Austin At Large: We Didn’t Demand a Recount

So somebody was wrong on the internet this week, and I had to get shirty and block them, and that is totally not newsworthy or column-worthy in itself, but it does tee up a larger conversation: Did the state's new "election integrity" rules change the outcome of close races in the March 1 primary?

Here locally, the closest race on the Democratic ballot by a long shot was the Travis County Commissioner Precinct 4 contest, which incumbent Margaret Gómez won by 248 votes, buoyed by late election day numbers, over two-time challenger Susanna Ledesma-Woody, a Del Valle ISD trustee and leader of the Del Valle Community Coalition. On Wed­nesday, as we went to press, Ledesma-Woody withdrew her request for a recount, acknowledging that she lost by a little over 1%. (She can't change her mind later.) That threshold is not relevant to state law governing recounts – the challenger needs to have lost by less than 10% of the total votes for the winner, which is about five times the margin in this race – but it is symbolic. Nobody has ever made up that much ground in a recount in local memory, and as long as state Rep. Donna How­ard is in office, locals will remember when she was reelected by 12 votes after a prolonged election contest that narrowed her margin but did not change the outcome.

The troll that I blocked, who probably isn't that bad a person or that off-base politically, was angry (and a li'l abusive, hence the block) that we did not shout that last fact loud enough as we reported the facts about the Pct. 4 contest. But in her initial statement upon seeking a recount last week, Ledesma-Woody highlighted things that really might have changed the outcome of this race but that wouldn't be resolved by a recount – that is, the chaos and disorder created by the new election rules.

It’s a Legal Matter, Baby

For Ledesma-Woody, or any similarly situated candidate in Texas, to challenge last week's primary results based on the litany of stupid random sh*t shoveled into the totally ad hoc omnibus elections package that became Senate Bill 1, they'd generally need to sue the winner in district court; while Ledesma-Woody could still do that, her statement announcing she would not seek a recount did not suggest she would. But let's say she did! That's what Laura Pressley, who used to be Dr. Fluoride but is now Dr. Voting Fraud, did when she dragged Greg Casar through years of proceedings all the way up to the Texas Supreme Court – not because she had any hope of changing the outcome of that 2014 City Council run-off, but because she wanted to make a point that the all-electronic voting system then in use in Travis County was no bueno. And ultimately, County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir agreed with her, and now we have voter-­verifiable paper ballots.

One thing Ledesma-Woody could do, if she wanted to sue Gómez to make herself the test case for potentially overturning SB 1, is point to the number of mail ballot applications that were rejected in Travis County. Gómez won the mail ballots in this race by 175 votes, so it's not a given that rejected mail ballots were going to break for Ledesma-Woody, or that those voters did not end up voting in person, but there were more than enough to theoretically close a gap of this size. A court case would help bring clarity on this topic, about which there's been a lot of noise and campaign sloganeering from Beto O'Rourke on down.

There were only 46 provisional ballots cast in the Pct. 4 race, which would suggest that most people who showed up in person were able to vote – they had the proper ID, were registered 30 days prior to the election at their current address, and all the other hoops people have to jump through. But we would benefit from knowing how many people showed up, were turned away, and then didn't vote at all. That would require an election contest, in court, where election poll workers and watchers took the stand.

This Is How We Suppress

There are probably a lot more issues that a candidate who wanted to contest the "election integrity" measures themselves could point to in their races; that's why we have specialists in election law to till this soil. I don't think any of this would necessarily change the outcome in the Pct. 4 race, since there are other factors at play that I think explain the results we got sufficiently without getting into direct claims of voter suppression. (We'll do a deeper dive on this – with maps! – next week, on Pct. 4 as well as other interesting races on the Travis ballot.) But since it's unlikely that a near-miss GOP candidate is going to sue over this and get crosswise with MAGAnation, and since challenging Texas House races actually happens in the Legislature itself (as it did with Howard), it should be a Democratic runner-up in a close local race like Pct. 4 who makes themselves the legal guinea pig.

The fact that we're even having this conversation is evidence of how the decades-long project to suppress dissenting voters in Texas (which predates GOP control) has been a smashing success even when it hasn't defaulted to obvious civil rights violations. The point of the enterprise is to generate fear, uncertainty, and doubt about election outcomes, to make people too confused or scared to vote, and thus to perpetuate lifelong habits of non-voting and non-caring that are almost impossible to break within one election cycle, even one with Beto O'Rourke spending vast sums to, it appears, meet every single voter in Texas in person. Had ex-President Apesh*t not fumbled the bag and made Republicans also feel that their votes didn't matter and might not even be counted, we could have gone on this way for a hundred years. Now would be a good time to change our ways.