It was Fred by a landslide....
In the ongoing saga of the failed NHMCCD election fiasco, Fred Blanton has been fighting an uphill battle with NHMCCD to release the ballot totals for the "cancelled" election from May of 2006. The district, with the help of Andy Taylor, dragged the process along for over 5 months, but the AG's office finally forced them to release the data. Of course they could not release the e-slate data electronically, that would be far too simple and easy. NOooooo, they had to print it all out on paper and make someone manually count it. As a result, only the tabulation totals for the mail in ballots have been counted so far. (I'll update this as more totals are available.) and it is a landslide..... 1,147 votes for Fred Blanton, and 306 for Randy Bates. Had the election not been hijacked, Fred would probably have won it hands down. But instead, the board found a third candidate to run in that race, diluting the anti-incumbent vote enough that the incumbent won when it was redone.
posted by Rorschach at
12/13/2007 04:26:00 PM
12 Comments:
I would say I'm speechless, but I'm not. I could say - I told you so, but I won't. I'm so sick and tired of all the BS with that college district I could just scream. When word of the tallies get out will Bates do the right thing and resign? Will Lampe fess up that she was "put forth" as a straw candidate to delute the votes to insure Bates' reelection?
Of course not.
Another thought to consider: Were other members of the board of trustees in collusion with Bates over aborting the original May 2006 election? Did they have an inkling that the bond and Bates were going down based on mail-in ballots? Why, I'd like to know, was the the election reopened to additional candidates? Nobody told the district to shut down the election. They did that all on their own - citing limited time to effect DOJ changes in polling locations and lack of trained polling volunteers. Is that the public's fault? Why were they trying to hide the election on district property to begin with?
This whole fiasco smaks of politics of the dirty kind! Stinky all around.
Phew!
Congratulations for NOT getting Mike Richards as the president of NHMCCD's North Harris College. Look at those local comments:
http://www.lvrj.com/news/12501531.html
Anon, that is a bit off topic, but I read the article you cite and the only thing I read in there about Richards was that if the Governor cut their budget that they would have to cut back on services.
I am reminded of Galatians 4:16; "Am I therefore become your enemy, because I tell you the truth?"
Anonymous posts by people who clearly have an axe to grind without any documentary evidence to back up their claims are not a substitute for proof. The difference here is that when I bring something out. I do so with documentary evidence to back up my claims. And if that evidence turns out to be faulty or misleading, If I find out about it, I correct myself.
Where's the update? eh? Truth too wicked to reveal?
Uh, no, Actually I have the scans of the e-slate printouts, (you can look them over yourself here:
http://www.linklst.com/NHMCCD_ESLATE.pdf ). What I have not had was the time to go through them and count them up accurately. From a quick and dirty word search, it would appear that the grand total was neck and neck going into the day of the election. I think the difference between Fred and Bates was something like 40 some odd votes in Bates's favor. (I don't have the count in front of me however.)
A few things can be extrapolated at this point I think. The election was to be on a Saturday when few employees of the college district were going to be on campus. Those that were going to vote, likely already did so during early voting. Therefore, any more votes recorded would have been from regular voters that came out specifically to vote in the election.
I was working a Klein ISD election that weekend myself, and virtually Every Single Voter that came into the polling place was looking for the NHMCCD polling location. Damned near every single one of them were coming to vote against the bond and said so to my face. That sort of sentiment tends to be anti-incumbent as well, seeing as how it was the incumbents that put forth the bond election to begin with. With that sort of voter sentiment rampant, I think it is a good bet that most of the votes on election day would have been for Fred. I think that 40 some odd vote advantage would have gone away pretty quick on election day. That would jive with the ratio of the mail in ballots which is likely more representative of the public sentiment than the early voting on campus where every employee was encouraged (dang near frog marched to the polls I'll bet) to go vote for their bosses.
One other point. Fred tells me that during the fight to get access to the ballots, Pickelman sent an email to Fred that quoted a number for the number of mail-in ballots. The number was quite a bit more than the number of mail-in ballots that were shown to Fred during the inspection (again I forget the number). He is looking through his records to find that email. That would beg the question: What happened to the other mail-in ballots?
OK I found my notes on the word search totals (again, I have not gone through and counted them one by one, this is based on an Adobe Acrobat word search on an OCR'd document scan which may or may not be accurate).
My estimated count from the e-slate is Bates 1690; Fred 790. Give or take about 10 votes either way for each. (We ran the count on several iterations of the scans to try to get a statistical average. There was about a +/-10 vote variation from one scan to the next.)
that brings the totals to:
Bates 1996; Blanton 1937 for a difference of about 60 votes.
Again, given the outrage all the voters showed me personally that day, I think that 60 vote margin would have gone away pretty quickly on election day.
We shouldn't have to "beg" that question at all, Rorsch. The stink from that entire ordeal lingers in the air still, and I don't think that even heir apparent, Carpenter, can erase that smell. Unless he can rid the district of the skunks that brought it all about.
Good luck, Jesse.
Woof!
I was sent a copy the estimated cost of the Open Records request and it seems that there were considerably more than the 1600 mail ballots mentioned.
The count of enveloped to be opened was closed to 2-3,000 something. Now since the election was conducted by the very people in question really thrown the need for elections to be held jointly only, without the hands of those in question touching a thing.
The next election is even thrown into more question since the School Districts that were the joint polling locations most all held November elections in 2006. Where does that leave the NHMCCD/LSCS as far as conducting a legitimate election?
Hey, Rorsch? Where's the update for the outcome of the total ballots cast that were counted? Guess it was convenient to just let it slide.
I have been busy and I admit I let it slide, I did however address it for the most part above in the comments.
Well, I don't whether to get back on this band wagon again or not. My one and only new year's resolutions was to "get over it," and if that entails totally walking away from everyone and everything connected with NHMCCD/LSCS, I'm thinking that's my best course of action. I was certainly advised to "lay low," and STFU.
And that's where I'm at......
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