In a controversy surrounding voter registration operations in Harris County, Democrats are claiming voter suppression at the local tax office, but Republican officials are saying the allegations are really a push to 1) create an ethical cloud around a sitting Republican state representative, Dwayne Bohac (R-Houston), who has supported voter ID legislation and now faces a tough re-election battle, and 2) put operational pressure on the Harris County voter registrar, making it more difficult to weed out fraudulent or unlawful voter registration applications.
That’s the assessment of Paul Bettencourt, who served as Harris County Tax Assessor Collector for ten years before resigning in November 2008, and is disputing numbers much circulated by the Texas Democratic Party (TDP) and others, which claim that “almost 70,000” individuals in Harris County were denied the right to vote, in violation of the Voting Rights Act, as a result of practices by the county’s tax office, between January 2007 and October 2008.
A resolution agreement was reached this week between TDP and Harris County. What that resolution agreement actually means depends on which side is talking.
“The Texas Democratic Party entered this settlement agreement because it specifically requires Harris County to end the practices we believe were largely responsible for almost 70,000 Texans being denied the opportunity to register to vote in Harris County in 2008,” TDP Chairman Boyd Richie said in a statement Oct. 26.
Democrats have claimed that the denials resulted from coordinated efforts between Bohac and Harris County associate voter registrar Ed Johnson. The two run the private company Campaign Data Systems, which provides publicly accessible voter information to interested parties. Left-leaning third-party observers such as the Lone Star Project, a research group whose stated mission is to counteract “rhetoric and misinformation” from Republican state leadership and Texas Republicans in Washington, have called Johnson Bohac’s “inside man” at Harris County.
But Bettencourt, who resigned in November 2008 and started his own business, told LSR that at all times the Harris County tax office complied with the law and took extra steps to ensure that voters were not disenfranchised.
Further, he and other sources told LSR, there is simply no basis for the claim that anywhere near 70,000 people were denied the right to vote in Harris County. Bettencourt provided LSR with extensive statistics to attest as much.
The case by the numbers
Between January 2007 and October 2008, the Harris County tax office received about 250,000 voter registration applications — upwards of 97,000 in October 2008 alone, Bettencourt told LSR.
“We would hope that they wouldn’t, but, gee whiz, it sounds like somebody might have been sandbagging,” Bettencourt said. Nevertheless, Bettencourt said, the tax office got all of the names on the rolls within the month leading up to Election Day.
For that nearly-two-year period, Bettencourt’s office rejected 3,518 applications. By comparison, Bettencourt said, during that period, Dallas County rejected about 1,200 applications. Tarrant County had about 10,700, a considerably higher per capita rate of rejection than that in Harris.
The tax office sent out, from January 2007 to October 2008, some 64,036 “notices of incomplete” to applicants. Some 22,518 of those applications were found to be duplicates as a result of voters’ moving. Another 29,386 ultimately became registered in time for Election Day 2008.
So, doing the math, notice of incompletes to which applicants did not respond totaled 12,132. Those are not “rejections,” Bettencourt emphasizes, they are unresolved incomplete voter applications. Even so, it hardly approaches the “60,000” rejections printed in the Houston Chronicle editorial this week or the “almost 70,000” repeatedly alleged by TDP, the Lone Star Project and others.
Only 7,000 provisional ballot applications were cast in Harris County for that election, which is in line with the rest of the counties, Bettencourt said.
Bettencourt said that Harris County had to reject 39 percent of all the voter applications delivered by ACORN. Various chapters of ACORN face indictment across the country for various criminal activities, including voter fraud.
Bettencourt said the Harris County tax office took 55,000 live phone calls on Election Day, cross training 200 people to do so, all in order to “make sure that no one was disenfranchised.”
The lawsuit
The TDP filed suit in November 2008, alleging that Harris County did not properly handle provisional ballots, and claiming that there were tens of thousands of people not registered who had tried to. Before Bettencourt left the tax office that month, Andy Taylor was hired as the attorney for Harris County in the case. Leo Vasquez replaced Bettencourt as tax assessor collector in December 2008.
The Harris County tax office immediately won a victory in court, forcing the Democrats in November 2008 to pull down their temporary restraining order.
This is not the first time Democrats have tried this — having sued the state three times total in 2008 and lost three times, including suing in Rep. Linda Harper-Brown’s (R-Irving) election, and even suing the elections administrator — Bettencourt said.
The approximately six-month-long discovery process in the Harris County case yielded no smoking gun, Bettencourt said. In May 2009, the Democrats made a motion demanding unfettered access to the voter registration system. Taylor successfully argued against the motion, saying it would violate voters’ privacy.
In June 2009, new Democratic county attorney Vince Ryan fired Taylor as counsel for Harris County in the lawsuit, replacing him with John Odam. Ryan said keeping Taylor on was an “unnecessary expense” to the county.
Taylor has a history of representing Republicans in trial, including occasions during the redistricting controversies of 2003. He also worked for then-Atty. Gen. John Cornyn.
U.S. District Court records indicate that in August 2009, Taylor was contacted by Bohac after two subpoenas had been served on him and his company, Campaign Data Systems. Before agreeing, Taylor contacted Vasquez to get his consent, which he gave without objection.
Ryan then moved to have Taylor removed once again on the grounds that his continued involvement in the case presented a conflict.
But the U.S. District Court denied Ryan’s motion because, among other reasons, Taylor represented Vasquez, not Ryan, in the lawsuit. “As such, Vince Ryan has no independent ability or standing to object to Mr. Taylor’s representation of Rep. Bohac and [Campaign Data Systems].” There is no adversity between Bohac and Vasquez, the court found.
Eventually the case against Bohac was dropped, Bettencourt told LSR. After that, what was left of the lawsuit went to mediation.
The resolution agreement
The resolution agreement indeed contains no actual statistics about rejections in Harris County during the time period in question.
Gary Polland, who represented Harris County voter registrar staffer George Hammerlein in a deposition in the case in September 2009, called the lawsuit “ludicrous” and said he advised Vasquez not to accept the resolution agreement because it had “no merit.”
Bettencourt and Polland both told LSR that the county could have continued to fight the case — and won. Bettencourt said the “statistical evidence is overwhelming” that the allegations of TDP cannot be sustained. Summary judgment was a real possibility, Polland told LSR.
But Vasquez said the decision to settle was made not by him but by Ryan.
Ryan said the agreement was a “much better way” than a lengthy court battle. “Now we have an agreement where the state party is comfortable as we move forward that things and procedures that will be followed adhere to the law and actually are enhancements to those procedures in certain cases,” he told LSR.
“We believe that the settlement accurately looks to the future to assure anybody that if something did happen in the past, it’s not happening now,” Ryan said. “It will not happen in future elections.”
The agreement, among other things, requires the voter registrar’s office to accept a voter application even if it lists a commercial address, but then allowing the registrar to challenge eligibility. In other words, such an application is accepted by default and the onus is on the voter registrar to show that it should not be added to the voter roles.
The Bohac factor
Ryan pointed to a provision in the agreement requiring the voter registrar’s office to update their employee manual to prohibit employees or contractors working with the tax office from having “other employment or financial interests in any outside company providing voter information to any candidate, political party, or other person or entity” (the resolution’s language).
That provision addresses allegations that Bohac and Johnson had coordinated on legislation to help their company. The Lone Star Project alleged that the two colluded on HB 1268 in 2005 in order to benefit their business. (The bill added a statement to a voter registration application that the applicant has not been issued a driver’s license or personal ID card. An applicant could mark the adjoining check box to indicate as much.)
“I can understand the perceptions that that could possibly cause if you are a believer in conspiracy theories,” Vasquez told LSR.
Bettencourt called the claim “preposterous on its face,” adding, “There’s no way that a change in a voter registration card enriches anybody that I’m aware of.”
Bohac’s bill passed to engrossment in the House on May 10, 2005, with nine Democratic members voting no. It passed via the Senate’s local and uncontested calendar.
Vasquez emphasized to LSR that the lawsuit, as a result of the resolution agreement, was dropped. He emphasized that “there was nothing that anyone ever was able to identify as wrongdoing, whether intentional or accidental.” Ryan agreed that there was no finding of wrongdoing in the agreement. O