Texas Prosecutes Little Old Ladies for Voter Fraud

By Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet. Posted March 31, 2008.

Willie Ray was a 69-year-old African-American City Council member from Texarkana who wanted her granddaughter, Jamillah Johnson, to learn about civil rights and voting during the 2004 presidential election. The pair helped homebound seniors citizens get absentee ballots, and once they were filled out, put them in the mail.

Fort Worth's Gloria Meeks, 69, was a church-going, community activist who proudly ran a phone bank and helped homebound elderly people like Parthenia McDonald, 79, to vote by mail. McDonald, whose mailbox was two blocks away from her home (she recently died), called Meeks "an angel" for helping her, a friend of both women said.

And until he recently moved out of state, Walter Hinojosa, a retired school teacher and labor organizer from Austin, was another Democratic Party volunteer who helped elderly and disabled people vote by getting them absentee ballots and mailing them.

Today, Ray and Johnson have criminal records for breaking Texas election law and faced travel restrictions during a six-month probation. Gloria Meeks is in a nursing home after having a stroke, prompted in part, her friends say, by state police who investigated her -- including spying on Meeks while she bathed -- and then questioned her about helping McDonald and others to vote. Hinojosa, meanwhile, has left Texas.

Their crime: not signing their name, address and signature on the back of the ballots they mailed for their senior neighbors, and carrying envelopes containing those ballots to the mailbox. Since 2005, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, a Republican, has been prosecuting Democratic Party activists, almost all African-Americans and Latinos, as part of an effort to eradicate what he said was an "epidemic" of voter fraud in Texas.

"These guilty pleas demonstrate precisely why it is so important to uphold the integrity of our election process in the state," Abbott said, speaking of Ray and Johnson's conviction in a press release. "We will visit justice upon any who ignore the fact that we have election laws in Texas and they apply to everyone."

But Texas Democrats, such as Lisa Turner of the Lone Star Project, onestarproject.net a political action committee that first exposed Abbott's prosecutions, issued reports on it and maintains a staff to fight voter suppression in the state, said Abbott's goal is not merely to prosecute little old ladies. Rather, Turner said it was to send a message to Texas' minority communities, which lean Democratic, by sowing fears among the elderly about voting by mail.

"It's the equivalent if when a gang moves into a neighborhood and spray paints their graffiti or their marker; it's not to deface one building. It is to send a message," Turner said. "You have agents of the attorney general, walking through a neighborhood, walking past three crack houses, to go talk to a voter. Think about that. What does that say their priorities are? It's about holding onto the levers of power."

Attorney General Abbott and the election laws that he has used to bring the prosecutions have been challenged in federal court under a suit that is slated to go to trial this spring. In September 2006, Gerry Hebert, a former chief of the U.S. Department of Justice's Voting Section -- which oversees the nation's voting rights laws -- and now executive director of the Washington-based Campaign Legal Center, filed a suit challenging the Texas attorney general, secretary of state and a 2003 Texas law that criminalized practices often used to help the elderly to vote by mail.

Abbott's office would not comment on the suit, but Texas Solicitor General Ted Cruz, who works for Abbott, issued a statement in September 2006 saying it "has no basis in law" and "the plaintiffs are combination of political operatives and individual criminals who have already pleaded guilty to voter fraud."

Meanwhile, Texas' attorney general has continued to prosecute middle-aged and elderly political volunteers under a law his office says stops people from impersonating voters and taking advantage of seniors by falsifying ballots. The accused are almost all African-American and Latino and likely Democrats.

In February 2008, Abbott indicted four Duval County residents, Lydia Molina, 70, Maria Soriano, 71, Elva Lazo, 62, Maria Trigo, 55, for allegedly delivering "mail-in ballot applications to numerous residents in Duval County, many of whom were ineligible to vote by mail," his press release said. Under Texas law, only the disabled, people 65 or older, or people expecting to be out of state on Election Day can vote absentee. The accused checked a box saying voters were disabled "when they were not," he said, referring to their actions in the 2006 election.

"The voter registrar's office then mailed the actual ballots to the residents," Abbott's release said. "Once the ballots were completed by the residents, the defendants allegedly retrieved these and mailed them to the registrar to be counted without identifying themselves on the carrier envelope." They face six months and a $2,000 fine.

Only likely Democrats prosecuted

Despite Abbott's repeated declarations nobody is above Texas law, he has prosecuted no Republicans.

"What is especially troubling is that while Greg Abbott's office has prosecuted minority seniors for simply mailing ballots, he has not prosecuted anyone on the other side of the aisle for what appear to be open and shut cases of real voter fraud," Hebert told Texas House Elections Committee, on January 25, 2008, as the panel held a hearing on a bill making the state's voter I.D. laws tougher.

See more stories tagged with: voter fraud, texas, vote by mail, mail, elderly

Steven Rosenfeld is a senior fellow at Alternet.org and co-author of "What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election," with Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman (The New Press, 2006).

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