Certain election crimes were returned to being a felony. That might be good news if anyone was ever charged with those crimes, but that rarely happens. A bill was passed that would lead to us leaving ERIC. ERIC is an organization that we spend a lot of money to support. It’s supposed to help clean up the voter rolls, but since it’s formation, the rolls have become even more bloated. Just this week the Secretary of State sent notice to ERIC of our pending resignation from the program. This is a big victory.

A bill was passed that would allow disabled people to receive a ballot via the internet that would allow even the blind to vote without a person to aid them in interpreting the ballot. This is one of those things that sounds wonderful, but in practice it will be abused, and it would have been yet another camels nose under the tent in helping to destroy security. Security would have gone out the window when people can print their own ballot, on their own printer, and/or send a ballot in electronically. The UOCAVA system which is used by the military folks to cast their ballots is already badly abused, and this measure would have piled on. Fortunately Abbott vetoed this bill, and that’s curious because it was said that he was the one pushing for its passage. This was a bullet dodged.

Lastly a bill was passed that should help with securing many of the documents that I have been going after. Several bills were filed to help accomplish that and most of the weren’t very good. Not to brag, but yours truly has done more work to find the problems in this area and nearly every bill failed to address some part of the problem. HB 5180 is the one I decided to support, but at the same time I lobbied hard for changes to that. Many of you may know that Brewster isn’t exactly Mr. Personality, and due to that, and preparing for the hearings on the lawsuits, my lobbying efforts fell short. Way short. A couple of other ladies did get changes made in the senate, but I’m afraid that they will confuse the situation. We do know have ballot access guaranteed 61 days after an election, but there are provisions in the bill that I think will allow for the chain of custody to be broken that could make that worthless. We’ll see how this plays out in real time. It goes into effect in September.

There was another tragedy during this session. Mr. Allen Vera, a former Ranger Captain and a man that fought for election integrity way before it was cool to do so, had a massive heart attack and died at the Capitol while there to testify on legislation. I knew Allen. He had been around for a while and knew ropes that most of us don’t and won’t for a very long time, and I’d hoped to learn from him. This is a great loss to me, but also to the whole state. Allen was effective while most of us are running around like headless chickens.

Of course, we also had the impeachment of Paxton that was headed up by that sniveling weasel Phelen.

I don’t believe in coincidences and the day the impeachment was announced was also the day that the decision on both court cases was announced. That narcissistic little punk and the satirists that support him were sending a message. They are all traitors to the country and to their neighbors.

Today we are in a kind of a limbo place on the election document thing. Tarrant County seems to be more cooperative, but most counties are taking a wait and see approach. There are split decisions in the lower courts on the issue of whether they were public or not under the old legislation and there are reasons in the law that this can make a real difference. We are waiting on the new law to come into effect. I’m hoping the counties will be stepping up and do the right thing. There is more to that, that I won’t go into in this forum. I’ll finish bringing y’all up to date tomorrow.