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Tuesday, February 15, 2005

02/15/05 - Rick Casey's Houston Chronicle Column

Back to Irish Aires Table of Contents To receive these postings via email, click HERE No Message is necessary. (Poster's Note: Rick slams the Irish.) HoustonChronicle.com -- http://www.HoustonChronicle.com Section: Rick Casey Feb. 8, 2005, 10:48PM Ironic voter fraud found in Vo race By RICK CASEY Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle Republican legislators breathed deep sighs of relief when former state Rep. Talmadge Heflin withdrew his election challenge Monday. If Heflin had pursued his quest for a new election, the entire House would have been forced to vote on the question. Republicans would lose either way. If they voted to uphold the victory by Democratic challenger Hubert Vo, they would anger some Republican Party activists. But if they voted to overturn the election, they would anger many Asian voters, a growing group that so far has not leaned far toward either major party. Democrats would have used a Heflin victory on the floor of the House the way Texians used the slaughter at the Alamo: as a battle cry. And if history is any guide, Vo would have easily won a second election on a wave of voter anger. To make voiding the election politically palatable required strong evidence of fraud by the Vo campaign, which is exactly what Republican leaders and Heflin's attorney, Andy Taylor, had promised. Did Mrs. Vo vote twice? One rumor circulating among the Republican leadership in Austin early on was that the wife of Democratic victor Hubert Vo had voted twice. Now, that sort of illegality would have given Republican legislators political cover for overturning the election. But as soon as Harris County Tax Assessor Collector Paul Bettencourt released a list of a couple of hundred apparently illegal votes, I knew there was not massive fraud. The first clue: Only seven or eight Irish names appeared on the list. I would consider it an insult to my heritage if anyone were to propose that massive Democratic election fraud could succeed with so little Irish participation. The second clue: The list featured even fewer Vietnamese names. Democratic voting fraud is traditionally tribal. If the first Vietnamese-American in the Legislature had stolen the election, it's logical he would have enlisted the help of significant numbers of his fellow Vietnamese. But claims of outrageous fraud vanished in the light of legitimate investigation. Time after time people who voted illegally turned out to have done so out of confusion (often furthered by election officials) and out of a patriotic desire to vote in the presidential election. Did GOP sandbag Africans? As Rep. Will Hartnett, the Republican who served as the "master of discovery" in the investigation, reported after two long days of hearings: "No evidence was presented that any illegal vote was made with knowledge of illegality or intent to violate election law." But as it turns out, the hearings did turn up evidence of some election fraud, with considerable irony. It seems that Heflin's team found a group of African-American voters in the Vo-Heflin race who, voter-registration records indicated, had moved into another legislative district, that of Democrat Rep. Scott Hochberg. But it turned out that these voters had not moved. Someone had fraudulently filed change-of-address cards for them. Who might have done that? A reporter for a left-wing Web site wrote about these and about some questionable entries on voter forms provided by the Heflin legal team. Instead of showing Democratic fraud, the reporter said, the hearings "served up a fine public record of practices by Republicans and unknown others that would suppress their rights." Soon the article was circulating by e-mail among Democratic activists, some of whom demanded an investigation by the district attorney. As it turns out, the District Attorney's Office already was investigating the fraudulent address changes at Bettencourt's request. But the suspect isn't a Republican, and the fraudulent address changes don't appear to have been intended to affect the Heflin-Vo race. Investigators think they were falsely changed in the hopes that the voters in question, mostly naturalized African immigrants, could be persuaded to vote for a Nigerian immigrant in the Democratic primary against Rep. Hochberg. (Authorities have been unable to find the erstwhile candidate for questioning.) It is the good fortune of the Democratic activists who voiced their suspicions to a few thousand friends over the Internet that their rhetoric didn't rise to public attention. It was, like the rhetoric of Heflin, his attorney Taylor and Republican Party leaders, based on assumption and innuendo. Slinging mud into the wind, a bipartisan pastime, is a messy business. You can write to Rick Casey at P.O. Box 4260, Houston, TX 77210, or e-mail him at rick.casey@chron.com Back to Irish Aires Table of Contents To receive these postings via email, click HERE No Message is necessary.
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