How to screw up an election and get away with it

Can you guess how? Here's a hint, it requires a lawyer. When both Klein ISD and Lone Star College District realized that their shoddy attempt to manipulate (and falsify? The world may never know now.) their bond elections back in May, they both performed an end run. State law states that interested parties my bring suit to contest an election within 30 days of the election. Two people filed separate lawsuits to do so. Fred Blanton filed against Klein ISD, and James W. Doyle filed against LSCS. The suits were similar because similar problems were discovered in both elections. Both entities showed shockingly poor judgment in the way they handled the Judges Booth Controllers (JBC's) both before and after the election. Programmed JBC's were left unattended at the polling locations prior to the election, and in many cases were left unattended by untrained election workers afterward as well. Many of the seals on the JBC's were broken or did not match the paperwork. And the chain of custody was completely compromised by missing signatures or non-existant forms. Bottom line there will likely never be a way to tell whether the bond measures actually passed or not. Klein was somewhat better than LSCS in their paperwork but there was one polling location who's JBC's were left at the polling location unattended that had a suspiciously odd vote total, one that was significantly different from all the other polling locations. Were that one polling location thrown out, the bond election would have failed by about the same margin that it was deemed to have passed by.

But Klein and LSCS had a plan for this eventuality. They both hired Vinson and Elkins to file a motion for declaratory judgment in Travis county. The only notice that such a filing took place was a relatively obscure legal notice published in the Chronicle. The filings took place within the first 10 days of the election, before lawsuits were even filed by Blanton or Doyle. The declaratory judgment was to allow both Klein and LSCS to sell the bonds regardless of the outcome of the lawsuit. In essence they made the lawsuits moot before they were even filed. Blanton and Doyle both had to make a choice. Do they continue fighting in the face of a declaratory judgment that must be successfully appealed before any lawsuit can even go forward? Or do they drop the suits and save their money and energy for the next fight?

Alas, they decided that discretion was the better part of valor.

The law that the districts used in this case needs to change. They circumvent the ability of the populace to hold these districts accountable for their illegal acts.