Good morning Austin:

Toward the end of the regular session, Gov. Greg Abbott signed a bipartisan voter fraud bill that promised to expand voting by residents of nursing homes even as it eliminated the possibility of fraud.

But Abbott also included further cracking down on ballot fraud on the agenda for the special session, and yesterday he tweeted his approval of legislation approved by the House responsive to his call.

Only, the new bill he touted yesterday would repeal a key part of the bill he touted, and signed into law, in May, before it ever had a chance to go into effect.

It was an especially heartbreaking turn of events for Rep. Tom Oliverson, the Cypress Republican who I wrote about recently on  First Reading: Be nice and carry a gun: Freshman of the year Rep. Tom Oliverson’s nuanced take on the special session.

As I wrote then, Oliverson was most proud of having crafted:

A BIPARTISAN ANSWER TO NURSING HOME ABSENTEE BALLOT FRAUD

Oliverson was able to put together a bipartisan coalition behind a measure, that was ultimately folded into an election reform bill, to deal with the problem of agents of different candidates fraudulently filling out absentee forms for unsuspecting nursing home residents.

Oliverson:

You’re not going to steal a presidential election with mail ballot fraud but you could affect a primary. You could win a school board race. you could perhaps win a county judge or a county commissioner race in a rural county.

We started the process with some very conservative stakeholders in Harris county Ed Johnson (senior director in the IT department of the Harris County Clerk’s office, and Alan Vera (former national poll watcher trainer for True the Vote).

The first week of session, Glenn Maxey (a former Democratic state representative from Austin and now legislative director for Texas Democratic Party) walks in this office – never met him before. He came to see me. He said, “I want to help.”

Any time we can get both parties to agree that there a) is fraud b) that’s right here and c) that we can fix it, it’s something we have to pursue.

Under Oliverson’s plan, borrowed form a successful practice in Wisconsin, “eelection judges go in as team to the nursing homes and manually the ballots are completed in front of them and they collect ballots from the residents. You’ve just removed the opportunity to commit fraud.”

Glenn suggested I go tot talk to (Austin Rep.) Celia Israel, she’s vice chair of Elections, and Glenn, he told me flat-out, he just said, “In my party she is probably the most respected name in terms of elections for us.” He said you should go talk to her I think she’ll really like this bill.

I did. She said, “Let me think about it,” and she got back to me the next day, “I really like it .”

“I’d like you to be my co-author,” Oliverson told Israel, who agreed. He talked with Rep. Jodie Laubenberg, R-Parker, who chairs the Elections Committee, and she joined as co-author.

I talked to Rafael Anchia (D-Dallas).  He walked me right over to Eric Johnson ‘s desk – “This almost got him in his election.”

Oliverson said Johnson, another Dallas Democrat, told him:

This is ground zero for me. Can I be a joint author? This is what’s happening in my back yard.

But yesterday, Rep. Craig Goldman, R-Fort Worth, who had been tapped by the governor along with Sen. Kelly Hancock, R-North Richland Hills, to guide the voter fraud legislation in the special session, amended the bill to repeal Oliverson’s measure, which would have gone into effect Sept. 1.

Here, from yesterday’s debate.

Oliverson:

As some of you have heard, one of the provisions of this amendment is that it completely repeals a bill which we passed actually twice with super majorities, bipartisanship, a bill that came out of the Elections Committee unanimously, and I just want to clear a few things up because one of the things that I heard is,   and I know some of you were told, is “Man, this bill should have never passed. It was deeply flawed, It was a terrible bill.”

And I just got to tell you, I’ve got a copy of the bill right in front of me, the bill that was added to Rep. (Diego) Bernal’s (D-San Antonio) bill, and I have gone through it line by line, and I have looked at every change as compared to when we filed it and how it came out of the Elections Committee, and the committee substitute, and I can account for every change, and most of the changes that are in here were things like, we established a minimum bed number, we deleted hospitals, we made an exception for small facilities with a small number of beds.

These were all changes that the election clerks came to us and they asked for and the thing about this bill, and the thing about this whole process that is very frustrating to me – I understand that it’s an unfunded mandate, I understand that it’s going to cause some of our election clerks, or all of our election clerks, to do more work and I’m sorry about that. I really am.

But to come up here and say, for for anyone to say, that somehow this product was hijacked, it was corrupted, it was a bad product, it’s just patently false. So unless somebody wants to get on the back mic and go through line by line and show me exactly where in this bill it is corrupted (slaps his hand into the podium) or where it’s flawed, then I don’t want to hear any more of that.

The second thing I wanted to say is that one of the things that makes people uneasy about this bill – and this is really sad, I want you to think about this for a minute – one of the things that makes people uneasy about this bill is the fact that it is a bipartisan election fraud bill, as if to suggest that it is not possible, never has been, never will be, for Republicans and Democrats to agree that there is election fraud, it affects us all and it’s something we want to work on together, and that it’s something we want to come up with a solution we can all agree on.

(Inhales deeply) And I just think that’s sad. I think it’s sad that there are people in the body, that there are people out there listening to me talk right now, that are naturally suspicious of anything that has to do with election fraud that’s bipartisan. They don’t necessarily want to give it a fair hearing, because they assume that if the party that’s not my party is for this bill, then it must be bad for me. And I think that’s sad, members, that we can’t come together on these issues and work together in a bipartisan way.

So I get it. We’ve come too far too fast. I understand that there are some concerns.

I have an amendment, which I’m not going to offer, but I have an amendment here, that would have actually cleaned up a lot of those concerns and things that were brought to me. It includes suggestions from the attorney general’s office, the secretary of state’s office, we continue to work with our election administrators and the clerks.

But we’re going to blow it up, and we’re going to pretend that it never happened, because we’ve gotten cold feet and we’ve come too far too fast, and I guess all I can say is, you know at one point people thought the world was flat and the sun revolved around the Earth.

But I will tell you this. I’m not a prosecutor. I’m not a lawyer. I’ve been told these cases are hard to prosecute. I’m told they are difficult to prove. They’re difficult to find.

What was unique about this bill, that we are now going to blow up and repeal, was that instead of punishing somebody after they commit a crime, we were actually taking away the opportunity to commit a crime.

Now I know, I’ve heard some people say, “No, no, no. That’s not true. It will open up the possibility for more fraud.” You know where that come from? Let me tell you where that comes from. That comes from an insecurity of the fact that our bill allows for someone who is registered to vote, a legal registered vote, residing at the nursing home, who did not previously request a ballot by mail, but is eligible for a ballot by mail, to get a ballot by mail and to be able to vote on the spot, subject to filling out an application for ballot by mail, and going through the same judging process to make sure that this was a legitimate process, as we see with many of our other election security things.

But I think it’s sad that at the end of the day, we’re more interested in punishing offenders then in preventing crime. I may not be a lawyer, but I am a doctor, and I will tell you flat-out, there’s an old saying in health care, and that is that an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure any time.

And so with that members, I am going to be voting on this bill, I hope you will excuse me that I do not want to blow up my own work product I believe in very strongly. However, I will say that I encourage those of you who are listening to me right now to follow the author on his amendment. We will come back in two years. We will try again, and I will keep fighting.

Laubenberg, who chairs the Elections Committee, came to the back mic to thank Oliverson for his work on the issue.

“I think everyone in the body, Republican or Dermocat, want to make it easy for legitimate voters to vote,” she said.

Oliverson said he “wanted people to have as many opportunities to legitimately vote and to protect their vote.”

Laubenberg, who under the rules of engagement had to be asking Oliverson a question said, “I just want to thank you, how do I put it in  a question? Can I thank you for your work and your willingness to work with everyone, will you accept?

Oliverson said yes and thank you.

But let’s pause here to hear from someone who was not thankful for what Oliverson had tried to do – Aaron Harris of Direct Action Texas, a conservative advocacy group in the DFW area.

That’s cheap freshman of  the year, buddy because, after all, Oliverson was chosen by the members of the House Republican caucus as the outstanding member of their freshman class.

Here, from a few days ago on Direct Action’s website:

OK, but something doesn’t parse here.

Oliverson said the idea behind his bill originated with Alan Vera, formerly of True the Vote, which is, I thought, as conservative a voting watchdog as you’re going to find, and who is now the chief of ballot security for the Harris County GOP, which I presume is as interested in winning elections there as Republicans in Tarrant County want to win elections where they are.

The bill had buy-in from heavyweights in the state Republican Party.

And, while Oliverson said both the governor’s office and the attorney general’s office called him Wednesday to tell him that they wanted his measure repealed, support for the measure among Harris County Republicans seems to have held fast.

In fact, another Harris County Republican, Rep. Kevin Roberts, R-Spring, came to the back mic to ask Oliverson what he should tell Vera, who had sent the party’s Harris County House delegation a long email, expressing his distress that Goldman’s “amendment  to SB 5 eliminating the new nursing home ballot process.

Reading from Vera’s email, Roberts said, “We’re at a loss to understand these planned actions  when the call for the special session specially highlighted the need to further reduce mail ballot fraud. This new effort to repeal the nursing home mail ballot process makes no sense. Under the current system, mail ballots sent to nursing homes and assisted living centers are a ballot harvester’s dream. My question is why are we repealing this?”

Oliverson:

I would answer that two ways. I think you have a legitimate concern among our election administrators and clerks that there is an unfunded mandate attached to that bill. There is. There will be dollars and we can’t exactly say how much that will be. I doubt it will be a significant amount of money, but I guess it could be.

As to the rest of this, I can’t answer your question. I really don’t know.

I’m sitting here with a copy of my bill. We vetted it very carefully. Everybody from True the Vote on the right to the Democrat Party of Texas on the left, and everybody signed off on every change that we made on this bill so, to your point, this was a carefully vetted, carefully thought-out process. It allows the secretary of state discretion in writing rules to anticipate or deal with situations that may not be able to be anticipated that could arise, that would allow for it to be implemented in the least painful process but at the same time preserve the integrity of our elections and make sure that our seniors votes aren’t harvested.

Here is the vote on the amendment repealing Oliverson’s provision, with Oliverson, present, not voting.

Goldman:

Well, I believe the increasing of penalties is the main point of this bill.

We’ve had instances in Tarrant County, and there’s been instances in Dallas County, where mainly these vote harvesters are going out and committing such fraud and if they get caught there’s not that strong of a penalty to prosecute those who get caught. So by increasing the penalties, hopefully this is deterrent not to commit these activities in the future.