Sandbar Politics

Rusty Legg has avoided a runoff by 1 vote according to sources at City Hall. Five provisional ballots were allowed in District 2, but they were not enough to alter the outcome. 47 of 95 provisional ballots were counted and nobody in any race got more than 3 additional votes.

Tarlton and Banks also hang on in Districts 5 & 1.

Now, the election goes to City Council, where they have choices to make. They can ‘canvas’ or approve the election and let it go forward with District 4 and the Mayoral races in a runoff, and let Banks, Legg, Beeton, Tarlton and Robb be seated Thursday at Council. Gonzales and Jaworski would hold over until the June 23rd runoff.

Or, Council could fail to approve the result, which would set us up for a new election, and several lawsuits. The smart thing to do would be approve and let anyone with the money and the motivation sue. That could be Tarris Woods in District 1 of course. History and all that. LULAC, NAACP, in the person of David Miller, and perennial complainer about justice Leon Phillips of Fatcat Janitorial are all crying foul. But it’s doubtful there’s a lawsuit in the bunch.

One serious dissenter is our old friend Julia Hatcher, frequent commenter here and at the GDN, and campaign manager for Gil Lopez, who got 20% of the vote in the District 4 race. Julia seems convinced that deliberate fraud has occurred, as opposed to complete incompetence, which is most people’s take on the County’s performance.

I vote for incompetence – who was there to defraud? It’s not like anyone lost a race by 4 votes this time. Cornelia won by 19 – Tarris has sued over less. But Batie and Lopez scored in the 20′s; Kinnear got 31%, Robb and Beeton won by 20%+ margins, and Pappous/Puccetti and Jaworski/Rosen are still fighting it out.

Do a manual recount of the ‘combo sheets’ (that thing you signed when you voted) if you want. What it will tell you is that some people voted in the wrong district and didn’t know it. It’s not going to move any of the races. It’s not going to show a pattern of disenfranchisement, emphasis on the ‘pattern’, that it would take to get Justice involved. I mean, DOJ was on site during the voting for goodness sake. They probably think we’re a bunch of hicks who couldn’t manage a cookout, but if they were going to call a halt, they’d have already done it.

This election was badly done. It makes lots of people look bad, and unfortunately, Dwight Sullivan has 2+ years to go and probably won’t get booted out of his $90K/year job in 2014 anyhow. Yes, this election was worse than most, but there are screwups at every election.

Blame the Three Stooges, not the Illuminati.

Doug Godinich, Galveston City Secretary confirms that the runoff date will be June 23rd. Not the 16th as the paper keeps reporting.

Presuming that things don’t get held up in a challenge, now or then, the new Council would be sworn in on June 28th. I think. I’ll confirm that, but that’s how I read the Charter.

NOTE: The June 28th date will be for offices won in the June 23rd runoff election.

Former Mayor Jan Coggeshall points out that swearing in for Council members confirmed from this Saturday’s election will be at the regular council meeting May 24th. Provided nothing jumps off the tracks, that will include Elizabeth Beeton and Marie Robb, and if their majorities hold, Cornelia Banks, Rusty Legg and Terrilyn Tarlton.

It’ll probably be a decade or more before the City trusts the County with an election again. There were mechanical problems, without backup. There were electronic machine issues that closed polling places and caused long lines. The machines were not evenly distributed – some places had long lines, others no line at all. Poll worker education was its usual dismal disappointment, and the count took hours because of the way the new system is set up at County.

Those things were inconvenient, and indicate a lack of leadership at County, but they probably didn’t change the election. You could just shake your head and go on, except…

It’s not over.

City district alignment is done by address, but your voting precinct is a County creation. If the voter roll has your name at the right address, but in the wrong precinct, you might get the wrong ballot. You could have been wrongly assigned precinct-wise for a decade, but only recently did redistricting put you in a different district.

Of course voters have a responsibility to know which district they’re in and who they came to vote for. Some were confused by redistricting and weren’t aware their district had changed. Some were given wrong ballots and knew it, and knew enough to force the election judge to correct it on the spot. But a lot of people don’t know the rules – and neither do election officials at the polls – so a fair number of people either voted provisionally or simply voted in the wrong District.

If you got the wrong ballot and voted anyway, then you’ve voted, period. You can complain about it later at the bar, but you haven’t been disenfranchised, you can’t ‘re-vote’, and your vote counts because County thinks you voted in the right place.

But if you insisted on voting in a district different from the one the County assigned you to, then you voted provisionally, and it’s possible your vote hasn’t been counted yet.

If you asked for the wrong ballot and voted in the wrong distirct, despite what they told you at the polls, then your vote won’t count. But if you were right and they were wrong and you voted provisionally in the right District, then your vote may really count.

Here’s where a single vote matters. 946 people voted in District 2. Rusty Legg needed 50% plus 1 vote to win. That’s 474 votes. He got 475. But there are those provisional ballots still uncounted. A net result of just 2 additional votes for anyone else could drag that race back into a runoff.

In District 5, Terrilyn Tarlton got 14 votes more than an majority. In District 1, Cornelia Banks beat Tarris Woods by 19 votes. With as many provisional ballots as were cast, those might not be safe margins.

District 4 is already going to a runoff along with the Mayor’s race. As of this moment, only Elizabeth Beeton and Marie Robb appear to have won unassailable victories.

The game isn’t over yet.

The good news is, there’s gonna be a runoff. The bad news is, there’s gonna be a runoff.

We’ll talk problems and recounts and scenarios for the next month, but here’s what you really want to know.

Lewis Rosen got 45%, Joe Jaworski got 39%.
Beau Rawlins 12%, Greg Roof 4%.

So there will be a runoff. Lew v. Joe.

Actual (unofficial) vote totals:
Rosen 2812
Jaworski 2471
Rawlins 721
Roof 264

District 1: Cornelia Banks beat Tarris Woods 318-299. A 19 vote margin? There will be a recount, of course. Woods has been in this territory before. Will he react the way he did when Legg beat him by 12 votes, i.e. with an $80,000 lawsuit designed to put a stop to this democracy noise?

District 2: Legg ‘wins’ outright with 50.21% of the vote. That’s too close to just call it done and head for the bar. Recount, recrimination, etc. Unless Richard Batie looks at the numbers closely. Vote count, Rusty beat him 475-286, i.e. Batie only got 30% of the vote. But 115 votes (12%) went to Chris Gonzales, and Teresa Banuelos, the invisible candidate, pulled down 70 votes (7%). Provisional ballots will determine which way this tilts. If they come out in Rusty’s favor, a challenge and potential runoff might be avoided.

Disrict 3: Beeton, pow. Everybody knows I’m rock-solid Beeton fan. She got 60% of the vote, a 20% margin, winning 527-364. If she could run fourth time in 2014, East Enders would be organizing today.

District 4: Less than you expected probably. Puccetti and Pappous are going to a runoff, barely. Puccetti surprised a lot of people getting 47% to Norm’s 32%. Gil Lopez got 20%; it remains to be seen whether his voters can be motivated to get out and vote again…and for whom.

District 5: Stunner of the night, Terrilyn Tarleton got 51% to win her council seat outright. Jeri Kinnear got 31% and Bill Quiroga got17%

Marie Robb got two-thirds of the vote in District 6 to win that seat handily.

Propositions: Everything passed, as predicted, except 2, 9 & 11, as predicted by everybody.

We’ll rehash this for weeks. So will the City, County, newspaper and the Secretary of State. My prediction: After all the talk, the City will stop using the County to do elections, the election will be certified, Lewis Rosen will be your Mayor on July 5th, and some County Republicans will be replaced come November.

Runoff analysis to come. It’s 3 a.m. thanks to the geniuses at the County election office, and I’m going to bed.

Our story so far:

District 1 – Banks
District 2 – Legg
District 3 – Beeton
District 4 – Pappous

Moving on.

District 5: Quiroga, Tarleton and Kinnear.
This is not a no-brainer. Quiroga was the most prepared of the bunch at the GAIN forum, but Tarleton is showing suprising ground game; the Mayor’s machine is firmly behind Jeri Kinnear. You never see her anywhere without Betty Massey at her side.

Kinnear is completely invested in Betty’s public housing scheme, plus she’s the one who drove the Park Board to build their empty $7 million headquarters downtown. Oops.

Both Terrilyn Tarleton and Bill Quiroga have perception issues. Bill announced for Mayor, then changed his mind and filed for D5. In 2010 he sort of kind of ran for Mayor. He got 119 votes total. He’s trying harder this time, but like Greg Roof, people wonder if he really means it.

Terrilyn is viewed as the real estate candidate. Don Mafrige is a big player in her campaign. He wants an anything-goes voice on council to replace Steve Greenberg’s current anything-goes vote.

My recommendation: Be sure you vote, either for Quiroga or Tarleton, but vote, and let it go to a runoff.

District 6: This is not an easy race. Marie Robb is smart and well-connected. Plus she’s at least nominally anti-PH. Trouble is, the west end knows there won’t be any public housing out there, so it’s not an issue for them. Mike Varela, retired fire chief, would make a fine Councilor, but he’s got no ground game in this election. Michael ‘who?’ Poe is running, but is not a factor.

So it’s looking, to me anyway, like Robb has it. Trouble is, she’s big-time WIGIPOA. If the rest of the Council deadlocks 3-3, making Robb the tie-breaker, there’s no telling what they will be willing to trade for sand and sewers. It’s already started: While Robb is anti-housing, she’s also anti-Beeton, because despite what you’ve been told, the West End eats a lot more in infrastructure tax money than they put in, and that’s only going to get worse. And Robb knows Rozier will vote with her on it. With the two of them on Council, your streets will never get paved.

I’d vote Varela.

The Mayor’s race is probably just a primary, and the real election will take place in the runoff, either June 23 or June 30. Question is, of Jaworski, Rosen and Rawlins, which two will be there?

You’d think the No-Joe vote would be strong, but JJ is running a very good ground game: he’s using big-dollar consultants, and working black churches, Lulac, NAACP – all the pro-housing crowd.

He’s helped by the large part of the population that doesn’t know housing is an issue, or doesn’t care. For every No-Joe voter, there’s a Why-Change voter out there. Unless Rosen and Rawlins are doing a lot of phone/mailing/door-knocking, there’s a chance Jaworski could get 51%, and all that that implies.

I’d vote against Joe on the housing issue alone. But reading his campaign contribution reports, it really looks like certain Houston players are trying to buy themselves a beach town. Don’t let them.

As I said earlier, it’s critical that District 2 (Legg) and District 4 (Pappous) don’t go to runoffs. I’ll explain why tomorrow.