective alternative.”

Here was perhaps the most powerful man in the Legislature saying that a Medicaid withdrawal made little financial sense. With good reason: Medicaid covers 70 percent of nursing home residents, more than 2 million children and more than half the births in the state. Ditching the program would cost Texas tens of billions in economic activity, might put doctors and pharmacies out of business, and could flood public hospitals with uninsured patients, leading to a spike in local property taxes.

Yet Dewhurst’s statement received scant media attention. Only one story—in the Chronicle—mentioned it. Medicaid withdrawal may make a good story, but unless the budget arithmetic changes, it ain’t gonna happen.

—Dave Mann

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dept. of miseducation

El “Fracaso” in Brownsville

It’s a bad time to play chicken with the University of Texas Board of Regents. With an estimated $20 billion budget shortfall looming, the board of Texas Southmost College in Brownsville thought it would renegotiate the contract with the UT system to force UT to pay more than $10 million in back rent. Instead, the regents announced in mid-November they’d dissolve the 99-year contract with Southmost.

The University of Texas Brownsville-Texas Southmost College is a unique hybrid. It’s a community college and a four-year university combined. In 1991, the community college, which is funded by local property taxes in Brownsville, forged a partnership with the UT system and signed a 99-year contract. The UT system rents many of the buildings from Southmost and handles most of the administrative duties. UT-Brownsville and Southmost President Juliet Garcia summed up the impending divorce from UT as a “fracaso,” a failure.

Garcia tried to paint a rosier picture to staff and faculty. She promised that the UT System was still committed to building a four-year university in Brownsville without Southmost. Garcia said UT Brownsville’s growth was passing through a “cocoon phase” like other universities, such as the University of Texas at El Paso. The metamorphosis from homely caterpillar to butterfly will be difficult during the state’s worst budget crisis in history.

Southmost Trustee David Oliveira had a darker spin. “I am extremely disappointed, but I can’t say I am shocked because I warned the other trustees that this was going to happen,” Oliveira told the Brownsville Herald. “This could have disastrous consequences for our community and could set us back 50 years if the University of Texas Board of Regents follows through with this. I don’t know where we are going to get the funds to continue the programs we have, at the level we have, without raising taxes.”

—Melissa del Bosque

dept. of influence-peddling

The election of the Texas House speaker has always been an insider’s fight. The 150 House members who vote on the speaker usually politick and trade loyalties in Austin’s back rooms without much concern for the voters back home. Until now.

The battle to become speaker in the coming legislative session has become a public affair: website postings by activist groups, open letters from House members, robocalls and email campaigns. So much so, that we have ongoing coverage of it.

Current Speaker Joe Straus, a San Antonio Republican, is considered a moderate—his position the product of last session’s closely divided House in which the GOP held a four-seat edge. This year’s election results—22 more Republican seats and a 99-51 majority—had barely been reported when hard-line conservative groups began attacking Straus and calling for a more conservative speaker. The day after the election, Straus announced that 130 of the 150 members had pledged their support. But those pledges are non-binding, and he now faces two opponents, not to mention scores of mobilized Tea Party activists.

Less than two days after the election, 46 right-wing activists sent a letter to House members saying “a change to a more conservative Speaker is in order.” Then Michael Q. Sullivan, one of its signatories and the leader of the conservative activist group Empower Texans, began pushing an anti-Straus petition at the website ConservativeSpeakerMandate.com, which quickly gained thousands of supporters.

Socially conservative Republican state Rep. Warren Chisum of Pampa was the first to challenge Straus. State Rep. Ken Paxton, a Republican Tea Party favorite from McKinney who also declared his candidacy, has already peeled off a few Straus supporters, though Chisum and Paxton have a long way to go.

The fight has been in the making for months. At the Republican state convention in June, protesters held anti-Straus signs and drowned out his introduction with boos. More recently, some activists’ calls to arms have bordered on anti-Semitic. (Straus is Jewish.) Harvey Kronberg of Quorum Report wrote that some right-wing activists had “crossed over the line” with calls for a “Christian” speaker. In particular, he cites Peter Morrison, one of the 46 activists who signed the anti-Straus letter. Morrison wrote to supporters, “Both Rep. Warren Chisum and Rep. Ken Paxton, who are Christians and true conservatives, have risen to the occasion to challenge Joe Straus for leadership.”

If the activist groups succeed in toppling Straus, the speaker’s race may never be an insider’s fight again.

—Abby Rapoport

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crime and punishment beat

DeLay on Trial

Read our update on DeLay’s verdict here.

The charges for which Tom DeLay was indicted in 2005 hinge on one simple transaction. In September 2002, a political action committee that then-House Majority Leader DeLay set up in Texas sent $190,000 in corporate funds to a national Republican committee in Washington, D.C. Two weeks later, that committee, the Republican National State Election Committee, sent seven checks totaling $190,000—money they claim was contributed by individual, non-corporate donors—to seven Republican candidates in Texas House races. It is illegal to contribute corporate or union money to a candidate for office in Texas. Illegal corporate money went to Washington, and the same amount came back as legal, non-corporate money. Prosecutors call that money laundering. DeLay’s defense team calls it politics.

In the second week of a trial that might run as long as one month, the prosecution introduced an incriminating statement that DeLay insists resulted in his indictment in 2005. As the members of the jury leaned forward in their chairs, listening to an audiotape, they heard the former majority leader agree to the transaction for which he faces a maximum sentence of life in prison for moneylaundering and conspiracy to launder money.

The tape is a recording of an Aug. 17, 2005, meeting with DeLay and his lawyers and then-Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle and his staff. Near the end of the interview, DeLay is questioned about a conversation he had with Jim Ellis, the executive director of DeLay’s Texans for a Republican Majority Political Action Committee.

Asked when he first heard about the transaction, DeLay says Ellis “told me he was going to do it.” Asked if he made a notation in a memorandum regarding what Ellis planned to do with the $190,000, DeLay responds: “I just said, ‘Fine.’” He also argues that “Everybody does it. Democrats. Democrats as well as Republicans.”

As prosecutors read it, “Fine” is informed consent to commit a crime. “Everybody does it” is the subtext of the defense advanced by DeLay’s attorney, Dick DeGuerin—though Judge Pat Priest will not allow DeGuerin to make that argument explicitly to the jury.

Prosecutors are creating a narrative that wends through DeLay’s role in the creation of the TRMPAC, the fundraisers’ direct solicitation of hundreds of thousands of corporate dollars, and finally to the election of a Republican majority in the Texas House, which made possible the 2003 redrawing of the state’s congressional districts to the GOP’s advantage.

DeLay is unbowed. After the taped conversation was played for the jurors on Nov. 10, he walked from the Austin courtroom, saying: “Did you hear anything in that tape that justifies the five years of hell they put me through?”

Those five years of hell didn’t include a prison term, unlike his former confidant, the disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. The former House majority leader is living in somewhat reduced circumstances. Rather than staying at a hotel, he and his wife are sleeping in their 40-foot, luxury motor home, which DeLay drove over from Sugar Land. Golf at St. Andrews in Scotland and fine dining on the lobby’s tab remain on hold.

—Lou Dubose

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dept. of elections

Sylvia Garcia’s Stunner

If any race epitomized the troubles of Texas Democrats on Election Day, it was Sylvia Garcia’s defeat in Houston.

Garcia—who had served on the Harris County commissioner’s court since 2003—seemed like a shoo-in for re-election. The slice of eastern Harris County she represents is heavily Democratic. Latinos comprise the majority of her district. Garcia had amassed nearly $1.8 million in campaign money to spend against an underfunded, little-known Republican opponent who not only couldn’t afford to hire a single staffer, but did little campaigning of any kind. Moreover, no Harris County commissioner had lost a re-election bid since 1974.

But as Garcia’s campaign studied the totals from early voting, it became clear she was in trouble. The week before Election Day, Garcia e-mailed supporters: “Right now, our Latino numbers are down from my previous cycles and I need them to win. … We need you to block walk and phone bank every day until Election Day. We are in desperate need of bilingual volunteers, especially for our phone bank.”

The fact that Garcia’s campaign was desperately trying to recruit block-walkers and bilingual callers several days before the election—when 60 percent of the vote had already been cast in early voting—tells you all you need to know. “She, I think, coasted too long in this race,” says Richard Murray, a political scientist at the University of Houston. 

Garcia relied on the Latino vote. Her district has few African-Americans, and many of the Anglos typically vote Republican. Relying on the Latino vote in Harris County was problematic this year. Latino turnout there increased a bit over 2006, Murray says, but still equated to a meager 12 percent of the electorate. Meanwhile, Anglo voters turned out in droves, many of them voting straight-ticket Republican. 

Garcia’s campaign was swamped by the bugaboo that defeated many a Texas Democrat in 2010: angry, energized, white Republican voters combined with another disappointing turnout by Latinos. It doesn’t seem quite fair given that her novice Republican opponent, Jack Morman, who will take office in January, barely campaigned. Then again, as Murray put it, “He didn’t need to. He was on the ballot with an ‘R’ by his name this year, and that’s all it took.”

—Dave Mann

campaign trail

It became clear pretty early on election night that Rick Perry was cruising toward re-election as Texas governor. (He ended up beating Bill White, the former Houston mayor, by more than 600,000 votes or 12 percent.) So the hot topic of conversation among the assembled—and bored—reporters at Perry’s celebration quickly turned to rank speculation: Would he run for president?

The Perry victory party had sounded like the place to be. The governor’s campaign and the Republican Party of Texas were holding a joint shindig at an exotic game ranch outside Austin. The ranch is home to zebras, kangeroos, emus and quite a few animals you’ve probably never heard of, like nyla, Nile lechewe and the rabbit-like Patagonian cavy. It’s run by Texas Disposal Systems, a solid-waste hauling company and sits adjacent to a massive landfill, which raises the question of what exactly they’re feeding those poor Patagonian cavy.

Inside the lodge, suspense faded fast when initial election returns showed every statewide Republican candidate holding insurmountable leads. So the assembled media milled around and watched several hundred giddy, mostly Anglo, Republicans line up to feast on a less-than-exotic buffet of beef and chicken.

Most seemed to agree that Perry’s dominating victory, more decisive than polls predicted, made a good launch point for a national campaign. Of course, it could prove a little awkward for a politician who’s spent 18 months bashing Washington to suddenly ask voters to send him there.

“I believe him when he says he’s not interested,” said Ilene Witt, a diehard Perry supporter from San Antonio.

A few feet away, however, staffers were selling Perry’s new book, Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington, for $24 a pop. From the early excerpts, the book seems very much the kind of memoir that other candidates have used to start a presidential run. And Perry was scheduled to appear on Fox News, The Today Show and Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart to publicize his book and himself the week after Election Day.

A decade into Perry’s tenure—which already makes him the state’s longest-serving governor—a healthy majority of Texas voters hasn’t had its fill of him yet. With a fresh four-year term, Perry is now in line to serve 14 years as governor—longer than the lifespan of your average Patagonian cavy. Given the state of Texas Democrats, the only way Perry might vacate the governor’s office in the near future is to move to the White House.

—Dave Mann and Melissa del Bosque

 

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dept. of elections

Watching Acres Homes

On one of the last days of early voting, Chris Alfred was prepared to help his mother vote at the Acres Homes Multi-Service Center. Like most people in Harris County, he had already heard about the poll watchers who were coming to largely minority precincts like Acres Homes to look for wrongdoing.

Chris spends his days helping his mother, Gloria Alfred, who’s been disabled by a stroke. When the pair arrived at the polling station, he got duly sworn in to assist her. The two entered the voting booth. Almost immediately, they say, one of the watchers appeared and said, “You can’t help her!” Chris said he carefully explained that his mother needed help, that he had been sworn in. The poll watcher backed off, but Gloria was still shaken. What if Chris hadn’t known what to say? she asked. “I might have been to the point where I couldn’t even have voted.”

Months ago, the King Street Patriots, a Harris County Tea Party group, launched an initiative called True the Vote to train poll watchers. Supporters say the project was meant to restore integrity to a voting process rife with fraud. Opponents argue there’s no such problem and that the Patriots are trying to suppress turnout and intimidate voters—particularly minority voters. After both True the Vote and Democratic elected officials called on the Department of Justice to intervene, federal personnel came to Harris County to monitor polls on election day.

Even during early voting, it was easy to see how things could flare up in Acres Homes. With voting booths, there was barely room for people to stand in their rows. When the two poll watchers—both white men—would walk amongst the voters, they often had to squeeze by. There was no missing them.

Poll watchers aren’t allowed to hover over voters, or to communicate with them. Democrats filed incident reports of poll watchers breaking these rules. True the Vote says there’s no evidence to back up those allegations and that it’s the poll watchers who are getting harassed.

“People are feeling very uncomfortable with the situation,” said one of the building workers who watched the scenes unfold over the early voting period. The man, who asked not to be identified, said there’d been flare-ups between voters and poll watchers. Mainly, he believed the efforts to be politically, not racially, motivated. The distinction is important—if True the Vote used racial bias in selecting polling sites, it would likely be violating the Voting Rights Act.

Still, most of the people at Acres Homes seemed unperturbed by the poll watchers, and some were supportive. “I’m glad for it,” said voter Deborah Williams as she left the center after casting her ballot. “People watching me has never bothered me.”

Gloria Alfred, who’s seen more elections than most, was more convinced that poll watchers kept people from voting. She argued the poll watchers targeted black neighborhoods “because a lot of us are kind of illiterate” about voting rules and it’s easier to use the legalese to intimidate. “I imagine a lot of people feel they shouldn’t even come to vote,” she said.

—Abby Rapoport

 

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dept. of justice

Disorder in the Court

It’s not uncommon for Houston lawyer Geoffrey Hoffman’s clients to wait more than a year for a hearing before an immigration judge. “I have cases postponed until 2011, 2012,” he says. With a whopping backlog of more than 247,000 pending cases nationwide—7,444 in Houston alone, as of June—the immigration courts move at a glacial pace. In August, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency finally did something about it. Assistant Secretary John Morton directed his attorneys in a memo to examine pending deportation cases nationwide and dismiss those cases where non-criminal immigrants had legitimate U.S. citizenship claims.

In Houston, the number of cases dismissed increased from 27 in July to 271 in August. Hoffman, faculty supervisor of the University of Houston’s Immigration Clinic, says that two of its 100 active cases have been dismissed so far. One of those dismissals involved a man who was in the process of filing for his legal residency when he received a ticket for not having a driver’s license. Because of the driver’s license violation, ICE ordered his deportation, despite the fact he’d since become a quadriplegic. “Cases like this should be dismissed,” Hoffman says, “so the immigration courts can be used in the most efficient way.”

Republican senators, including Texas’ John Cornyn, don’t see it that way. News of the dismissals created a national controversy among immigration hardliners who called the new policy “back-door amnesty.” In late October, Cornyn and other GOP senators on the committee demanded a report from Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano by November 15 on the number and types of dismissals ICE had granted. In the letter, the senators took offense at the agency’s “selectively enforcing the laws against only those aliens it considers a priority.” 

—Melissa del Bosque

Democrats were in a fight to retain their edge in Dallas County, although Bill White pulled ahead of Gov. Rick Perry in the county with 54 percent of a heavy early vote. Returns were released just as the polls closed at 7 pm.

With an all-day rain falling across the county, the early vote could be more important than ever if the weather worked to suppress Election Day turnout.

District Attorney Craig Watkins, the Democratic incumbent, was 3,547 votes behind Republican challenger Danny Clancy out of 212,725 early votes cast. That’s just over a 1 percent margin. Many courthouse races were just as tight.

Republicans took bigger leads in several statehouse races in which freshman or second-term Democrats are trying to hold onto seats they won in 2006 and 2008.

In House District 107 in northeast Dallas, Republican Kenneth Sheets opened a 55-42 lead over two-term Democrat Allen Vaught.

In Mesquite’s House District 101, Republican Cindy Burkett opened a 53-47 lead over incumbent Robert Miklos, a freshman Democrat.

In District 102, Republican Stafani Carter sprung ahead by a 58-41 margin over incumbent freshman Democrat Carol Kent.

There is apparently nothing as cozy as a thoroughly safe seat to keep one dry when voters are in a stormy mood. Despite a scandal in which she was caught giving scholarships to family members from a Congressional Black Caucus fund, Eddie Bernice Johnson, the longtime Democratic incumbent in the 30^th congressional district, was pasting Republican Stephen Broden by a 76-21 percent margin of the 59,325 early votes cast.

In recent days, it appeared that the tense voting situation in Harris County was going to spread to other areas on election day. The lead-up to the election got so hot in Houston that voting machines combusted into flames, which was followed by accusations by a Tea Party group, called the King Street Patriots, claiming that Democratic registration efforts were an attempt at large scale voter fraud.

The Patriots sent poll watchers to early voting as part of their campaign to “True the Vote,” which led to accusations by Democrats that poll watchers stepped over the line and intimidated minority voters. Then the Department of Justice decided to send observers to keep an eye out in Houston. If that wasn’t enough, word spread this week that the King Street Patriots were setting their sites on Austin.

I went searching for the militant watchdogs in precinct 426 in East Austin, where a coalition of Hispanic and black activists had launched a voter drive to increase turnout by 20 percent. It’s too early to tell if the campaign was successful at turning out votes — and voters were only trickling in to the polling place at Govalle Elementary around 3pm — but the precinct did attract the elusive poll watcher.

Michael Adams, a volunteer with the Travis County Republican Party, stood sternly next to the election officials, where he said he’d been standing for more than five hours.

Adams was at the end of his shift, so we stepped outside to chat. He said he’d come to look out for telltale signs of fraud, like bus loads of suspicious people coming in to vote, or people helping other people vote who were not authorized to vote, or officials allowing people to vote without registration. But he says he didn’t see anything like that going down. “I’ve been an election judge,” he says. “This polling place was a well-oiled machine.”

But Adams said it was important to have poll watchers to protect against skullduggery. I offered that if the Democrats are stealing elections in Texas, they haven’t been doing a very good job. “Donna Campbell is in a tight race with Lloyd Doggett,” he replied. “And I have Black friends in the Republican party from East Austin. The stories they tell me are hair-curling. They say there are dead people voting. There are people coming in to vote and being told they already voted—someone stole their vote and now they are turned away. The corruption happens in urban areas, which is controlled by the Democrats.”

Although there have been few documented cases of voter fraud in Texas, Adams, like many Texas Republicans, are convinced it’s a real problem. He calls it an “inescapable fact.” Adams says the best solution is a Voter I.D. bill. “People steal envelopes with names and addresses from the trash, especially in apartments in urban areas, and they use that to register and vote” says Adams. “Voters should have to produce a photo I.D. at the polls.”

Adams has been transformed by the politics of voting. He says he was a Democrat for 30 years. But when the Gore campaign challenged the election in Florida in 2000, he saw it as a naked attempt to steal the election. He’s been a Republican ever since. “Before that, I thought the Democrats were the good guys,” he said.

Adams believed the accusations leveled at “True the Vote” were overblown. “It seems impossible to intimidate voters while poll watching,” he says. “You’re not allowed to talk to voters. It doesn’t intimidate anyone — expect perhaps the registrar.”

But Adams admits that, at least at this urban polling place, the election was proceeding as it was supposed to. As he walked off, several voters approached the school, all of them democrats. Sally Salazar was upset that Obama hadn’t pushed harder for immigration reform. But she was excited for Bill White (“Maybe someday he’ll be president!). She said, “I’m coming in with my one vote, but with me are thousands of others.”

She meant that metaphorically.