Month: February 2022

Note: This news story was published Feb. 24, 2022 in the Hill Country News. I offer it here in case one of my readers is among the 100 WilCo voters who used the Texas Secretary of State’s website to correct a mail ballot application in February.

When Jo Stone was notified in January that her mail ballot application had been rejected, she tried to fix it.

As instructed, she logged on to the Texas Secretary of State’s website and believes she did everything she was asked in order to correct her application. Indeed, before she logged out, she was told that her application had been successfully corrected.

Yet, when she checked back with the WilCo elections website, she saw that her ballot application was still declined.

“I’m just going to vote in person,” she said, exasperated. Though a senior, Stone has no trouble getting around and lives only a few blocks from her regular polling location in Sun City. In the past, she has served as an elections clerk at that location and has voted by mail in Texas for more than a decade.

“We notified her and she corrected the application on the state’s mail ballot application tracker,” confirmed Julie Wassnik, WilCo’s voter registration supervisor. “We did not get that information from the state’s tracker. The last time we got [an update] was at the end of January.”

Stone was one of at least 100 WilCo voters who used the Secretary of State’s website to correct an application or mail ballot since Feb. 1, but whose corrected information languished in Austin until Feb. 22.

“We realized around the middle of February that we weren’t getting updates,” said Wassnik. She said her office notified the Secretary of State but nothing happened. Wassnik began taking screen shots of the state’s notification dashboard in order to update local records, but the corrections voters made between the first and middle of the month weren’t made.

Assistant Secretary of State for Communications Sam Taylor said that the state and counties like Williamson routinely sync voter databases overnight. He said this issue should have been caught during that process.

“Our office has been working to provide regular updates of all voters statewide who have used our Mail Ballot Tracker to verify mismatched ID information on their Applications for Ballot by Mail (ABBMs),” he said in an email response. “This morning, we provided a comprehensive electronic file to all 38 counties to make sure they had a full list of all voters who had corrected any missing or mismatched ID information before the Feb. 18 deadline.”

Taylor said that the county should have received regular updates.”We’re reviewing the sent files with our vendor and the offline county vendor to confirm when those updates were received,” Taylor said.

WilCo elections chief Chris Davis insisted that his office had not received an update from the state since Jan. 31.

The WilCo elections office said that Stone’s application was initially declined because she wrote the the final digit of her drivers license number incorrectly. Had she included her Social security number, which she had also provided when she registered to vote, the application would have been accepted.

“This is illustrative of what’s happening across the state,” Davis said. “All Texas counties are struggling with this and it’s going to be an issue until people get used to it.”

Stone fell victim to the more complicated mail ballot process enacted last year as part of the Texas Legislature’s effort to “secure” the state’s elections. Voting rights advocates have called the law an effort in voter suppression.

“We are seeing very high defect rates,” Davis acknowledged. The main reason applications and mail ballots are rejected have to do with the identifying numbers that must be included. “We are going to have more mail ballots rejected than at any time in the past because of these numbers.”

The new law requires voters who vote by mail to include either a Texas drivers license number or the last four digits of the voter’s Social Security number. Voters had to provide one of those identifying numbers when they registered to vote. Some voters included both numbers when they registered. Many don’t remember which one they provided.

Some Texas counties are seeing defect rates approaching 40%. In WilCo, the rate is significantly lower. Davis predicted that the rate will be closer to 20% of all mail ballots. He said his team has tried very hard to reach out to mail ballot voters in an attempt to clear them up.

“If we have a phone number, an email address on file, we try to help voters fix it because they are curable,” he said, but noted that “that window is closing … fast.”

To be safe, Davis suggested that voters include both numbers in the space provided underneath the flap of the mail ballot’s return envelope.

Even though the county finally approved her mail ballot application, Stone called the election office Tuesday morning and cancelled her mail ballot. She said she planned to be away from the city later in the week and wanted to vote in person before she left. Had she not cancelled the ballot application, she would have been been on the rolls as having received a mail ballot and been forced to cast a provisional vote.

It’s too late to apply for a ballot by mail, Davis said. For a mail ballot to be counted, it must be postmarked no later than 7 p.m., March 1. And, if you choose not to mail it, be sure to take it with you when you vote in person.

If you do vote by mail, Davis had a final bit of advice.

“Put both numbers on your ballot.”

Note: Jo Stone is author’s mother.

Jim Penniman-Morin and I are locked in a good-natured battle over who first said that government should be boring.

To be honest, I’m not entirely sure that Jim cares but that would make for a poor analogy so I’m going with my version of this story.

Jim is a member of the Cedar Park city council and is running to succeed Corbin van Arsdale as mayor. I scrolled back through Jim’s social media to see if I could pinpoint when he first uttered that sentiment but could find very little. Unless he said it at a campaign event, I only know for certain that he said it during a Cedar Park Chamber candidate forum in 2021.

Wait. Might have been in 2020. Who knows? The last two or three covid-afflicted years sort of blur together (and, for that, we should demand a mulligan — just not over the boring government thing).

On Oct. 2, 2019, I published a column under the headline “Council meetings are supposed to be boring.” I re-upped that message in July of 2021. So, I contend that I said it before Jim did … but, my search on the Google Machine shows that neither of us can claim we said it first because people have been pushing that narrative for a very long time.

Certain people want to see state or local government engulfed in a flaming, three-ring circus, full of partisan sound and fury but signifying very little in the way of public policy, if anything at all. When they get their way, the sane ones in the crowd remind the rest of us that government is SUPPOSED to be boring.

I bring this up because the very same people who prompted those commentaries, and Jim’s campaign tag line, marched into the Cedar Park City Hall right at the deadline last week and filed for seats on May city council ballot.

As of Friday, these candidates are challenging each and every seat on the Cedar Park council.

As I noted to the friend who alerted me to the last-minute filings, after uttering an expletive-laden diatribe, “Wait, didn’t those guys get their [heads] handed to them last time?”

Narrator: “They did, indeed, get their [heads] handed to them the last time.”

I know the narrator is correct because I just looked up the results from 2020 and 2021 when this particular cabal was sent packing by 2-1 margins. In 2020, Heather Jefts beat Dorian Chavez with 60% of the vote. In 2021, Penniman-Morin beat him with 62% of the vote. That same election saw Ann Duffy and Kevin Harris win their respective races against Claudia Chavez and Collin Klein with more than 63% of the vote.

Election watchers consider 2-1 victories to be landslides.

The only wild card here is Tim Kelly. He signed up to challenge Jefts and has yet to actually lose an election, though it’s worth noting that his only victory, which ushered in our late, great unpleasantness, was a slim 52% win in 2019.

The recent drubbing his friends have taken at the polls is a sure repudiation of the policies (such as they were and what there were of them) Kelly and his ilk espoused.

It seems that, given a choice, the electorate prefers a government that is boring to one that routinely flashes in the national spotlight, is featured prominently on right-wing hate radio, and in which sitting members shout down fellow members, invite armed partisans to meetings and use social media to belittle and threaten common citizens.

We prefer a government that builds roads and fosters economic development — you know, boring stuff — to one that invites partisan mudslinging and self-aggrandizement.

In other words, voters seem to prefer a government that is boring to one that is constantly embroiled in controversy.

That’s worth remembering when the campaign turns ugly, which it will.

But, don’t let the sure-to-come nasty campaign keep you from the polls. Boring government is a government worth fighting for.