Righteous Warrior

I had planned to sit down and write about something altogether different this Thursday morning. But, first thing, I heard of the death of a friend, Alan Vera. I have written about him frequently. He was the go-to guy on election integrity in the state of Texas, and particularly here in Harris County. I had his number in my phone and called him personally when I had election day questions. (If everybody did that, it’s no wonder HCRP finally got a help line for those issues.)

Alan Vera, speaking at the Cypress Texas Tea Party, November 21, 2022
screenshot from here

Alan passed away this morning, in the state capitol building, just before he was scheduled to testify on several election integrity bills. He was a fixture there during the legislative session. His knowledge and understanding on these matters is unparalleled. People across the state and the nation have been trained and educated by him. He is likely the main reason Texas didn’t allow Dominion voting machines; he showed them to be unreliable. And any good election integrity legislation on the books in Texas likely saw his hand in writing it and getting it passed.

All who knew him are stunned. They had a moment of silence in his honor in today’s hearing.

I have a number of his speeches, long and short, on my phone. I would record him, in case I wanted to quote him later, which I have often done. (See the list of times I’ve written about him below.)

Alan Vera was one of the original founders of True the Vote, along with Catherine Engelbrecht. The first time I met him was when I attended a True the Vote poll watcher training class, and he was my teacher. Hundreds, maybe thousands (I may be vastly underestimating the number), have received poll watcher training from Alan. He stayed with True the Vote until 2014, when he became the Ballot Security committee chair for the Harris County Republican Party. True the Vote is a 501(c)3, which means nonpartisan. He saw that the party needed his particular help more, and he has given that help tirelessly.

There’s a quote that I think fits Alan:

“My life is like my shoes—to be worn out in service.”[i]

I’ve worked with Alan Vera for years on the Senatorial District 7 and Texas platform committees. We didn’t hang out at each other’s houses, but I considered him, along with his wife, Colleen, to be friends. I’ve sat with them at various meetings and candidate forums, and always enjoyed our conversations. I know them to be true righteous warriors.

I will personally miss him. I have followed him on Facebook where it is not all political. He was an Army Ranger, and, as he put it, once you take the oath to protect and defend, you never stop. Almost daily he would put up a quote from Winston Churchill: "We sleep safely because rough men stand ready to visit violence on those who would harm us," and below that a meme about soldiers doing their work. Here’s one he posted Tuesday.

a post on Alan Vera's Facebook page, Tuesday, May 2, 2023

One of the Vera's foster puppies
from Alan's FB page

Another main feature of his social media was letting us know the progress on their puppy rescue. He and Colleen would foster puppies who would otherwise likely be euthanized. They got them healthy and groomed and somewhat socialized, and then they would see them off on their journeys to be adopted by their “furever families.” He would post photos of them in the process, and about to leave—and on their way and at their new homes when photos got sent to him. We had a dog problem in our neighborhood a few months back; two dogs got loose and attacked our dog. This had happened multiple times recently to other families. We talked to the owner later, and they needed advice on what to do with these dogs. I called Alan, expert on dog rescues as well as election integrity. He gave advice on rescues and who to contact, which I was able to pass along.

This is something he posted last Friday, which seems so appropriate now.

a post passed along on Alan Vera's Facebook page a week ago

He also had a great, and slightly warped, sense of humor. And some of his social media posts showed that side, which was always good for a daily laugh. 

Whenever he had an important talk or training to give, he would ask for our prayers. I would stop what I was doing and pray for him.

The last time he spoke at our Cypress Texas Tea Party meeting, he said something that has stuck with me, and has maybe more meaning now. The words in quotes are his, as I quoted them here: 

“Plan A for election integrity in Texas is that 99% of all adult Texans live their lives according to traditional Judeo-Christian principles.” But the reality is, “Thousands of people across the state have consented to being human agents of powers and principalities of darkness, and are working to undermine the state and this country, which God himself founded.” So his Plan B continues to be: Deterrence, Prevention, and Real-time Intervention.

He was a warrior against those powers and principalities of darkness; he has been doing yeoman’s work here on earth in the fight. The grand story is reaching a climax. We know from scripture how the story turns out. Still, there are battles yet to be waged. Here on earth we will somehow have to continue without him, which feels daunting. But this life here is not the only place where a spiritual battle is waged. I can only assume that, at such a time as this, he was tagged for fighting in the spiritual realm, where such a man as he can be even more effective. After our eventual victory, I look forward to hearing his battle stories of how he helped us win.

 Some of My Posts that Include Wisdom from Alan Vera

·        “Election Debacle Report”—November 21, 2022 

·        “Deterrence, Prevention, and Real-Time Intervention”—July 28, 2022 

·        “Chain-of-Custody Issues"—May 12, 2022” 

·        “When Does Incompetence Become Cover for Intentional Wrongdoing?”—March 7, 2022

·        “Boring Is Good”—November 1, 2011 

·        “Being There”—September 29, 2011 

 

Videos

·        Alan Vera at Cypress Texas Tea Party November 19, 2022 

·        Alan Vera at Cypress Texas Tea Party July 23, 2022 

 

Media Stories Today

·        Harris County GOP Statement on the Passing of Longtime Activist and Ballot Security Chairman Alan Vera—May 4, 2023 

·        “Well Done, Soldier: Remembering Alan Vera” by Erin Anderson for Texas Scorecard, May 4, 2023. 

·        “Longtime Harris County GOP activist Alan Veradies before testifying at Texas Capitol” by Taylor Goldenstein for the Houston Chronicle, May 4, 2023. 

---

[i] The quote is from Spencer W. Kimball, former Prophet and President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as recounted by Gordon B. Hinckley, “He Is at Peace,” Ensign, December 1985, p. 41. 

Election Debacle Report

I haven’t had a chance to debrief, following the November 8^th Midterm Election. Maybe it’s better to have waited a couple of weeks, so I can look at data and facts, and not be overcome by emotion.

In Texas at large, Republicans won big. We won some House districts that I’m quite happy about—special congratulations to Terri Leo Wilson and Mark Dorazio, both of whom I consider my friends. And, again, we won all the statewide offices.

But in Harris County, where I live, it was one disappointment after another. And there were widespread problems with the election. Were our losses a failure to GOTV? Or were they insurmountable election system issues? Or some combination?

Let me look first at the voter apathy issue. I can look at my precinct, and my polling place. They may or may not be typical, but at least it’s data I have. This relates to the energy of the electorate, which is at odds with the final results. But if you’re not interested in this very local detail, you can scroll down to the broader county report.

 

My Precinct and Polling Location

When we opened our polling place at 7:00 AM (workers arrive at 5:30 AM to make opening on time a reliable reality), we had 70 people already in line, waiting to vote. We never caught up throughout the day. This is even though we are very efficient in getting people to fill every available voting machine. We marked the end of the line at 7:00 PM, and it took us until 8:00 PM to clear all the voters in line.

The school where we have our polling location. We use a band room,
with its own entrance, off to the left.
image from Google Maps

We had a record number of voters for this polling place—around 900.

Our polling place is not limited to our precinct, since there is countywide voting now on election day. When we had polling places assigned to precincts, prior to 2019, there was another polling place in the elementary school next door to the middle school where we’re located. The problem with countywide voting was that, if polling places are too close together, a person could vote at one location and then vote again at a second location that was within 20-30 minutes away, before the electronic pollbook was updated to show that voter had voted. The one within 5 minutes of our location, then, was eliminated. So heavier voter traffic than historically is hard to measure back further than a couple of years.

In March, during the Primary Election, we ended up running both the Republican and Democrat polling, because the Democrats didn’t hire any workers for our location and asked us last minute to step up and help without any additional pay. We did it. We had about 100 more Republican voters than Democrat voters that day at our polling location. Our area is close to even between the parties but leans Republican.

In my precinct (which includes early voting and voters who go elsewhere on Election Day) I had 437 Republican Primary voters. I got 639 known Republican votes in the November election. That looks to me like a pretty excited Republican electorate.

I have data to drill down a little deeper for this election, but I don’t still have access to data to make apples-to-apples comparisons to previous elections.

I had 2231 voters from my precinct in the November 8 election, of 5002 registered voters, for a turnout of 44.6%. Of known Republican voters, I got 639 out of 806 for a turnout of 79.3%. Democrats got 488 out of 656 for a turnout of 74.4%. Swing voters are the largest cohort; we got 1104 out of 3540 for a turnout of 39.8%. I don’t have That’s not an unexpected increase. Only committed party voters show up in a primary election. Those, plus Democrats or other parties who cross over, plus the “swing voters, which includes not just people who swing from one party to another, but those who are not committed to a party, the independents. You get even more in a presidential election year, such as 2020, because a lot of voters only tune in enough to vote when they’re bombarded with presidential election ads and news for a full year.

Those who are saying our turnout was down are comparing it to the 2020 election. I had 3465 votes cast from my precinct in the 2020 election; that’s out of 4792 registered voters, 72.31%. 1709 were for Trump; 1673 were for Biden. That’s a difference of just 36 votes.

If you look at differences in this election, my precinct was significantly more Republican. I put it in a table.  Here is a key: CD 38 is my US Congressional race; it’s a new district. “Comptr” is Comptroller, the state controller of funds. “GLO” is General Land Office. “Ag Comm” is Agriculture Commissioner. “RR” is Railroad Commissioner, which handles Oil & Gas mainly—long story regarding the name. “SBOE” is State Board of Education. “HD” is state House District. “DJ” is District Judge; I chose a particular race as a representative race, rather than the many dozen district judge races. “HC Judge” is the Harris County Judge, the administrator of the county. Then we have District Clerk, Harris County Clerk, Harris County Treasurer. And “CC Pct 4” is the County Commissioner for county precinct 4. The County Commissioners Court consists of four County Commissioners and the County Judge.

Note that this table shows only my precinct data, not necessarily the winners of those races.

My precinct data for several races, November 8, 2022 Midterm Election.
I gathered the canvass report data from the Harris County elections report site.

This lets me do at least a bit of comparison. For example, in 2018, the last Midterm Election, I remembered my Texas House Representative won by just a tiny margin, and a lot of it was the difference in my precinct. This time that race was a 7-point spread in my precinct, which was by no means the highest spread. Here’s the 2018 table for comparison. There was no SBOE race in my area that year; the other races are the same as the 2022 table. However, not all races have the same candidates.

My precinct data for the same races, from the November 2018 Midterm Election.
I gathered the canvass report data from the Harris County Elections Archives.

Support for the Governor went down—mainly due to pandemic orders that went against freedom, plus the ongoing border crisis. Just about every other race, the Republican vote in my precinct was a much higher spread.

HD 138 went from 0.8% to 7.0%, with an increase of 135 Republican votes. The DJ 248 race went from 2.6% to 12.6%, with an increase of 206 Republican votes. The County Judge went from a very respectable 7.5% to 12.4%, with an increase of 84 Republican votes. My precinct still just leans Republican, but it’s a much stronger lean than in 2018.

I believe we had both better turnout and more Republican voters. While some precinct chairs could claim credit—because of their blockwalking and get-out-the-vote efforts, I’m not one of those. I mainly contact active Republican voters and get them the information they need to be informed voters. The overall excitement was not coming from me. That’s why I believe we had that excitement over all or most of the county.

And that’s why I’m so shocked at our complete sweep of losses across all county races.

So that brings us to what else was going on in this election.

 

The Mess That Was the Harris County Election

We had ballot security expert Alan Vera come and speak at our Tea Party again on Saturday, to give us a report. It wasn’t pretty. He starts off this way:

Earlier this year, during the heat of the fight over the primary election, some guy named Alan Vera looked at the TV cameras from every major Houston TV station and said, "Incompetence is the perfect camouflage for malfeasance." I refuse to use the word incompetence anymore in discussing elections in Harris County. We’re long past that phase. The accurate words to use are malfeasance and collusion.

Ballot security expert Alan Vera, at Cypress Texas Tea Party, November 19, 2022.
screenshot from here

It’s hard to know how much our local news makes its way to other places. But, as Vera says later,

General and Special Election in Harris County, Texas, and Maricopa County, Arizona, have replaced Broward County, Florida, as the election laughingstock of the country. Think about—those of you who are old enough to remember—who won the presidential election in 2000. Remember that that year, and for years afterward, Broward County, Florida, was the cesspool of elections in the US. If something was going to go wrong, it was Broward County that was going to screw it up. Today you're living in one of two main cesspools of election integrity in the US. I’m not sure there’s a bottle of Rid-X [septic treatment] big enough to clean out the mess we have in Harris County.

So, what were the problems this time? Let’s just say, if there were issues in the past elections—and they were so bad the County Judge actually required the resignation of her specially chosen crony that she’d appointed as the Election Administrator (we covered details here)—those were still present. But today we’ll deal mainly with the new ones. Here’s the list, and then we’ll go into a bit more detail.

·        Preventing Republican Election Workers.

·        Misallocating polling places and equipment.

·        Failing to provide ballot paper.

·        Spoiled ballot problems.

·        More ballots than voters.

First, trying to prevent Republican election workers. The law required that any judges and workers be provided by the parties by the deadline of the end of June; any such listed persons had to be appointed. Done—we thought. Harris County Republican Party provided more than ever before. But then the County, after the deadline, instead of confirming these workers, sent out an invitation at large for workers. If the workers who had already signed up saw those emails and didn’t respond—because they had already applied and been selected by the party weeks or months earlier—the Harris County EA’s office kicked them out of the system and replaced them with workers of their own choosing. Just a minor miscommunication? On top of all their other shenanigans, I don’t think so.

Second, misallocating polling places and equipment. Some background here. Up through 2018, when Stan Stanart, as County Clerk, ran the elections, the County was facing an ADA lawsuit (that’s the Americans with Disabilities Act). The lawsuit claimed that there were hazards preventing people with disabilities from voting. There were no such actual claimants, only an organization that wanted to impose its will. Before Democrat rule, Stan Stanart and Harris County fought the lawsuit and refused to submit. But the moment the Democrats took the wheel, they took on the fines and the burden of dealing with ADA requirements. The ADA training, added to our poll worker training, the first time or two added an extra hour that could have been handled with a 5-minute explanation saying essentially, “If you need to make adjustments to your polling place, you’ll get equipment and instructions when you pick up your voting equipment.” I’m not against that accommodation when needed. But there’s more to it. And they have since much condensed the ADA part of election worker training.

One of the ADA requirements is that a polling place must be within one block of public transportation. If you’re from some eastern city, you might think that makes sense. But we—out here beyond the Houston city limits, and many places within those limits—have no public transportation. At all. You drive, or you hire an uber. But this rule gave the Democrats the idea that they could disqualify all those suburban schools and other polling places—in mainly Republican strongholds. They couldn’t fully get away with that, but they did make polling places more scarce for Republicans, and it doesn’t look random.

There were entire school districts—I believe Spring Branch ISD was one—in which the Elections Administrator’s office said, “They refused to allow us to use their schools this year,” which I believe the schools can’t even do. But HCRP made calls to Spring Branch ISD and learned they had received zero requests for the use of their schools, but they were willing to host polling locations, as they always had. Hmm.

We got our regular polling location this time (we’d been placed elsewhere in 2019). It took some insistence, and repetition, and reminding them that we had a relationship with the school, which would make things go more smoothly. And, as you might have noted from above, we’re only just barely Republican leaning, so there are a lot of Democrat voters they’d be disenfranchising here.

But they cut the number of machines and workers from our Primary Election allotment, even though the November General Election typically has a much higher turnout than a Primary Election. We had 21 working machines in March (because we ran the Democrats’ Primary for them, we only opened one controller line for them, which is all we could staff, but I think there were more machines). They cut our staff to PJ, AJ, plus four clerks. We needed six clerks to fill their requirements. As a result, I was planning to just volunteer (work without pay), and the AJ’s husband ended up going to a different polling location to work. A few days before the election, they let us have our full six.

We asked why we had been given these smaller allotments and couldn’t get an answer.

Third, failing to provide ballot paper. This isn’t the first time for this one, exactly. In the Primary, they figured out, during the weekend of handing out equipment, that someone had estimated ballot paper as one page per voter when we have a long ballot that requires two legal-size pages. In that election, some Presiding Judges got the wrong size paper—letter-size rather than legal-size, all of which was unusable. Others just got half of what they needed, so they had to go back for a second time to the pickup location to get more. That was our experience.

So you’d think they would figure this out. But somehow they managed to underestimate how much paper would be needed—at these various locations similar to ours where they thought we’d get way fewer voters than in the Primary, instead of more. (Remember, a general election is both parties plus independents, so it’s almost guaranteed to be more voters than in the Primary.) In our polling location, we had a clerk start making phonecalls for more paper by around 10:30 in the morning, based on the kind of traffic we were getting. We got lucky. The roving technician assigned to us, who stops by every two hours, had two extra boxes of paper in his vehicle, and he gave us one. Giving these technicians all the extra paper their route might need would have solved the problem entirely.

By the time the County got around to delivering the requested paper, around 6:00 PM, we were two reams into the new box. (The delivery guy left the extra box anyway, showing that a paper shortage was never the issue.) We would have been one of those shut-down polling places, if we hadn’t been both proactive and lucky.

Other polling locations were not so lucky. Stories abound. Many were on hold or were ignored entirely by the County’s call line. One story I heard was a polling place that did that long wait on hold, and then the County told them, “You’re wrong; you have enough paper,” refusing to believe them or send over the needed paper.

They did finally send out additional paper—a pallet load full. They put that in motion at 5:00 PM, during Houston’s going-home traffic hour, ensuring they couldn’t get across the county in less than an hour. By the way, there were places that had run out of paper as early as 2:00 PM. Everyone arriving between 2:00 PM and 7:00 PM got turned away.

There were, I think at latest count, 23 polling locations that ran out of paper—and had to send voters away. Maybe the voters had time to go to some other polling place and wait in lines made longer there by the closing of these polling places; or maybe they didn’t have that kind of transportation or time. Voters were absolutely, definitely disenfranchised by this action of the Election Administrator’s office, which is indeed a criminal offense, since it’s the thing the Democrats are always accusing Republicans of attempting.

But, by the way, all 23 of these paper-deficit polling locations just happened to be in strong Republican areas. What a coincidence.

Fourth, you may recall that we had paper jamming problems in each election since we started using these machines in November 2021. Smaller elections, with one letter-size page, were not as bad as the Primary and General, where we have 99 lines on the ballot. This time they added a paper feeding device to the machine and promised us in training that you couldn’t even force them to jam now. Except, in my training, the first try jammed. And then the demonstration of the duo-go (for handicapped curbside voting) also jammed.

Showing the new paper path guide, intended to prevent jams,
from page 153 of the Harris County Elections Manual 2022-2023

We had paper jams, as if the paper feeding devices did no good at all. We had to have one person working each line, to help voters with paper feeding problems, at all times. That ended up being my assignment for the whole day. I got very good at it. I could hear the little hum that meant the person is ready for printing, and I’d get close to see if they needed help. Sometimes the paper just needed a little much nudge, to catch, than you’d think it would need. Even with my help, we still had some jams. Most of the time we could easily deal with reprinting a page and spoiling the crumpled page.

At our polling place, because of our special care, we had almost no problems at the scanner. That wasn’t true for other places, where scanners couldn’t read smeared or crumpled ballot pages. And this is where the real problems show up.

By the way, I’ll mention here something new Alan Vera told us. Tarrant County, where Ft. Worth is, uses the same machines we do. Also, they are a large county with a long ballot that requires two ballot pages. And yet they have zero paper jams. What’s the difference? They maintain and calibrate their machines. A FOIA request in Harris County reveals that there has been no maintenance schedule for our voting machines. Is this incompetence, or are the people running our elections planning to use the mis-scanned ballots to cheat?

If a scanner takes one of the two pages but not the other, the solution is to put the second page of that ballot in an emergency chute. It is then read by hand at Central Count. But that’s not what people were doing—and this problem arose during Early Voting. Poll workers instead gave the person a new voter code and had them redo their ballot, print it, and place BOTH of the new pages into the scanner. That means that voter got, at minimum, 1 ½ votes.

And there’s more. Some voting locations—innocently or not—very wrongly placed spoiled ballots in the emergency chute on the scanner, instead of in the carefully segregated spoiled ballots envelope, to which we attach the voter’s name and time of voting, to make sure we do not accidentally allow that spoiled ballot to be counted while they get a reprinted ballot page that is counted.

Fifth, that’s one way you get more ballots than voters. But Harris County’s Elections Administrator’s office found another one. Because there were some voting locations that did not open on time (equipment failures, or possibly just not skilled enough workers), they went to a judge—without even notifying the Republicans—and requested an extra hour of voting, which the judge granted, illegally. But we were instructed to take voters who arrived between 7:00 and 8:00 PM and have them vote provisionally. We handled about 10 of these. That means their ballots would be segregated and not counted, until they could be proven to be legal, acceptable ballots, which is called “curing.” That’s what we do if someone needs to provide proof of something—such as, if they were given a mail-in ballot and claim they didn’t use it, they can vote provisionally, and then later turn in their unused mail-in ballot to “cure” their provisional ballot.

In this weird case, these post-7:00 PM provisional ballots were supposed to be segregated from any other provisional ballots. We can’t be sure that happened around the County. Then we got a message, at 8:20 PM, after we’d processed all voters, including those provisionals, that we should not allow after-7:00 PM provisional ballots, because another judge had stayed the first judge’s ruling, so they couldn’t even vote provisionally after 7:00 PM.

I haven’t mentioned yet a new problem we noticed at our polling location this time. There were a large number of voters whose ID did not scan or did not show up in the system. An advanced search by name turned them up. One of our clerks handled 15 of these—at the same apartment address. We don’t have power at our polling location to deny a voter whose name shows up as a registered voter. But 15 from one apartment—young people, lots of tattoos and piercings, all showing up late in the day, and their IDs don’t scan. And that’s just in the line that noticed; we don’t know if there were more from that apartment who ended up in the other line.

Voter roll problems continue, so I didn't list that. But Alan Vera tells us there are 200,000 known names on Harris County voter rolls that do not live here and are not legal voters. We made a big effort this summer to try to identify a number of troubled places, to verify that voters did not live there, particularly in places listing many voters in one location. We sent in affidavits to legally challenge those names. They are nevertheless still on the rolls. 

What I think this shows is fake driver licenses. We had that issue come up last election a couple of times, but it was for addresses that didn’t even exist in the county. When we couldn’t let this one guy vote, he just picked up his ID card and mumbled something about having to talk with his friends. Later I learned that there was indeed an entity manufacturing fake driver licenses for the purpose of voting. Now, apparently, they’ve learned to at least identify an actual location within the county. They just haven’t learned not to have them all assigned to the same apartment—at least not then have them all show up at the same polling location.

Yes, there is a place to report such voting irregularities. In Harris County it is DefendMyBallot.org/.   Elsewhere in Texas, you can make similar reports at Texas.ProtecttheVote.com. This is for any PJ, AJ, clerk, poll watcher, or voter who observed an election irregularity. Getting it in writing by eyewitnesses is the way to build a case.

This is, as Alan Vera put it, “alarming and infuriating.” He also gave us the only real solution: “Plan A for election integrity in Texas is that 99% of all adult Texans live their lives according to traditional Judeo-Christian principles.” But the reality is, “Thousands of people across the state have consented to being human agents of powers and principalities of darkness, and are working to undermine the state and this country, which God himself founded.” So his Plan B continues to be: Deterrence, Prevention, and Real-time Intervention.

Alan Vera (left), HCRP attorney Andy Taylor, HCRP Chair Cindy Siegel,
Senator Paul Bettencourt, former District Clerk and candidate Chris Daniels,
at press conference November 10, 2022
screenshot from here

 

This is what happens when I don’t write often enough; I write one blog post that is long enough to be three or four. If you’ve read this far, congratulations. You might also want to check out these videos and other sources related to the Harris County election debacle:

·        Alan Vera at our Cypress Texas Tea Party meeting November 19, 2022. 

·        Cindy Siegel and HCRP press conference November10, 2022 

·        Cindy Siegel and HCRP press conference November14, 2022 

·        Post by Sen. Paul Bettencourt, with links to several Houston Chronicle stories. 

Deterrence, Prevention, and Real-Time Intervention

This past Saturday, at our local Tea Party meeting, we had the privilege of hearing from Alan Vera on election integrity—including a heavy dose of what we need to do. Alan is an expert on the subject and trains people nationwide in fighting various kinds of election fraud. As one of the originators of True the Vote, he was mytrainer for poll watching back in 2011.

Unfortunately, I missed the first 20 minutes or so of his talk; I was stuck in traffic, spending 40 minutes to travel the last 2 miles. Of course there was no warning of the slowdown until after the only previous exit. I recorded it (here), but I’m missing that first part. Still, there was enough in the hour, including Q&A, that I heard to share a few gems here.

He reiterated the refrain that we need “Deterrence, Prevention, and Real-Time Intervention.” I’ll mostly be looking at his stories of real-time intervention—the stories of what regular citizens have done and need to do, because, as he puts it, “Law enforcement ain’t comin’ over the hill to save us.”

Alan Vera, former Army Ranger, election integrity expert,
speaks at the Cypress Texas Tea Party, July 23, 2022
screenshot from here

This first story is from way too close to home—about three miles down the street:

The day before Early Voting in 2020, I got a call from a lady here in West Houston. She had been to the Food Town Grocery at the corner of Highway 6 and FM [farm-to-market road] 529. She came out of the Food Town and was stopped by a young man and young lady, each of whom was pulling a big wagon full of canvas bags. And they said to her, “Would you like to earn a $100 gift card?” And she said, “Well, yeah. What do I have to do?” “Well, just take a handful of these home, sign them, put a stamp on them, and send them in.” And she said, “What are they?”

So they pulled out a stack. It was all mail ballots. Already filled out. Every Democrat candidate was checked. And they showed her, “Just check the name of the voter here. Fold it up, and before you seal it sign your name across that seal. And here is the roll stamps to send it in with.”

And she said, “I don't feel comfortable with that.” She went home and called the Harris County Sheriff's Office, but they said, “We don't do election fraud.”

We don’t do election fraud! Law enforcement ain’t comin’ over the hill to save us.

Sure, we need laws on the books, and we’ve done well at upping some the crimes to felonies. But once the crime is committed, it’s often too late. We need to deter, prevent, and step up—in real time—to stop the steal from happening in the first place.

Another of Alan’s stories is from 2020, when the interim county clerk, replacing the elected county clerk who stepped down amid ethical violations “for health reasons because of COVID,”—that interim clerk did all he could to use the COVID crisis, proving that mail ballots are their chosen election fraud tool:

Back in 2020, you know, County Clerk Chris Hollis held a press conference. He announced that there was going to be a record number of mail ballots in Harris County for that election: 285,000 mail ballots was his confident prediction. We knew the Democrats were going to use try to use mail ballots as their key fraud that election.

So in March of 2020, my wife, Colleen, published the first of two articles exposing the mail ballot fraud ring in Harris County, to get started on it. And we published that, and we said, “What do we do now?” And we said, “Let's pray.” So we prayed.

some of the evidence found by Colleen Vera,
in her 2020 post here

Two days later, I got phone calls from four private investigative agencies. They'd seen the article. They said, “What can we do to help?” We said, “What do you know? How can you help me again?” They said, “We know where the two buildings are which are the mail ballot factories in Harris County. One’s owned by a guy named Womack [?—couldn’t tell what he said]. The other owned by a guy named Dallas Jones. We know where those are.”

So I said, “Tell about that.”

“Well, there's buildings, two-story buildings. People come in, and they go to the top floor, and they work there all day, signing mail ballots—fraudulently signing mail ballots. We know where they are.”

I said, “Well, can you surveille them?” They laughed, and said, “We'll do better than that.”

So they surveilled these two buildings. But they didn't do it clandestinely from two blocks away with binoculars. They were on the sidewalk outside the front door of each building, with video cameras. They were recording the face of everyone going in their door. They were taking photos of their driver's licenses. [I think he means license plates, visible on every car.] They were making it very uncomfortable to go in and out of those buildings.

Two weeks before early voting began, they shut down both facilities, thanks to four private eyes who said, “We’re going to do something.”

That’s only the first part of the story. Here are some more details of a win for the freedom fighters:

And you all have seen the movie 2000 Mules. We didn't have unmanned drop boxes in Texas. But we had worse. Governor Abbott, in his COVID wisdom, extended early voting by a week in 2020. Then he did something much worse. He changed the rules for dropping off your mail ballot in person.

The Texas Election Code says you can drop off your mail ballot in person on only one day: Election Day between 7 AM and 7 PM, and only at the main office of the Early Voting clerk, which is the EA [election administrator]. One day, 12 hours. Governor Abbott extended it to 62 days. 62 days, you could drop off your mail ballot.

Well, I wrote and sent off a letter of protest. Got [Senator] Bettencourt involved, Senator Hughes involved. Said, “You guys got to do something about this.” And then I just prayed. Prayed and prayed and prayed.

Two days later, I got a call from a church leader I'd never met before. She said, “I hear you need some help with mail ballots.” I said, “Yeah, I need 35 poll watchers who will be around 24/7 at NRG Arena and stop the mail ballot fraud to that venue.” She said, “Give me two days.”

Two days later, she had me 35 poll watchers willing to go round the clock at NRG. And I trained them by Zoom call Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights. And they did it. They did it. They stood at NRG through rain, and through heat, through wind, thunderstorms. They were there 62 days at NRG Arena.

mail ballots being turned in at NRG Arena in Houston in 2020,
Getty image by Go Nakamura, found here

Did they stop stuff? You betcha.

Car after car would pull up with banker's boxes full of mail ballots filled with mail ballots. And these church poll watchers said, “No, the law says you can only drop off your own mail ballot. That's it. And you must show ID to do so. And the name and signature on your driver's license has to match the name and signature on the carrier envelope. And then you have to sign this form here,” it’s a sign-in form with the time you dropped off your mail ballot.

They upheld that. And they turned away car after car after car, full of mail ballots to be dropped off. They stopped it.

Now, there were a couple of nights that got kind of harry. And, believe it or not, the private detective guys were across the street from NRG Arena with binoculars, making sure our polls were okay. They were watching over them.

Chris Hollins said 285,000 mail ballots. We got 163,000, just average for Harris County in a presidential election. We beat him. We beat him without a single act by law enforcement or any elected official. Real time intervention.

This is not to say you don’t also work with the legislature and law enforcement. This next story is a good look behind the scenes of the legislative fight. To remind you, in the 2021 legislative session, we had a bill, SB1, that would strengthen voter laws in a number of ways. The legislators cut work short by a day, preventing some final bills from passing, which included this one. So the Governor called a special session. The Democrats fled the state so no business could be done. So the Governor called a second special session, by the end of which some Dems were trickling back in. There were three sessions in all, but the “time bomb” was planted in the second:

From August 2020 to October 2020, there were four of us working clandestinely to write the bill that eventually became Senate Bill 1. It was myself representing Harris County Republican Party. It was the Texas Public Policy Foundation. It was Texans for Lawsuit Reform. And it was the Opiela Law Firm up in Austin. We worked for three months drafting Senate Bill 1, and the bill was finally filed that January. 80% of the language was ours.

So we got it done. We hand it off. And now it belongs to Senator Bryan Hughes. And we got to watch the Democrats go apoplectic over Senate Bill 1. They broke quorum. They fled to Washington. They held press conferences. They yelled voter suppression. And we're all sitting back here laughing. The four of us again going, “Gee, no one knows we did that.” But it’s fun to watch them melt down.

So then Senate Bill 1 didn't pass in the regular session, because they broke quorum.  It didn't pass in the first special session. And Democrats are starting to trickle back. Between the first and second special session, we were doing a project for Mike Schofield, and I suddenly remembered, because I’m old, that—Holy Cow! We've got another problem. In Harris County, since the Democrats took over in 2019, in every election we have had more ballots and voters. Another miracle of the loaves and fishes. Every election there were more ballots cast than voters who signed in.

So I approached Senator Bettencourt and Senator Hughes, and said, “Guys, I need to add two sentences to Senate Bill 1.” Just two simple sentences. Just requiring that, every election there be a reconciliation of the number of voters and the number of ballots. They snuck it in there between the sessions.

Now, because the special session starts all over again, Senate Bill 1 was refiled. It wasn’t like an amendment from the floor of the Senate. It was refiled. So these two sentences are at the bottom of page 38 and an 80 page bill. Nobody noticed them. They fought over the poll watchers. They fought over the civil penalties. They fought over everything, but not over that reconciliation issue. It sailed through and was finally passed in the second special session.

So, like a good Army Ranger booby trap, the tripwires were set. The detonators were all primed. and the ammo was all live; the explosives were all live. And it just sat there sat there. It sat there until the March 1^st Primary. Isabel Longoria [the appointed Elections Administrator, after the County Commission removed oversight of elections from the County Clerk] had pretty much screwed up everything about the elections. She had screwed everything up. And it was getting harder and harder for [Harris County] Judge Hidalgo to continue to support her—especially when the Communist Chronicle [the Houston Chronicle] even said, “Sorry, Dems, this mess is not the Republicans’ fault.”

Then, on election night, of course we had to sue, because she was not going to finish counting the ballots in the 24-hour period required by law. We had to go to court to sue to give her more time to count the ballots. It took her 41 hours instead of 24 hours.

And then came the moment of truth: the reconciliation form. They signed it at 3:00 in the morning, on March 3^rd. They're all sleepy, they're all groggy. And they signed it and sent to Secretary of State. The next day, he called and said, “Harris County, you seem to have forgotten to count 10,000 ballots. Boom! Trip wires went off. Detonators went off. It was great. Lina Hidalgo then asked for Isabel's resignation.

No one knows who did that. Bettencourt knows was, because he helped me get it in there. But it's fun. There's real satisfaction in doing things quietly behind the scenes that nobody will ever know about. It’s important. It's important.

So real time intervention, it's up to us.

There were more stories, and there was more advice. But this is enough for now. Again, he makes sure we understand—this November 8^th, no one gets to sit home on election day. We’ve all got to volunteer. Work the polls, or be a poll watcher. Or volunteer at central count. Between now and then, we can help check the voter rolls and clean them up; we can get our neighbors to understand how important it is to vote in this election.

I asked Alan afterward if what I’m seeing is true: if we don’t stop the voter fraud this election, and we lose to Democrat cheating, is that the end of our freedom? Are things that dire?” He said yes, things are that dire.

Don’t be caught sleeping through the demise of our great country, when you could be taking a day off to deploy to somewhere in your county to guarantee free and fair elections. Join in our fight to recover our constitutional republic. Be there for the real-time interventions.

When Does Incompetence Become Cover for Intentional Wrongdoing?

This is going to be a debrief of our Harris County election last Tuesday, which was pretty much a disaster.

In a pair of press conferences over the weekend (Friday here and Monday here), Harris County Republican Chair Cindy Siegel listed some of the problems:

·       Double booking election workers to the same polling place.

·       Telling election judges who were planning to work that they weren’t needed, instead of sending them where they were needed.

·       Delivering equipment to the wrong places—even to a place that wasn’t even a polling place.

·       Missing equipment.

·       Equipment that didn’t work.

·       Delivering the wrong size paper (the very long ballot required two legal-size pages; they sent letter size to some locations).

·       Poor training, delivered late in the process.

And more.

from left, Alan Vera, Sen. Paul Bettencourt, Cindy Siegel,
Marga Matthews, and Steven Mitby,
screenshot from Friday's press conference

First today I’ll debrief our polling place, which, because of our experience, handled problems relatively smoothly. But—there was a lot the County did that made things more difficult than they needed to be.

Then I’ll cover a bit more of what happened countywide that has led to a lawsuit asking for the resignation of the unelected bureaucrat hired to run our elections “more efficiently.”

 

Our Polling Place

We got to run our usual polling place this time. But back in November, we waited and waited for the County to give us our assignment. When they finally did, they assigned us to another place about 20 minutes away, and assigned our polling place to some random Democrat judge. Traditionally, the party with the majority of votes in the previous election gets to run that place, so I was entitled to it as precinct chair. But since the Democrats took over County government in 2018, they have been trying to marginalize precinct chairs and prevent our connection to our voters. So this wasn’t that surprising.

That November election—a low-turnout election with very little on the ballot—was our first experience with the new paper ballot system. It was a good one to practice on. The system is built by the same makers as the previous eSlate system: Hart. We don’t use Dominion anywhere here in Texas; too many flaws. This paper system was first used last May’s special district elections. But our area didn’t have anything on the ballot, so we didn’t experience it then. Anyway, this election is the third round for the County to be using it.

This system, in theory, is pretty good. Nothing is connected to the internet except the ePollbooks—the tablet we use to identify registered voters, which we’ve been using since around 2016. We use photo ID to check them in. A driver’s license works best; it has a code on the back that can be scanned to bring up their registration, which works pretty well. Other forms of ID—or none of those, under certain circumstances—can be used for those without a driver's license. Some of those we have to type in the information and do a search of the voter rolls. When that doesn’t work, the presiding judge handles it with a call to the County to verify a person’s eligibility.

Once the person is checked in, we print them a code to use at the voting booth. In this system, the machine is called a Duo. They can enter their code in any Duo tied to the Controller that printed out their code. They then insert the paper, just until it catches; it hangs out. They make their voting decisions on the touch screen of the Duo. Once they’re ready, the Duo prints the ballot. It is heat-sensitive paper, which makes it permanent and difficult to duplicate. Once the ballot is printed, the voter goes over to the Scanner, a totally separate machine, and inserts the ballot. The Scanner records a digitally-scanned image of the ballot, saved in a sealed part of the machine, and the paper ballot is dropped into the ballot box below. So the digital scans are quick to count at the end of the voting day, but the paper ballots are available for comparison in case of a recount.

In theory, that’s all good. There are some physical difficulties. The Duo machines are prone to misfeed the paper. If a voter inserts the paper very carefully, with two hands and a lot of patience, no problem. But in real life paper frequently misfeeds.

Add to that, this past week’s ballot required two legal-sized pages—have I mentioned that we have the longest ballot in the country? There were 99 choices (89 races plus 10 resolutions) on the ballot. You need to insert the first page and let it hang out of the machine while you make all those choices on the touch screen. You need to do something with that second sheet of paper. We instructed voters to place it carefully alongside the privacy screen at the side of the Duo. But if a person held it in hand, or let it get scrunched or bent, is was more likely to misfeed. We were suspicious that some machines were more likely to misfeed than others, maybe because paper that had gotten stuck earlier left scraps inside that got in the way. But we were pretty busy running an election to verify that.

For every paper that got scrunched, we had to replace the paper and reprint that page—and we accounted for each spoiled page, and identified on the voter on the judge’s tablet. Those spoiled pages got placed in an envelope for that purpose and were returned to the counting center with the judge’s box at the end of the day.

This was a problem everywhere and kept us busy. We had a sense there were more Republican spoiled ballots than Democrat—but then we had a lot more Republican voters. So it’s hard to know whether the percentage was comparable, or whether our equipment was more often malfunctioning.

The real problems of the day—all around Harris County—were at the Scanner. Sometimes the Scanner wouldn’t scan a page. This happened if the Duo misprinted or smeared. This could easily happen if a Duo only slightly misfed but came through eventually and the voter didn’t notice. It could happen if a voter thought the Duo was finished printing and gave the paper a tug just a tad too early. Anyway, it was a vulnerability. It happened a number of times at our location, but nowhere near as often as the Duo misfeeds.

When the Scanner would not scan a page, we could place the unscannable page in the emergency ballot box, attached; those ballots would be hand counted at Central Counting at night. We followed procedure at the end of the day, placing those unscanned ballots from the emergency box into a special envelope for the purpose, and then sealed them inside the Scanner—which has a coded seal related to chain of custody, as all counted materials do.

But the County changed procedure during the day. Not entirely. We still did all the right things. But this was such a problem for so many polling places, with workers new to the equipment, that they feared people would not follow procedure and would leave those ballots inside the ballot box container.

We broke down the ballot box container as trained. We took out the gray ballot box from inside, made sure there were no stray ballots fallen elsewhere in the box container (there weren’t), and sealed the ballot box. We took the ballots out of the emergency box and placed them in their special envelope, sealed inside the Scanner machine, which was now separated from the box container. And we folded up the box container, which was completely empty of ballots, and placed it on the rack with the other voting equipment—and sealed the rack.

We got to our counting location about 9:40 PM (more below on why it took so long to get there). At 10:10 PM my husband, the presiding judge, got a text—that we didn’t see on his phone at that time—instructing us to remember to bring the black, folded up ballot box container with us to the dropoff location. When we got to the front of the line another 15 minutes or so later, we had everything in order—except no black empty folded-up ballot box container.

It turns out they had sent a text to the tablets—the ePollbooks, but the presiding and alternate judges keep theirs separate to do their other duties—sometime early afternoon. We were busy all day and did not notice the text. It’s not obvious when a text has come in; you have to remember to go look for them.

So at the dropoff location, the official from the County is saying, “That’s on us. We own that. We should have communicated better.” But how do they take accountability for that error? They try to send us back to our polling location in the middle of the night, where we would have to break the seal on the equipment, and retrieve that item, and bring it back to them; but they would let us skip the line when we returned, so kind of them. It was going to require my husband calling the school contact to have them call the custodians to come to the door and let us in to do that—when we knew there were no ballots left inside, because we had followed the appropriate protocol as trained. So we didn’t go get it. Which meant we also didn’t leave the rest of the equipment unsealed, so that’s good for us.

That statement of “It’s our fault; we own that—but we’re making you make up for our mistakes anyway” was a theme of this election.

My husband picked up his equipment on Saturday at the appointed time. Lines got long later, despite appointments, but weren’t too bad for him. He had been warned they were a couple of hours behind at the beginning of the day, so they had adjusted all appointments until they could catch up. They called back on Sunday for him to come and get more ballot paper. According to the explanation, someone had miscalculated and planned for only the amount of paper for one per voter—when each voter needed two. But we actually needed about five times what they’d originally given us. It worked out, but it was an additional inconvenience. Fortunately the pickup location was only about 15 minutes from home.

equipment pickup line on Sunday, February 27
photo posted on Facebook by Robert Jeter III

On Monday night, before Election Day Tuesday, we needed to set up our equipment. We were given a spare orchestra room at the middle school where we usually run our polls. But we shouldn’t have to run a primary election in the same smallish room as the other party. Two years ago, slightly pre-COVID, we did it with a lot of inconvenience. My husband tried to get the school to allow them to use the hallway outside the room—which is already gated off from the rest of the school, so there’s no contact with students. The school said no, so we knew we were stuck. He had tried multiple times to find out who the Democrat PJ would be, to coordinate. There was none by Monday night.

It took about 2 ½ hours to do our setup—this is all so that the morning setup only takes another hour and a half, so we can open at 7:00 AM. The Democrat equipment was there, but was not set up.

He had his alarm set for 4:30 AM, to get to the polling place at 5:30, to be ready for the 7:00 AM start. At around midnight he got a text—asking him to run both the Republican Primary and the Democrat Primary—with no additional staff. He happened to wake and see the text, but at that point there wasn’t anything he could do to prepare.

The priority was to set up our polling place and then do what we could. This required the equipment setup that should have been done Monday night, plus getting the equipment turned on. He managed to get six Duos set up for the Democrats—in addition to the 14 Duos for Republicans. There were more Duos, but not more workers. We got a high school student technician, who was hired by the Democrats to report length of line every so often during the day—at the same $17/hour as the other clerks. We used her, under our supervision, because we had to, to run the Democrat Controller, checking in voters and handing them their codes. Late in the day we got a seventh Duo connected to their line. There were times when three to five Democrats waited in line for an available machine. Rarely did Republicans have to wait. We had more than double the number of machines, so we handled the higher number of voters (about 100 more Republicans than Democrats by end of day).

It took beyond 7:00 AM to get theirs open to voters. A couple of voters got told to vote elsewhere. Another stayed, seeing ours was getting close, because she’d already been to two other locations that weren’t yet open. Much of our delay was because their ePollbook tablet wasn’t working. It required the County to reset it remotely, but that couldn’t be done until their help line wasn’t busy and we could reach them.

So we handled all their voter instruction, machine help, and the extra take down of their polling place at the end of the day. And all the paperwork. Everything. For no extra pay except the extra hour or so that it took us to close down at the end of the day.

There was an explanation that the two county party chairs had consulted and worked together to help each other. So, at some polling places where Republican judges had quit at the last minute (because they weren’t willing to be blamed for running an election with the wrong equipment, etc.), Democrats stepped in, and vice versa. Except—ours didn’t quit at the last minute; they never hired one for our location. And, if we’d been told even a day earlier, we could have done that setup Monday night.

 

County Problems

Alan Vera, screenshot from here

This past Saturday we held our precinct conventions, at locations by House district, and I ran into Alan Vera, head of the HCRP Ballot Security Committee and national election expert. I asked him if we were going to debrief this election. I told him we didn’t have big fraud, but we had some problems. And he said, essentially, what I heard him say later, in today’s press conference. It was in response to a question about how the HCRP was characterizing the problems: incompetence, or intended to influence the outcome. Alan said,

I am wrestling with the question directly related to your comment. The question is this: At what point does election incompetence become the perfect camouflage for election malfeasance? Incompetence because, on equipment pickup day, dozens of judges, both Republican and Democrat, left the pickup point with no ballots at all to run the election. Nothing. But, at least as of right now, only Republican judges were given the wrong ballot size, so that their voters voting on the wrong ballot size, 10 to 13 of their votes at the edge of that 8 ½ by 11 paper will never be counted.

And there's at least 140 voters so far, that we know of, who lost those votes. On Election Day, scores of Republican and Democrat judges had to deal with equipment that didn't work. The Duos wouldn’t boot up; the Scanners wouldn’t scan. That was widespread. But it was only three Republican judges who got to their polls and found there was no equipment at all. Their voting equipment had been delivered to another location, which wasn't even a polling place.

So the question you asked is a good one. At what point does election incompetence lead to election malfeasance? We'll keep digging until we find out.

Let’s add a couple of other details. Longoria asked for an extension to the 24-hour counting requirement. This is law from the 1950s and 1960s, not some new legislation from just last summer. Every previous election official has been able to meet the requirement. She finally got the count done, and certified that all the votes were counted. And then, I think it was Saturday, said (paraphrased)—"Oh, by the way, there’s another 10,000 mail-in ballots that we found that we hadn’t counted. Oops!"

No election official should ever be allowed to get away with “finding” ballots after the counting has been completed. They had one job. Finding uncounted ballots means they failed in that job. It’s a complicated job that requires planning and experience—which this unelected election administrator does not have, but was nevertheless hired by Lina Hidalgo without Republican approval, and without even unanimous Democrat approval.

We had high voter turnout on the Republican side. That was good. But we had polling places that didn’t have enough voting machines for Republicans. They are not interchangeable with Democrat machines on Election Day; setup is different. At one location, 300 Republicans were in line to vote at 7:00 PM; they stayed until all voted, as they are entitled to do, which took until 11:00 PM.

Did we mention that the Director of Training was fired two days before the start of Early Voting? While it ought to be happening far ahead, most training for Election Day workers happens during those two weeks. In fact, they were so late at appointing us—despite our giving our intention to serve months in advance—that the first week of training dates was over by then, and all possible trainings were at bad times (during our church on Sunday was when my husband had to do Judge training) or a long drive to the south end of the county. The training, we thought, was actually improving, now that we can do it in person—and they limit ADA training to the few minutes of necessary info. So I’m not sure why the Director was fired.

So, there were all these issues affecting voters who want to cast their votes. And do they own up to the problem? No. They blame voters for incompetence (don’t know how to put the paper in). They blame presiding judges for incompetence. They blame last summer’s election law changes—which apply to mail-in ballots, which were part of Early Voting count, not Election Day count—different places, different procedures entirely. They even claimed, “See, the errors were found; that means the system is working,” as if that vindicated them. By the way, it was the Secretary of State that found the discrepancy of those 10,000 votes, not Longoria’s “system.”

central counting taking place, screenshot from here

What we have is an absolute mess—followed by a coverup.

What we need is for this to never happen again.

We have a small countywide election coming up in early May. Both parties have a runoff election May 24. We need things fixed by then. But, even more importantly, we need things fixed before the high-turnout November midterm election. Last Tuesday’s disaster was with a 15% voter turnout. What happens when we get a 50% voter turnout?

Senator Paul Bettencourt suggests that we get rid of Hidalgo’s unelected election bureaucrat and return the duties of county elections to the County Clerk. Currently the County Clerk is a Democrat. Bettencourt, a Republican, is making that suggestion. Anyone has to be better than Longoria and crew. And we need someone accountable to the people, with some kind of stake in keeping us from being the worst run election of any large county in the nation.

The lawsuit is intended to force Longoria and her crew to resign or be fired. While that is necessary, I look forward to a day we can return our elections to a Republican County Clerk, with experience and integrity. We miss those days.