Showing posts sorted by relevance for query texas voter fraud cases. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query texas voter fraud cases. Sort by date Show all posts

Monday, April 11, 2016

SEC charges Paxton with stock fraud

Civil charges (which means a fine), not criminal, as with the state jail felonies he's been facing.  In fact there's only a few new details to add to this embarrassment.

U.S. regulators charged Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Monday for his alleged role in a stock scam that defrauded investors in a Texas-based technology company called Servergy Inc.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission accused the company and former Chief Executive Officer William Mapp of selling private stock while misleading investors about the energy efficiency of its sole product, and accused Paxton of working to raise investor funds for the company without disclosing his commissions.

The SEC's civil case followed a related criminal case against Paxton for securities fraud. Last year, a Texas state grand jury indicted Paxton for his alleged role in a scheme to mislead investors.

Let's skip over to the Chron for this:

The complaint alleges that Paxton told the SEC that he intended to pay for the shares and even offered to pay $100,000 to Mapp during a meeting at a Dairy Queen in McKinney, Texas.
According to Paxton, Mapp then said, "I can't take your money. God doesn't want me to take your money." So Paxton took the shares as a gift.

The Lord's name invoked over BeltBusters, fries, and shakes at DQ as the dirty deal went down.  That's what I like about Texas.  More from the Houston Press:

Paxton's connection to Servergy has been one of the most intriguing details about the AG's current legal woes. Before his indictment on state securities fraud charges last summer, the SEC had already accused Servergy of lying to investors by falsely claiming its data servers had already been sold to huge companies, like Amazon and Freescale. The SEC claims Servergy even lied to investors about the very servers the company was selling, falsely claiming the machines required 80 percent less cooling, energy and space than others on the market.

According to a press release announcing federal charges against Paxton and others, the SEC claims former Servergy CEO William Mapp sold millions of dollars in company stock by exaggerating his product's merits. As for Amazon's supposed interest in the company's servers, the press release states: "In reality, an Amazon employee had merely contacted Servergy because he wanted to test the product in his free time for personal use."

And last, this.

Bill Miller, a longtime Austin consultant who has represented politicians under investigation and facing criminal charges, said he expects Monday's federal charges will only make Paxton "lock down for the long haul. He will not step down."
"The feds are straight-up business in cases like this," Miller said. "They don't care whether he's attorney general or not, and they're going to press ahead with their case – and you can expect him to fight it," he said. "In a case like this, once you're there – like he is now – he's going to tough it out to the end."

Paxton is relying on the same Lone Star justice that saw Rick Perry skate on his indictments, which is that the courts in Texas are overwhelmingly Republican-elected and thus deliver their own unique interpretations of the law.  Republican voters picked Paxton in the runoff two springs ago over Dan Branch -- who was endorsed by W Bush -- despite his having already confessed to his crimes, mostly because (and here I have to make an educated guess about the rationale formed in the mind of the typical Republican primary runoff voter) of Paxton's personal relationship with Ted Cruz Jesus Christ.

After all, if you're only accountable for your sins on the day you stand before your god, who is the GOP base to judge you?
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Wednesday, November 20, 2013

One in three Houston-area gas pumps is a ripoff

This is what happens after twenty years of Republican rule at the statewide level.

(Houston CBS affiliate KHOU's investigative reporters) analyzed state inspection records and discovered that in the last two years nearly one in three gas station inspections in our region ended in a failing grade.

In all, that represented 1,667 different gas stations ....

State inspectors found problems with (one station's) pumps three different times since the beginning of November, 2011.  According to the Texas Department of Agriculture, in one case a pump charged $1.28 before delivering any gas.

I've blogged about this since 2010, when Hank Gilbert challenged Todd Staples for ag commissioner.  Seven years later, the problem has only gotten worse.  Now Staples wants a promotion to lieutenant governor in 2014.

I'm sure this institutionalized incompetence is only because the agriculture commission is just understaffed due to cutbacks passed in Austin.  After all, since we can't afford any state parks, and the only roads being built are toll roads, everybody's got to tighten their belt.  Right?

If an operator is determined to be intentionally ripping off customers, TDA will turn its findings over the Texas Attorney General’s Office.

How many of these has Greg Abbott's office prosecuted?  Fewer than the number of statistically insignificant voter "fraud" cases, I would guess.  This is the hallmark of Coathanger Ken's legacy: ignore actual fraud, pursue the monster-under-your-bed fears of the right-wing primary voter.

This is the kind of bad government conservatives should be complaining about.  Instead their response is to run ever more conservative candidates against their previous darlings.  That's not going to fix anything.

Instead of waiting for the TXGOP to figure out that they're part of the problem, let's vote for some solutions instead.  And let's encourage those who aren't voting in off-presidential year elections that it is vital that they start doing so.
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Friday, December 18, 2020

T'was the Week Before Xmas Lone Star Roundup

I'm not pleased with my Latin@ post (here's something worth reading from Latino Rebels, though).  I've rewritten mine a couple of times, and with the Census delay in providing updated demographics, there's not going to be much in the way of currency in the projections for redistricting/gerrymandering in the forthcoming legislative session.  Plenty of scare-mongering speculation, though.  I'm tempted to resort to a Kuffner-styled Weakend link dump, but since I find that lazy and half-assed ... probably not.  Don't really know what I'm going to do with a post I've spent probably forty hours on and doesn't meet my personal standards.  Anyway ...



It's remarkable that Ken Paxton didn't find his way to the top of either Texas Monthly's Bum Steer Awards or Progress Texas' Worst of 2020, but that just shows you how stiff the competition is.


The winners were well-deserved.


More of TM's selections throughout this post.  Here's a salute to Governor COVID, who would rather kill Texans than cower before the "bidness/freedumb" base of the TXGOP.


More "do as I say, not as I do" from our elected leaders.


There were other late contenders for Bum Steers and Worst Texans.  Here's one of the hard-charging finalists on my personal list.


Read the whole Tweet thread.  Few stories have the shock capacity of this one.


Guess who's behind the Liberty Center for God and Country?  It was "Christians Outed for Behaving Less than Godly" week.


Then there's Greasy Henry Cuellar, whose bad behavior was noted twice.


Besides shafting AOC -- a trending topic this week regarding M4A -- who was the beneficiary of slots on Energy and Commerce?


Those of us who won't be supporting corporate Democrats any more have a long, hard job ahead.  And it doesn't involve pushing people like Fletcher to the left.

Despite these Grinches ...


... several Texans got in the spirit of the holiday season.


I have more of the typical updates on environmental and criminal and social justice news that will wait until Monday's Wrangle.  Closing today with these.

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Monday, July 09, 2012

Holder to speak in Houston today at NAACP *update*

The subject of Texas' Photo ID law will probably come up.

The NAACP vows to register 1 million new voters in time for the November elections to overturn what leaders called an "onslaught of state restrictions on voting."

Alluding to the long struggle of the nation's oldest and largest civil rights organization, Board Chair Roslyn Brock insisted in the opening address of the association's 103rd annual convention on Sunday night that voting rights were again in jeopardy.

"Our right to vote is under attack more than at any other time in history since we passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965," she said. "We overcame then and we shall overcome now -- but only if we are willing to dedicate ourselves to fighting a battle that many of us thought we had won many years ago."

Attorney General Holder, while in Houston to speak to convention attendees today, will likely be paying attention to matters back in Washington.

Texas will launch a challenge to a central piece of civil rights legislation in a Washington court on Monday in a case the Obama administration has characterised as a fight to protect the right to vote.

The five-day hearing will rule on whether the US justice department has the power to block Texas from implementing a state law requiring voters to show photo identification at the polls – a move critics say will disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of people, principally Latinos and other minorities.

Yes, now that the RP of Tx has put abolishment of the VRA into its party platform, we know that this is just another ingredient mashed into the stew of Daily/Weekly/Perpetual Outrages O'Day that conservatives have to keep stirring in order to stoke the anger and hatred that, in turn, motivates their base to turn out and vote.

Here's a few relevant excerpts from elsewhere.

Supporters of the (photo ID) laws cite anecdotal cases of fraud as a reason that states need to do more to secure elections, but fraud appears to be rare. As part of its effort to build support for voter ID laws, the Republican National Lawyers Association last year published a report that identified some 400 election fraud prosecutions over a decade across the entire country. That's not even one per state per year. (emphasis is mine)

You can expect some of those "supporters" to be seen outside the GRB "protesting" today.

Two of the three judges on the panel were appointed by Democratic presidents so it might seem unlikely the court would overturn the Obama administration.

[...] 

The Texas lawsuit for approval of the voter identification law is: State of Texas v. Holder in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, No. 12-cv-128. The judicial panel is composed of Appeals Judge David Tatel, District Judge Robert Wilkins and District Judge Rosemary Collyer.

Mitt Romney is slated to speak on Wednesday morning to the convention; Vice President Joe Biden is scheduled for Thursday. There's probably time reserved for the president if he decides to make an appearance, but at this point that would be a surprise.

More as it develops.

Update: Holder will not speak today because he was delayed at the airport, and has rescheduled for tomorrow, according to this Tweet.
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Thursday, March 13, 2008

Bulletins from the front lines

Christian Science Monitor:

"These six weeks are one of the most critical periods for the Democrats," says Joseph Aistrup, a political scientist at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kan. "The candidates will be floating a lot of trial balloons to see what particular angles work."

The audience is only partly the voters who will award Pennsylvania's 158 delegates.

Perhaps more important, analysts say, are the nearly 800 elected officials and party leaders known as superdelegates who may well tip the race; the ordinary Americans whose poll responses journalists use to gauge shifts in political momentum; and the Democratic leaders who will decide whether and how to proceed with do-overs of the primaries in Michigan and Florida, which had been stripped of their delegates because they moved up their contests in violation of party rules.

Clinton won Michigan and Florida. But Obama didn't appear on the Michigan ballot, and to honor the party sanctions, neither campaigned in the two states.

Those primaries, if replayed in some form, would throw 366 delegates back into play. But it would also raise the threshold to win the nomination from 2,025 to 2,208. According to an Associated Press tally, Obama now has 1,598 delegates and Clinton 1,487, including pledged and superdelegates. Neither candidate is likely to pile up enough pledged delegates – those awarded through voting – in the 10 remaining contests to seal the nomination.

A decision on whether to rerun the Michigan and Florida primaries could come in the next couple of weeks, a move likely to divert a raft of campaign resources to those delegate-rich states.

More at the link. From a report filed at the Harris county executive committee meeting (of Democratic precinct chairs) last evening:

About 600 voters voted twice mostly on EVPA (Early Voting - Personal Appearance) and on Election Day. ... about 1100 voted in both primaries, (perhaps) in a combination of EV and Election Day voting. Actually some may have voted in the R primary and showed up for the D precinct conventions but that will not be known until the SD credentials are done.

I posted already about encountering one of these double voters. Of course this is voter fraud, but not the kind the OAG of Texas usually chooses to prosecute. Some of these cases will eventually be turned over to the Harris County DA's office; a new man starts there soon.

Senate District conventions promise to be chaos, as the final allocation of Texas delegates is at stake:

Curious whether Barack Obama or Hillary Rodham Clinton won Texas' Democratic caucuses March 4? The official results won't be available until March 29. ...

The (Texas) Democratic Party gave up Monday on its effort to produce a running public tally of the (delegate) count. The state party had set up a reporting system, outside the official count, that relied on 8,247 precinct chairmen to voluntarily call their results to 254 county chairmen who would relay them to state party headquarters.

But an estimated 1 million Democrats — far more than ever before — showed up for the caucuses, which were held right after voting ended in the first part of the Democratic contest: a standard primary administered by state government.

The huge turnout played havoc with the caucuses, creating confusion, long waits and even a few calls to the police to calm frustrations late on March 4. It hasn't made the count any easier either. ...

Now the party will rely on the official system laid down in its rules. Those rules require only that precinct chairmen mail the results of their caucuses to their county party chairmen 72 hours after primary election day. County chairmen don't have to reveal those results until county or state senate district conventions on March 29.

As in many states with caucuses, these district conventions pick delegates to a state convention in June which picks the actual national convention delegates. The Associated Press uses the results from local caucuses to calculate the number of national delegates each candidate will win, if the candidate's level of support doesn't change during this multi-stage process. ...


This is why the Texas Two-Step is actually four steps: primary, caucus, senate district, and state convention. It allows for lots of manipulation by those who know the system (i.e. Clinton supporters) and those who don't (i.e. Obama supporters).

Houston's 857 precinct results are still coming in, said Harris County Democratic chairman Gerald Birnberg. The count has been slowed because precinct convention chairmen ran out of official sign-in sheets, so they tore "Democrats Vote Here" signs off the wall and scrawled the preferences of caucus-goers in long hand. Birnberg said a dozen workers have put in 12-hour days since March 4 just making sure the paperwork was right, without even counting the votes yet in the state's largest city.

My SD will have 1522 delegates to the convention; at the moment to convene in a high school gymnasium capable of holding between 11-1200. The chairman's response is to seat overflow delegates in a separate auditorium.

That scenario is fraught with legal peril. The 'plan B' response was "Not all the delegates show up anyway."

This development bodes further ill for participatory democracy in Texas. Thousands of disenfranchised voters, delegates, and alternates coming to the process for the first time are likely to be more than a little disillusioned by their exclusion, which doesn't have rosy portent for their continuing their participation in the future, now does it?

Some will stay and fight while others will leave, turned off by the sausage-making of democracy. The only question left to know is how many and who wins as a result.
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Monday, November 05, 2012

Day-before developments

-- Townhall.com and Drudge riled up the local True the Vote pasty thugs with this.

Friday afternoon at an early polling place located at 6719 W. Montgomery Road in Houston, NAACP members were seen advocating for President Barack Obama according to volunteer poll watchers on location at the time.

According to Eve Rockford, a poll watcher trained by voter integrity group True the Vote, three NAACP members showed up to the 139 precinct location with 50 cases of bottled water and began handing bottles out to people standing in line. While wearing NAACP labeled clothing, members were "stirring the crowd" and talking to voters about flying to Ohio to promote President Barack Obama.

The Houston Chronicle reported the following on Sunday.

A disturbance at the busy Acres Homes early voting location Friday night was related to representatives of the NAACP protesting long wait times for disabled voters, county officials said Sunday.

An article on the website Townhall.com, linked on the widely read Drudge Report, stated that people wearing NAACP shirts "took over" the Acres Homes polling place, electioneering and voicing support for President Barack Obama while poll workers "did nothing."

Assistant County Attorney Doug Ray disputed that account.

 "It wasn't like they were taking control of the place. It wasn't like we did nothing about it. That's just not true at all," Ray said. 

You can read more about the he said/she said bullshit at the link (and don't miss the comments). Here's Rep. Sylvester Turner's account, via Carl Whitmarsh's e-list.

On Friday, the last day of early polling, I received several calls from people at the Acres Homes Multi-Service Center that seniors and disabled persons who were not physically able to walk and stand in the voting line and who requested a portable voting machine be brought to their cars were told to go to another voting location or come inside because the clerks were too busy. I had my chief of staff call the Secretary of State's office for them to advise those persons at the Acres Home Multii-service Center that the law required them to offer curb-side service to those persons unable to come inside to vote. Once I got there, I was also told that poll watchers with True the Vote raised complaints about persons wearing NAACP shirts being inside the polls giving people water and assisting those elderly persons who did come inside. The True the Vote poll watchers argued that the NAACP was a political organization that endorsed candidates and demanded that they remove or cover up their shirts.

Those of you familiar with the NAACP know that it has never endorsed political candidates and neither were the persons at the center advocating for any candidate or party. These so-called poll watchers also had problems with me being outside talking to voters. True the Vote is a political entity with a political agenda who has trained individuals to come into areas like Acres Homes, in my district, to attempt to intimidate and harass voters be they young or old.

Tuesday is the final day to vote. I am asking voters in Acres Homes and across Harris County to exercise your democratic right to vote and not allow anyone to intimidate or prevent you from voting. 

And so it goes...

Update: Isiah Carey reports that the HCGOP has filed suit. This should be as much fun as Gerry Birnberg's attempt to get Lloyd Oliver off the Harris County ballot.

-- Mailed ballots are likely to be 2012's hanging chads.

Sloppy signatures on mail-in ballots might prove to be the hanging chads of the 2012 election.
As Republicans and Democrats raise alarms about potential voter fraud and voter suppression, mail-in ballots have boomed as an uncontroversial form of convenient, inexpensive voting.

In the critical swing states of Ohio and Florida, more than a fifth of voters chose the mail-in option 2010. In Colorado, another battleground, the number was nearly two-thirds.
But there may be controversy to come. For a variety of reasons, mail-in ballots are much more likely to be rejected than conventional, in-person votes.

With the razor-close presidential election Tuesday between President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney potentially riding on a few tens of thousands of votes in a handful of states, the election could be decided by election officials' judgments about mail-in ballot signatures.

"You would worry that in Florida, in particular, the new hanging chad becomes whether you count this absentee ballot or not based on whether the signature is right," said Charles Stewart III, co-director of the Voting Technology Project and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor.

I have a personal account about this to share.

I was appointed by the Harris County Green Party to serve on the Early Voting Ballot Board last month, but the presiding judge (a Democrat) had me (and other Greens) removed in a parliamentary procedure. He called a vote on our fitness to serve based on the fact that we voted in the Democratic primary. When the County Clerk informed him that the Texas Election Code deemed that procedure illegal, the presiding judge resorted to having us dismissed because there "wasn't enough work for us to be needed".

You may recall that I mentioned Charles Kuffner's (and the County Clerk's) numbers here for Harris County mailed ballots: a total in excess of 66,000, almost 14,000 more than in 2008. That's as of last Friday; more are arriving in the mail over the weekend, today, and tomorrow. The ballot board's charge is to have these all counted by Election Day. Some ballots arrive afterwards and are added in the final canvass, but all votes arriving before ED must be counted by ED.

Normally an EVBB judge like myself would be bound by oath not to reveal deliberations of the board like this. The reason I am writing about it is because the presiding judge neglected to have me sworn in.

I'll have more to say about this in the future, but it's going to have to wind its way through a handful of lawyers first.

-- On a last and lighter note, here's a slideshow of some of the memes of the 2012 campaign. They left several out IMHO so it's hard to pick a favorite among these, but I'll go with this...


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Saturday, October 11, 2008

Conservatives keep on shrieking 'fraud'

Following the revelations that ACORN registered Tony Romo and a few other Dallas Cowboys to vote in Nevada, the knee-jerk Republick outcry shifted suddenly from "ILL EAGLES" to "FRAUD". Closer to home, the Local Twos found a few dead folks who voted in the Texas primary in March.

That led, predictably, to a little LBJ bashing. (Really though, what do the conservatives have left to complain about? Since John McCain has been forced to talk down the bigots showing up at his rallies, they can no longer claim even with a half-straight face that Barack Hussein Obama is a terrorist. Team Maverick sidekick Sarah Barracuda got gaffed by the Republican investigation in the Alaska legislature that found her guilty of abusing her authority, so her stock is going to keep plummeting. Republicans across the country from the White House to the statehouse to the courthouse are about to be washed out to sea under a blue tsunami, and the panic and desperation is palpable.)

Regarding ACORN:

ACORN registers lots of lower income and/or minority voters. They operate all across the country and do a lot of things beside voter registration. What's key to understand is their method. By and large they do not rely on volunteers to register voters. They hire people -- often people with low incomes or even the unemployed. This has the dual effect of not only registering people but also providing some work and income for people who are out of work. But because a lot of these people are doing it for the money, inevitably, a few of them cut corners or even cheat. So someone will end up filling out cards for nonexistent names and some of those slip through ACORN's own efforts to catch errors. (It's important to note that in many of the recent ACORN cases that have gotten the most attention it's ACORN itself that has turned the people in who did the fake registrations.) These reports start buzzing through the right-wing media every two years and every time the anecdotal reports of 'thousands' of fraudulent registrations turns out, on closer inspection, to be either totally bogus themselves or wildly exaggerated. So thousands of phony registrations ends up being, like, twelve.

And as for anybody voting with a deceased person's registration, they ought to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. But the task of updating voter registrations falls to the county tax assessor-collector (Matt), and because Harris County maintains a vital records database that includes death certificates, there's really no excuse beyond bureaucratic incompetence that allows for 4,000 dead people to remain on the voter rolls.

Fortunately we have a great alternative to Paul Bettencourt on the ballot next month, and her name is Dr. Diane Trautman.
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