Urgent Alert to All Harris County Voters

November 01, 2020 By: El Jefe Category: 2020 Election, Voter Suppression

HEARING IS TOMORROW MORNING AT 10:30 AM.

If you live in Harris County, Texas, and cast your vote in a drive through location this election, your vote, along with almost 130,000 other votes, is in jeopardy.  Radical Republican operatives have filed yet another lawsuit against drive through voting, this time in an effort to actually invalidate all of those votes.  The Texas Supreme Court dismissed a similar suit a couple of weeks ago, but this one, filed in federal court, is before Andrew Hanen, a GWB appointee, who is known as one of the most ultra-conservative judges in the federal system.  The threat of almost 130,000 Harris County residents losing their vote is real.  If this lawsuit succeeds, it will throw the Texas elections into chaos.

Larry Veselka, a well known Houston attorney, is intervening in the case tomorrow and will represent any Harris County voter who cast their vote in a drive through location.  He has provided a Google Doc intervenor form (link below).  If you voted in a drive through location in Harris County, please fill out this form to make your voice heard.

Drive-Through Voter and Intervenor Sign-Up and Consent.

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KHOU Broadcasts False Story about Voting in Harris County

March 04, 2020 By: El Jefe Category: 2020 Election, Voter Suppression

Today, KHOU broadcast a demonstrably false story about yesterday’s long lines at polling places in Harris County. In one of their “Verify” segments, they pretended to investigate the extremely long lines for Democratic voters while Republican voters who had NO lines. The truth is that the GOP polling places had no lines because Trump had already sewn up the nomination (because the RNC declined to hold primaries), so turnout for the remaining primary races was meager.
 
KHOU’s conclusion from their “investigation” was that both Democrats and Republicans “agreed in advance” to hold separate primaries. In short, that conclusion is blatantly false; Harris Country Clerk Diane Trautman even tweeted about how Republicans refused to agree to hold a joint primary so both parties could share the same voting machines. Because of this refusal, the county was required to allocate HALF of the voting machines to the Republican primary even though Democratic primary voters outnumbered Republican voters 3 to 1. Combine that with the Republican controlled Texas government shuttering 750 Texas polling places since 2012 and you have a formula for disaster, which is exactly what happened. Democratic voters stood in line yesterday for up to 5 hours just to cast a primary vote. While this was occurring, Republican poll workers sat and twiddled their thumbs as HALF of the county’s voting machines went virtually unused. The HCRP knew that the Democratic primary was contested which would drive a large turnout. They also knew that hoarding half the machines would make lines much longer in the Democratic primary. Here’s the truth: the HCRP was perfectly happy to inconvenience hundreds of thousands of Harris County residents so they could suppress the Democratic vote and generally make life miserable for them. It was shameful.  Just a little common decency would have gone a long way, but that is completely out of character for today’s GOP.
 
The real shame here was that KHOU blew this story badly by falsely reporting that both parties agreed to the split primary when that was simply not true. There are two possibilities here: KHOU was intimidated into lying about the political practices of the HCRP, OR, the reporter here was simply incompetent.  I’ll leave the conclusions to our readers.
In the meantime, I call on KHOU to correct the record and report this story accurately.
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An Adult at Harris County?

September 12, 2017 By: El Jefe Category: Harvey

As we all know too well, the Texas Gulf Coast, including our own Harris County, home of the Planet Hooston, received its THIRD 500 years storm 10 days ago, flooding over 100,000 homes and causing $150 to $180 billion of damage in Texas.  AGAIN.

Ed Emmett, who is our illustrious County Judge, just had a brilliant idea – why don’t we fix that?  Good idea, Ed.  First let’s talk about some numbers.

  • 178,000 structures sit IN the 100 year floodplain (remember, we’ve had 3 – 500 year plus storms in 3 years.  County flooding guru Jeff Lindner said Harvey was the 40,000 year storm.  How’s that feel?
  • Here’s what really stupid…The county’s 2,450 miles of bayous and streams can only handle 20% of a 100 year storm.  This is why it floods when it gets humid here.
  • There is almost unbridled development going on in flood prone areas.
  • Our two western flood control basins, Addicks and Barker, have outlived their limited capacity to control flooding, as demonstrated by the thousands of homes that were flooded after the county started releasing water to protect the dams themselves.

Emmett, who is a mainstream Republican (he uses his brain) is known for his pragmatic management style.  He’s calling for sweeping changes to thinking on flood control, including a new reservoir, buyouts of flood prone houses, and other flood control measures.  In presenting the plan and speaking of the now common flooding, he said, “We can’t continue to say these are anomalies. You’ve got to say, We’re in a new normal, so how are we going to react to it?”

All I say is amen to that.  The $20 billion it would cost to mitigate flood damage is just a fraction of ONE of these debilitating events.

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