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In response to
"Another example involves elections. If things don’t go their way, they’ll just take over the process. -- (link)"
by
Qale
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Mattress Mack continues to try and get the 2022 election records, pressing state Senators for help. State law doesn’t permit such a thing.
Posted by
Qale
Apr 18 '23, 18:34
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“We’re pleading with you now to release the public election records that could dampen the breeding mistrust of our officials,” McIngvale testified Tuesday before the Senate Committee on Business and Commerce. His remarks were part of invited testimony by Republican state Sen. Paul Bettencourt of Houston.
The county has separately sued the Texas Attorney General’s Office over its insistence that it turn over records including copies of paper ballots that have had names and IDs redacted from them, saying that releasing the records would break with legal precedent and violate the state’s election code.
In response to McIngvale’s initial records request, the county provided some documents and appealed to the attorney general’s office on the rest, saying it couldn’t turn over records that were part of pending litigation.
The county did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday, but has said that McIngvale’s request was “handled the same as any other requests for documents related to ongoing litigation against the county.”
Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee has said the Texas Public Information Act includes the litigation exemption to prevent the public from misinterpreting information before a case is resolved in court.
Harris County is the subject of several lawsuits targeting the November election, during which a few dozen precincts reported running out of ballot paper. A postmortem by the county’s election administrator’s office found that most of the locations received additional ballot deliveries and that election officials at a third of them gave conflicting accounts of whether they truly did have shortages.
The measure McIngvale was testifying on Tuesday, Senate Bill 1579 by Bettencourt, aims to narrow the circumstances under which an agency needs to appeal to the attorney general’s office.
In theory, it could speed up the process for some applicants to get a decision on their requests. Local and state officials routinely appeal requests to the attorney general’s office, not just in Harris County, and some critics say the practice is overused in order to delay the release of records.
Bettencourt, who used to oversee voter registration in Harris County and was sued himself over not releasing records, is pushing another bill which would more directly deal with McIngvale’s situation by making documents that are part of election-related litigation subject to release.
SB 1579 still has a long way to go to become law, including passing the full Senate and House. On Tuesday, state Sen. Lois Kolkhorst, R-Brenham, appeared to be in support.
“The point is, the government is the people’s government,” she said. “We have to get to a better place where we’re not playing hide-the-ball.”
McIngvale has railed against crime in Harris County in recent years and last year helped bankroll County Judge Lina Hidalgo’s GOP opponent, Alexandra del Moral Mealer, who ultimately lost by about 18,000 votes. He used his remarks Tuesday to veer from the scope of the bill and instead paint a grim picture of a county he said is “besieged by criminals.”
“Do not turn your back on us now,” McIngvale said, claiming that children in Houston are “afraid to walk to school” and mothers “are afraid to go grocery shopping.”
“We’re asking you to send in the Texas Rangers and other law enforcement agencies to help us fight the rampant crime in Harris County,” he said.
Violent crime declined in 2022 in Harris County, but was still above its pre-pandemic rate. Large counties and cities across the country struggled to respond to nationwide spikes in murders and other violent crime during the height of the pandemic.
After his remarks before the committee, McIngvale gathered with reporters outside the state Capitol. Dressed in a sky blue sports coat emblazoned with the names of every winner of the Kentucky Derby, he urged the governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general to “use the weight” of their offices to “shine a light on what happened on election night in Harris County.”
“We need accountability in Harris County,” McIngvale said. “People deserve to know what happened on Election Day. Why did Travis County, Bexar County, Dallas County have the election done by 10 o’clock the night of the election. Harris County took us until 6 o’clock the next day. We’re better than that in Harris County.”
McIngvale was joined Tuesday by Wayne Dolcefino, a former TV news journalist whom McIngvale hired to investigate the election results.
“This is really going to become, I think, sadly, one of the biggest fights over the right to know,” Dolcefino said. “Regardless of whether you’re a conspiracy theorist or not, there were problems in that election. … We are simply trying to find out when they knew there were problems, what they did, what the election administrator did.”
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