But while no one claimed responsibility for the mailer, it mirrored the language that Garza’s opponents have long used to say his reforms ushered in a period of lawlessness, despite data showing crime is on the decline.

Sylestine claimed that Garza painted a “political bullseye” on police officers, and aired an ad accusing him of being “lenient” on child sexual assault. The local police union similarly accused Garza of “targeting” cops for “political gain,” or giving a “sweetheart deal to a child predator.” The head of the local GOP called for his criminal prosecution and said that Garza has “declared war” on the police. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton accused him of caring more about “the radical agenda of dangerous Antifa and BLM mobs than justice.” And they all routinely singled out the support he received in 2020 from a PAC associated with George Soros, the billionaire who has supported progressive causes and emerged as a leading foil for the right. 

On Tuesday, Garza easily beat back his opposition, prevailing over the well-funded Sylestine in the Democratic primary.

As of publication, Garza leads Sylestine 66 to 34 percent. Garza will be heavily favored in November against Republican Daniel Betts, in this staunchly blue county. 

Bob Libal, a Garza supporter and Austin-based reform advocate, said he was inundated toward the end of the campaign by “extreme fearmongering rhetoric,” text messages and images that falsely portrayed Austin as a “dystopic, crime-ridden place” with criminals “roaming the streets.” 

Libal told Bolts that Garza’s win “speaks to the broad popularity of progressive criminal legal reforms in Travis County, even up against an extremely well-funded campaign operating from the playbook of fear.” 

Over in Houston, Harris County DA Kim Ogg has employed a similar playbook during her tenure in office, long accusing proponents of criminal justice reform of filling the streets with violence.

On Tuesday, she lost overwhelmingly in the Democratic primary to challenger Sean Teare, a former prosecutor in her office. She trails 78 to 22 percent as of publication.

While Ogg won her first term in 2016 on promises of reform, she then became one of the leading antagonists of Harris County’s landmark bail reform, which expanded pretrial release for people accused of low-level offenses. “We see judges right now letting dangerous misdemeanor offenders out,” Ogg complained in 2019. After voters elected some progressive county officials in 2018, she frequently battled with them. Ogg painted the frightening picture of a “new battleground for public safety” that pitted her staff against local Democratic judges, whom she blamed for letting violent defendants walk. (The Harris County jail has remained overcrowded and in violation of minimum safety standards.) 

“When you have murderers running around on multiple bonds… it’s a scary time,” she said.

Again this year, Ogg went after her challenger, Teare, for being “Soros-funded”—ironically, since her first win in 2016 was fueled by more than half-a-million dollars in spending from a PAC with ties to the billionaire. While benefiting herself from heavy financial support from the bail industry, Ogg claimed that Soros backed Teare because she “did not toe the line on bail and did not agree to open the doors of the jail to violent offenders.” 

Teare told Bolts last month that Ogg spread a “culture of fear” in her office. He says the DA has caused line prosecutors to overcharge some cases, be too aggressive in plea offers, and resist pretrial detention, for fear of backlash over a specific case of recidivism. “That’s the way you don’t get in trouble,” he said. 

Teare has said he supports the misdemeanor bail reform and he pledged not to take campaign donations from the bail industry. His website features a study that showed the increase in pretrial releases did not increase crime.

In his victory speech on Tuesday, Teare thanked the Texas Organizing Project, a progressive organization that has backed local reforms, including an initiative to drive people out of jail, and that endorsed him this year. 

“When they put their mind to a race, they go all in,” Teare said. “Jumping in behind me is something that I’ll remember forever.”

Still, Teare has also carved out an overall moderate persona compared to Ogg’s unsuccessful challengers four years ago. For instance, he declined during the campaign to criticize Ogg over the death penalty, saying he agreed with an incumbent who has sought capital punishment many times. As a former prosecutor, Teare brought a different background to the race than Garza, a former public defender and labor lawyer, did in Austin. 

In the general election, Teare will face another former prosecutor, Republican Dan Simons. He will be favored in a county that leans Democratic, though not as heavily as Travis.

He benefited during the primary from the erosion of Ogg’s relationship with the Democratic Party. As Bolts wrote last month, nearly 200 local precinct chairs adopted a party resolution in December that said Ogg had “abused the power of her office to pursue personal vendettas against her political opponents, sided with Republicans to advance their extremist agenda, and stood in the way of fixing the broken criminal justice system.”

Daniel Cohen, who heads the group Indivisible Houston, helped organize the resolution against Ogg. “This is a new model of accountability within the party, within the community,” he told Bolts. He said that most of the resolution’s proponents were motivated by reading coverage of how Ogg was “weaponizing” the power of her office against adversaries like County Judge Lina Hidalgo, former judge Franklin Bynum, whom Ogg petitioned to remove from the bench, and County Commissioner Rodney Ellis, who repeatedly opposed budget increases that Ogg requested.

For Cohen, the throughline between the various Democrats whom Ogg has targeted is that they supported the county’s misdemeanor bail reform. “It’s a pretty clear pattern in terms of the people who she fights.” 

And Ogg kept attacking former allies during the primary campaign, for instance telling Texas Monthly that the Houston LGBTQ+ Political Caucus, which had endorsed her in the past and endorsed Teare this time, does not represent “truly gay people.”

In Austin, Garza maintained a far more harmonious relationship to his own party—benefiting for instance from the endorsements of the two Democrats who represent Travis County in Congress, Lloyd Doggett and Greg Casar. 

But he has a far more hostile relationship with Republicans—and while that’s unlikely to cost him his job in the general election, Garza’s critics are plotting to get him out through other means.

Garza has piloted a swath of reforms over his first term, including ramping up restorative justice and pretrial diversion programs to reduce the number of people with criminal convictions. In 2022, his pledge, alongside some other DAs to not prosecute abortion cases drew ire from Texas Republicans, who last year passed a law that authorized courts to remove prosecutors for declining to prosecute certain cases. Garza is now facing a legal petition to remove him under the new law.

Local police groups have also signaled support for such efforts after Garza filed charges against more than a dozen officers for using excessive force; Garza dropped the cases in December but told Bolts he still intends to continue pressing for “systemic change” in policing.

That threat of removal will loom large over the rest of the year, and Garza’s likely second term.

On Tuesday night, though, Garza started off by celebrating his victory. He told his cheering supporters, “Tonight, we scored a major victory for our progressive movement and for criminal justice reform.”

The post “Playbook of Fear” Fails to Sway Voters in Austin and Houston DA Races appeared first on Bolts.

In public forums and letters to the local newspaper, Uvalde County residents have called on Nolasco to resign and refrain from running for office. But Nolasco is pressing ahead, and he faces three opponents in the Republican primary on March 5; one of them, Otto Arnim, has highlighted the sheriff’s role in the failed response to the massacre. 

But Uvalde County DA Christina Mitchell is running unopposed in her own Republican primary on the same day, despite complaints that she has helped shield local cops from consequences for their failures during the shooting. She’ll also face no Democrat in the general election, as none filed to run against her by the December deadline. 

And so it goes across the state: Hundreds of local elections will shape the future of law enforcement this year, but whether they lead to any change or accountability of course depends on who actually is running. 

Sheriffs who run some of Texas’ largest lockups and have long faced scandals over deaths and abuses behind bars are now asking voters for another term, with some facing competitive races. But of the 14 counties whose jails are on notice with the state jail commission for violating minimum safety standards as of February 2024, seven are overseen by incumbent sheriffs who are running unopposed this year.

District attorney races may also shift the policy landscape in some of Texas’ largest cities, with disagreements over prosecution practices shaping contests in Harris County (Houston) and Travis County (Austin) in particular. But in large swaths of the state, these elections have already been decided: Only 28 percent of the state’s DA races this year drew multiple candidates by the December deadline, leaving dozens of incumbents like Mitchell virtually certain to secure another term.

This includes populous areas that have not seen a contested election in years. In Montgomery County, a county of nearly 650,000 north of Houston, Republican DA Brett Ligon is running with no primary or general election challenger for the third consecutive cycle.

Still, there’s plenty to watch in politics around criminal justice in Texas this year. With a recent state law granting local law enforcement new powers to arrest people whom they suspect are undocumented, sheriffs face mounting questions over how they’ll choose to cooperate with the state’s crackdown on immigrants; some are racing to bolster the law, while candidates in more Democratic counties like El Paso are promising to resist it.

Far-right officials and activists are also going after justices on the all-Republican Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in this year’s GOP primary—an intra-party grudge match that, as Bolts has reported, stems from the court’s 2021 ruling that limited Attorney General Ken Paxton’s authority over voter fraud prosecutions in the state. Meanwhile, organizers in the High Plains city of Lubbock are petitioning for a local ballot measure to decriminalize small amounts of marijuana, even as Paxton sues to block similar ordinances that voters recently passed in several other Texas cities. 

To kick off our coverage of elections that will shape policing and criminal punishment in Texas this year, below is Bolts’ guide to some important storylines to start watching in the run-up to the March 5 primaries.

Deadly jails, and sheriffs that run them 

Jail deaths have surged across the country in recent years, including in many of Texas’ largest counties. This year, with all of the state’s sheriff’s offices on the ballot, some are seeking re-election amid criticism over spiking deaths on their watch. 

In Tarrant County, home to Fort Worth, jail deaths have risen dramatically under Sheriff Bill Waybourn, a Republican who first entered office in 2017 and is seeking re-election this year. At least 60 people have died in Tarrant County jail custody since Waybourn took over, compared to 25 in-custody deaths during the 8-year period that preceded him, according to state records and data compiled by nonprofit oversight group Texas Justice Initiative. 

Waybourn, who is unopposed in the Republican primary next month but will face a Democratic challenger in November, has become a sort of national right-wing celebrity for his anti-immigrant rhetoric and efforts to police elections in Tarrant County. But at home, criticism has mounted over the rise in deaths and other scandals on his watch—including allegations of a cover-up following one particularly questionable jail death; a pregnant woman with severe mental illness who delivered her baby alone inside her cell (the child later died); and a disabled woman who left the jail comatose and covered in bruises. Last year, a group of Tarrant County activists working with the civil rights clinic at Texas A&M University’s law school filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice seeking an investigation into the local jail. 

“The Tarrant County Jail has failed the community at every turn,” the letter stated. “It has failed to provide medical care, to protect incarcerated people from risks associated with poor mental health, to perform checks, and to protect individuals from harm from jail staff and others in the jail.”

Both of Waybourn’s Democratic challengers—Patrick Moses, a retired federal officer, and Indya Murray, a local police officer—have cited problems at the jail as a reason for running. Voters will choose which of them moves to November’s general election against Waybourn on March 5.

In a recent forum local officials organized to discuss problems at the jail, Waybourn defended his running of the facility and downplayed the scandals on his watch, blaming the deaths on drug addiction and other health problems that he said were outside the control of his staff—like “excited delirium,” a supposed condition that medical associations have long rejected but which cops still cite to explain in-custody deaths. 

Other sheriffs who oversee large scandal-plagued lockups in Texas are also on the ballot this year, including Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez, a Democrat first elected to the post in 2016, and Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar, another Democrat first elected that same year. As Bolts has reported, Harris County’s jail system, the largest in the state, has struggled with overcrowding and violence in recent years. The Bexar County jail has also seen a rise in deaths in recent years and a high suicide rate, a persistent problem at the jail for more than a decade. 

As of publication, Harris County is one of the 14 counties with jails currently flagged by state authorities as non-compliant with minimum safety standards. Besides Gonzalez, the other sheriffs who are facing competition in these counties are all Republicans in rural areas like Newton County, which like Harris County is shipping people out-of-state as a solution to its jail overcrowding.

Boss Ogg fights her own party 

When she won the Harris County DA race in 2016, Kim Ogg became the first Democrat to run Texas’ largest prosecutor’s shop in 40 years. She promised a vision of change that seemed to distance the office from its tough-on-crime heyday, focusing on reforms aimed at diverting people accused of low-level crimes, like marijuana possession, from jail. 

The county has kept morphing politically since her first win, including electing other reform-minded Democrats to key offices as part of a blue wave in 2018, and adopting bail reform for misdemeanor cases in the aftermath of a lawsuit and federal ruling striking down the county’s previous practice of routinely detaining people with petty charges who couldn’t afford to pay for their pretrial freedom. 

But during that time, Ogg has largely parted ways with this broader movement to reform Harris County’s criminal legal system, in part by fiercely resisting the efforts at bail reform. Now Ogg is running for a third term—this time with a much more sour relationship to many in her party. She first faces a challenge from a former staffer in the March 5 Democratic primary. 

In recent years, reform-minded local officials who have butted heads with Ogg have found themselves in the crosshairs of her powerful office. Under Ogg, the DA’s office filed complaints with the state in an attempt to unseat a Democratic criminal court judge who was vocally critical of the DA. Her office attempted to prosecute another Democratic judge who had publicly sparred with her over bail reforms. Ogg’s office is also currently prosecuting former aides of Democratic Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, the county executive who has repeatedly clashed with the DA over criminal justice policy, over alleged improprieties involving a county contract. 

Pushback from Ogg’s own party reached a boiling point late last year when Harris County Democrats officially admonished the DA. Local party precinct chairs voted overwhelmingly to pass a resolution stating that Ogg has “abused the power of her office to pursue personal vendettas against her political opponents, sided with Republicans to advance their extremist agenda, and stood in the way of fixing the broken criminal justice system.” 

Ogg has dismissed the intra-party fight as “political drama” and argues she helped steer the office through Hurricane Harvey and the COVID-19 pandemic, crises that wreaked havoc on the local criminal legal system. (Ogg’s office and campaign didn’t respond to numerous requests for comment for this story.) 

Ogg’s critics say her charging decisions have contributed to the deadly crisis at the local jail. Defense attorneys and former prosecutors have accused her of mismanagement and bungling some of the office’s core functions, such as screening charges filed by police. According to a recent investigation by the Houston Chronicle, cases prosecuted by the DA’s office that judges later tossed for lack of probable cause have skyrocketed under Ogg after she changed how the office reviews charges, resulting in more and more Houstonians jailed without a firm legal basis. 

Sean Teare, a former prosecutor who is challenging Ogg in the Democratic primary, told Bolts that problems with the DA’s intake division reflect a larger “culture of fear” that she has fostered in the office. He claims that prosecutors are reluctant to dismiss weak cases, or allow for pretrial release or plead down charges when appropriate, for fear that a case might later generate critical headlines. Teare argues that the environment has compounded the looming backlog in criminal cases facing the office. 

“You can make the recommendation for plea bargains at the highest level possible, just never move off of it, and the case will never plea,” he said. “It will pend for three and a half years and someone else will have to try it—even if we know we can’t make the case or that’s not the right recommendation, because that’s the way you don’t get in trouble.” 

While Democrats have come to dominate countywide elections in Harris County, the primary winner will face Dan Simons, a local Republican lawyer, in the general election.

Austin’s election unfolds under a removal threat

Just a month before a Minneapolis officer murdered George Floyd and sparked a national uprising, Austin cops had killed Mike Ramos, another unarmed Black man whose name, along with Floyd’s, eventually became a rallying cry during the seismic protests that hit Texas’ capital city that summer. Austin police only reinforced their reputation for violence during the 2020 protests, shooting crowd-control munitions like “bean bag” rounds at unarmed protesters, resulting in numerous severe injuries. 

José Garza, a former public defender and labor rights organizer, successfully ran for Travis County DA that year, vowing to hold police accountable. Within months, prosecutions against abusive cops started to rise. In early 2022, about a year after taking over, Garza announced charges against more than a dozen Austin officers accused of assault and deadly conduct during the 2020 protests. 

Garza’s first term has been a lesson in what kind of policy changes local reform-minded DAs can enact—from prosecuting police to improving the office’s historically harmful treatment of sex assault survivors and piloting a restorative justice program. Garza says the office has also dramatically expanded access to pretrial diversion programs, so that most people charged with non-violent offenses are now connected with some kind of service, whether job training or treatment, instead of being convicted. In an interview with Bolts, Garza pointed to a recent case, a single father charged with cocaine possession, as an example: diversion meant prosecutors sending the man to the local carpenters union for a training program and dismissing the charge when he completed it.

“The carpenters told us he was their best student, and so he ended his contact with our criminal legal system in Travis County, not as a convicted felon but as a carpenter’s apprentice,” Garza said. 

But as he stepped up police prosecutions and other reforms, Garza has drawn the hostility of law enforcement unions and their allies, a familiar pattern to other progressives in his office. And as he now seeks a second term, Garza first faces a March 5 Democratic primary against Jeremy Sylestine, a former prosecutor who has accused him of painting a “political bullseye” on APD officers.

Sylestine has also aired campaign ads accusing the DA of being too lenient on plea deals (Sylestine’s campaign didn’t respond to requests for comment for this story). Daniel Betts, the only GOP candidate, has encouraged Republican voters to cross party lines to vote in the Democratic primary against Garza, which is allowed under Texas’ open primary system. 

In their efforts against Garza, police groups are also looking beyond elections. Last year, Republicans in the Texas legislature rewrote state law to allow for courts to remove local DAs who choose not to pursue certain types of crimes. Aimed at a handful of ”rogue prosecutors” who, like Garza, had promised not to prosecute people for abortion, the new law also threatens to undermine local attempts to decriminalize marijuana possession. 

Law enforcement groups launched a website to collect complaints against Garza the week the new prosecutor-removal law took effect last September. In December, the GOP candidate who lost to Garza in the 2020 general election helped file a petition to remove him from office, citing the new law. 

Garza in December ended up dismissing the criminal charges against most of the Austin police officers his office was prosecuting for excessive force during the 2020 protests. Garza says those cases were derailed late last year when APD sent his office an internal review showing that police officials knew ahead of the protests that the department’s crowd-control munitions were dangerous and could maim people. Garza also says police conveniently did not investigate or disclose those facts until the three-year statute of limitations had passed for any potential indictments against higher-ups. 

Garza insists that police prosecutions are among the most difficult cases his office handles but he says he’s using his perch to push for police oversight and accountability in ways that go beyond prosecuting cases. In December, even as he dropped the charges against officers who injured protesters in 2020, Garza says he asked Austin’s mayor to join him in calling for a U.S. Department of Justice investigation into APD’s use of force and crowd-control tactics during the 2020 protest.

“I’m really more convinced than ever that there really needs to be deep, systemic change in the Austin Police Department,” Garza said. 

The post The Texas Elections That Will Shape Policing and Punishment This Year appeared first on Bolts.

“The court didn’t make it any easier to win voting rights cases,” redistricting expert Justin Levitt told Bolts at the time. “It just declined to make it much, much, much, much, much, much harder.”

But the reprieve may have been temporary, and winning voting rights cases may still get much harder this year. A series of cases are working their way through federal courts that represent grave threats to Section 2 of the VRA, which prohibits denying the right to vote “on account or race or color,” language that extends into protection against racial gerrymandering. 

In these cases, conservatives are trying out a suite of new legal arguments, each of which would dramatically narrow the scope of the VRA. The cases are still making their way through district and appellate courts, with some early rulings favoring conservatives, at times authored by judges nominated by Donald Trump. Many are expected to end up at the Supreme Court, where members of the conservative majority have already expressed skepticism at various aspects of the VRA. 

Judges will decide if critical protections afforded by Section 2 of the VRA remain applicable to the present, whether the law applies to statewide races and coalition districts, and even whether voting rights groups can ever bring a lawsuit under Section 2—a sleeper case that already detonated in an appeals court last fall. The most acute stakes concern the rules of redistricting, with officials in GOP-run states including Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, North Dakota, and Texas proposing new interpretations that would fuel gerrymandering and undercut the voting power of communities of color. 

Here is your roadmap to four major legal threats that may further unravel the VRA in 2024, and what cases you should be watching.

1. What if private plaintiffs can no longer sue?

What is the threat to the VRA?

For decades, ordinary citizens and voting-rights organizations have brought lawsuits alleging VRA violations. These lawsuits, and the mountain of legal work and research that goes into them, have been critical to getting courts to strike down discriminatory legislation and create districts that allow communities of color to be represented by candidates of their choice.

In what’s undoubtedly the biggest threat facing the VRA, federal courts might invalidate that entire approach. Conservatives have made the case that only the U.S. Attorney General has the power to sue over violations of Section 2 of the VRA, and they landed a startling ruling by a district court judge last year. If the ruling stands, it would ban private parties from bringing these lawsuits, massively shrinking enforcement; when the Department of Justice is controlled by politicians hostile to civil rights, it may eliminate these VRA lawsuits altogether. 

What are the cases to watch?

Keep an eye on Arkansas State Conference NAACP v. Arkansas Board of Apportionment, the challenge to Arkansas’s state legislative districts. 

After Arkansas Republicans drew new legislative maps in 2021, the state NAACP sued in federal court, arguing that Black Arkansans were underrepresented, and that this violated Section 2 of the VRA. But the district court judge who heard the case, Trump-appointee Lee Rudofsky, questioned whether the NAACP was even allowed to bring suit at all. 

It’s been a long-established practice for private parties to sue over Section 2 allegations. But Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas encouraged that question to be revisited in a 2021 concurrence, stating that courts have “assumed” that this is appropriate without ever deciding it. Walking into that breach, with an explicit appeal to Gorsuch, Rudofsky ended up dismissing the suit with a bombshell finding: “Only the Attorney General of the United States can bring a case like this one.” 

In November, a three-judge panel on the Eighth Circuit, one of the most conservative appellate courts in the country, affirmed that ruling in a decision authored by Eighth Circuit Judge David Stras.

If the ruling holds—the NAACP has asked the full Eighth Circuit to reconsider the decision, and an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court is likely regardless—it would be sure to sideline a great many VRA cases. Besides the Arkansas litigation, high-profile cases last year that led to new maps in Alabama and Louisiana were brought by private plaintiffs, and would have been dismissed outright under Stras’ ruling.

The GOP has rushed to defend the holding and use it in other contexts. In December, the Republican attorneys general of twelve states (including Idaho’s Raul Labrador, Kansas’ Kris Kobach, and Texas’ Ken Paxton, all prominent far-right figures) signed on to an amicus brief asking the Fifth Circuit to take on the Eighth Circuit’s interpretation and rule against voting rights groups in the ongoing litigation around Alabama’s congressional map.

And in North Dakota, a state that falls within the Eighth Circuit, the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians and the Spirit Lake Tribe successfully challenged legislative districts in 2023 for diminishing the voting power of Native voters. State officials have agreed to use a replacement map for the 2024 election but have appealed the use of the map beyond that point. And in pushing back against the ruling last month, North Dakota’s Republican Secretary of State, Michael Howe, has already invoked the same argument that private parties cannot bring suits under Section 2 of the VRA, an argument that would outright silence the legal power of the two tribes that challenged the state.

2. The conservative case that times have changed

What is the threat to the VRA?

When the Supreme Court in 2013 struck down Section 5 of the VRA, which required certain jurisdictions to seek D.O.J. approval before changing their voting procedures, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that “things have changed dramatically” in the South since 1965.

Some conservatives want federal courts to go even further, and dramatically re-interpret Section 2 on that same basis. And Justice Brett Kavanaugh last year gave them a reason to keep trying, doing so in the very same Alabama case in which he sided with the liberal justices to otherwise save the VRA. He noted that Justice Clarence Thomas’s dissenting opinion in the case argued that “the authority to conduct race-based redistricting cannot extend indefinitely into the future.” But Kavanaugh wrote that “Alabama did not raise that temporal argument in this Court, and I therefore would not consider it at this time.” The time may now be coming that’ll test Kavanaugh: Despite the massive barriers that people of color continue to face in exercising the franchise, multiple cases are working their way through the legal system in which defendants are renewing the argument that “things have changed” too much to keep enforcing Section 2.

What are the cases to watch?

Keep an eye on Milligan v. Allen, the continued litigation over Alabama’s congressional map, and Robinson v. Landry, the challenge to Louisiana’s congressional map 

Alabama this year will vote under a new congressional map that a federal court drew in late 2023 to create an additional district likely to elect a Black candidate. State officials have objected to the new map, and in so doing they’ve picked up on Kavanaugh’s argument: Alabama is asking courts to decide whether “the authority to conduct race-based redistricting extends to the present day,” regardless of its original justification. 

Louisiana officials have made a similar claim in their effort to fight court rulings that have struck down the state’s congressional maps as violating the VRA. (Louisiana adopted a new map creating a new majority-Black district this month due to a court-ordered deadline, but the litigation over that order continues.) 

Alabama has called the litigation against its original map “affirmative action in redistricting.” In 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court in 2023 struck down affirmative action in university admissions, and even though that case did not touch on voting rights, GOP officials in several states have weaponized the case to argue that the VRA is no longer applicable to the present.

In July, Louisiana officials filed a brief arguing that the affirmative action decision shows that “statutes requiring race-based classification” will “necessarily become obsolete.” They ask courts to settle “whether the facts on the ground here similarly warrant a rejection of Section 2 of the VRA, as applied, because it is no longer necessary.”

If the Fifth Circuit and the Supreme Court take the bait and say the established interpretation of Section 2 as no longer permissible, it would greatly narrow the legal space for racial discrimination claims.

It would amount to a judicial carte blanche for states to double down on discriminatory practices, except now shielded by the argument that the country is too enlightened to allow such practices.

3. Courts may shut the door to sue over statewide elections

What is the threat to the VRA?

Legal challenges often focus on how politicians have drawn districts: Have they respected the VRA in how they’ve separated or combined a state’s communities? But civil rights litigants have also contested the use of “at-large” elections, which are elections that elect the members of a body (say, a city council) throughout the jurisdiction, without the use of districts. Using this “at-large” structure for local races can prevent minority groups from electing a candidate of their choice; in some contexts, lawsuits have successfully forced counties and cities to convert their electoral system to use districts, allowing different communities to be better represented.

A case that’s percolating through the federal court system may decide whether similar lawsuits can ever be brought in the context of statewide elections. If that door is shut, it would put many government bodies whose members are elected at-large—most commonly, public utility commissions, boards of university regents, or boards of education—beyond the reach of VRA litigation.

What is the case to watch?

Keep an eye on Rose v. Raffensperger, the challenge to Georgia’s public service commission elections. 

In 2020, several Georgia voters sued over the use of statewide (“at-large”) elections for the five members of the state’s Public Service Commission, the body that regulates public utilities. They argued that a compact, Black-majority district could be created to elect a member of the Commission; a district court agreed after a trial, and ordered the state legislature to draw districts to that effect. But the state’s decision to appeal dragged out the process, leading to canceled elections. And in November, in a ruling authored by Judge Elizabeth Branch, another Trump appointee, a three-judge panel on the Eleventh Circuit reversed that decision. The panel held that the plaintiffs had not made out a sufficient claim under the VRA because their proposed remedy would “upset Georgia’s policy interests,” specifically, its “interest in maintaining its form of government.” In other words, because the Georgia legislature decided to make the Public Service Commission elected statewide, the court was obligated to respect that decision.

The ultimate resolution of this case will shape the viability of a lot of prospective litigation. This is believed to be the first case challenging the use of a statewide electoral system, so the district court’s decision had opened the door to similar challenges popping up elsewhere. If lawsuits like this can be brought against the use of statewide elections to pick members of state boards, voters may be able to target other elected state institutions whose “at large” membership is largely or all-white—Alabama’s Public Service Commission and Texas’s Railroad Commission come to mind—with the demand that they replace statewide elections with a system that providing communities of color a better opportunity to elect a member. 

If these challenges can’t be brought, however, communities of color may keep being systematically shut out with impunity.

4. The use of “coalition districts” is under threat

What is the threat to the VRA?

The VRA may compel states or localities to create districts that give voters in a racial group the opportunity to elect a candidate of their choice. In deciding whether such a district is required, federal courts assess whether a specific group’s size and voting behavior warrant such an opportunity district. But what happens when no single racial group is large enough to reach that threshold, but several do so when combined? 

In that context, some federal courts have required the creation of “coalition” districts, a practice that has boosted representation for people of color. For instance, they may consider Black and Latinx residents together to force the creation of a district in which voters would have a better shot at electing a nonwhite candidate. A case out of Texas is now threatening this practice, however. 

What are the cases to watch?

Keep an eye on Petteway v. Galveston County, the challenge to county commission districts in Galveston County, Texas. 

Following the 2020 census, Galveston County commissioners drew a new set of districts for their county commission; their map eliminated the county’s only “majority-minority” district—a coalition district in which Black and Latino voters make up a majority. Backed by conservative legal groups, the county argued during a trial last year that the VRA should not be used to protect multiracial coalitions; but a federal court sided with plaintiffs in restoring the district. Judge Jeffrey Brown, who was nominated by Trump, even wrote that the “circumstances and effect of the enacted plan were mean-spirited and egregious.”

But the conservative Fifth Circuit chose to suspend the decision until it could decide the county’s appeal, and the U.S. Supreme Court blessed that move in December over the objections of liberal justices. The appeals court made clear that it wanted to revisit its past decisions that have endorsed the use of coalition districts.

The case may hand conservative justices another shot at upending the redistricting norms, if they choose to weigh in for the first time on the permissibility of coalition districts. If coalition districts are no longer used as a remedy to racial discrimination, it may further cut the number of districts drawn to elect people of color; in racially diverse regions like Texas, it would make it harder to challenge maps that are resulting in a disproportionate number of white officials.

Some of these questions are playing out in Georgia. A federal court last year struck down the state’s congressional map, ordering an additional Black opportunity district. The legislature responded by carving up an existing coalition district and turning it into a Black majority district. The challengers have argued, unsuccessfully so far, that this is impermissible: that fixing a VRA violation cannot involve eliminating an existing coalition district.

The post Your Guide to Four Emerging Threats to the Voting Rights Act appeared first on Bolts.

Evan Lee had trouble getting the medication he needed for mental illness and other health issues after being booked into the Harris County jail, just three days from Christmas in 2021. As a result, Lee’s family says he deteriorated during his time inside the hulking lockup in downtown Houston, until March 9, 2022, when he was badly beaten and injured by another inmate.

According to a lawsuit Lee’s family filed against the county earlier this summer, it took two days for jail officials to give him any medical care despite visible injuries like facial bruising. Even then, according to the lawsuit, jail medical staff “simply looked at Mr. Lee and sent him back to his cell without any treatment, observation or further diagnostic testing.” On March 18, more than a week after the fight, jail staff finally sent Lee to a hospital because of how disoriented he was. Doctors found serious head injuries, including two areas of bleeding in his brain, and pronounced him brain-dead two days later. 

Lee, 31, was one of at least 28 people who died after being in Harris County jail custody in 2022, when Texas’ largest jail system saw a record wave of deaths. Alongside other mourning parents, his mother Jacilet Griffin-Lee now religiously attends meetings held by the Texas Commission on Jail Standards, a state regulatory agency. For more than a year at these hearings, Harris County has been called to the carpet for violating minimum safety standards, including for lapses in medical care and monitoring of people in custody. Griffin-Lee and other family members drove the 160-mile trip from Houston to Austin for the jail commission’s last hearing on Nov. 2 and stood at the back of the room, holding poster-sized photos of loved ones lost to the jail as an entourage of Harris County officials testified about efforts to improve conditions. 

After Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez left the hearing room, Griffin-Lee peppered him with questions in the basement level of the Texas capitol building. “It’s a horrible facility, it just hurts for people to get the death penalty while they’re waiting for their case,” she said as other grieving mothers circled the sheriff. “We should not be getting the kind of letters we’re getting from inmates that are there and what they’re witnessing.” 

Harris County officials have largely blamed the jail crisis on overcrowding and short staffing; as of the November hearing, more than 9,000 people were detained inside a Harris County jail system that had more than 200 vacant jailer positions. And yet they haven’t announced major new efforts to shrink the population they wish to jail. Instead, in response to the jail commission’s escalating pressure, they’ve started shipping even more people in their custody to for-profit lockups far from Harris County. 

Last month, after the state jail commission threatened to reduce Harris County’s jail capacity if it didn’t comply with minimum standards, the county’s governing body—its five-person commissioners court—unanimously approved a $11.3 million contract to send up to 360 people to a private prison in Mississippi. That’s on top of the roughly 1,300 people whose detention the sheriff’s office already outsources to other private lockups outside the county. 

Any pretrial detention, which accounts for more than 70 percent of the county’s jail population, separates families; it also makes mounting a defense more difficult, putting pressure on people to plead guilty. But those challenges multiply when people are sent hundreds of miles away. It may even compound the backlog in criminal cases that has contributed to the overcrowding crisis. According to county data, people now spend on average nearly 200 days in Harris County jail custody, most waiting for their case to be processed, which is far greater than the national average jail stay of 33 days. Defense attorneys say more outsourcing could add to delays in cases as more people must be transported back to the county for court hearings.

“It’s hugely expensive, it draws things out, and it destroys relationships between clients and lawyers and clients and their families,” Alex Bunin, Harris County’s chief public defender, told me. “It creates just all kinds of anxieties that can play out later and affect things like recidivism and getting a job and getting back into society.”

The outsourcing, ostensibly a response to dangerous jail conditions in Harris County, will put even more people in the hands of private prison companies with their own histories of abuse. 

CoreCivic, the private prison giant that inked the new contract with Harris County last month to detain people in one of its Mississippi lockups, has long been accused of short staffing, excessive force, and poor treatment at its facilities. Another company Harris County contracts with to house up to 500 people in one of its Louisiana prisons, LaSalle Corrections, has a similarly troubled track record; in 2020, the company lost its contract to run a bi-state jail on the Texas-Arkansas border following years of lawsuits over deaths on its watch. 

Harris County detainees shipped to the LaSalle Corrections Center in northwest Louisiana, nearly 300 miles from home, have already warned of dangerous conditions. Rahan Atia, a Houston defense attorney, told me that he started hearing complaints of extortion and threats of violence after he took over the cases of several defendants held there. 

In September, Atia asked a Harris County judge on one of his cases to prevent the sheriff’s office from sending a client back to LaSalle after he’d been brought to Harris County for a hearing. (Atia asked that his client not be named to protect his privacy.) The request prompted a hearing over whether to keep the defendant in Harris County. 

Lawyers for the county opposed the motion. “The same people that are out there are here,” said Graylon Wells, a lawyer with the Harris County Attorney’s Office, according to a transcript I obtained of the hearing. 

Wells said that the jails managed by the county also present dangers, questioning whether the defendant would be any safer staying in Harris County. “My confusion here is inmates rotate from LaSalle to here, so why is he safer here than he is in LaSalle?” Wells asked. Victoria Jimenez, a lawyer with the sheriff’s office, told the judge, “It is nearly impossible to prevent any type of extortion from happening … What if something happens to him here?” 

“Is something going to happen to him here?” the judge, Natalia Cornelio, asked. “God forbid, no. Hopefully not,” Jimenez replied, then added, “Things happen every day in that jail.” 

Atia told me the hearing felt like a troubling admission by the county that it couldn’t ensure safety for anyone in its custody, whether in the facilities they run directly or elsewhere. He credited Cornelio for taking the matter seriously and granting his request to keep the defendant in Harris County after the extortion attempts, but he added that other judges refused to even hear similar complaints. “Other judges went, ‘Well you know, it’s just the culture,’” he said. “No, it’s not just the culture. We need to stop this.” 

Neither the sheriff’s office or LaSalle representatives responded to my requests for comment or questions sent by email for this story. 

The outsourcing also decreases oversight of the conditions under which people are detained. Jails inside the state fall under the regulation of the Texas jail commission and are required to hold independent law enforcement investigations into each death in custody and report them to the state attorney general. (As I wrote earlier this year, some Texas sheriffs have tried to undermine these requirements.) 

But those requirements stop at the state line. 

Andrea Armstrong, a law professor at Loyola University in New Orleans who works with her students to compile information about deaths in custody across Louisiana, says that her state has comparably weak jail regulations and oversight. She pointed to the case of Billie Davis, a 35-year-old man who died after Harris County sent him to the LaSalle Correctional Center last year. Had he died in Texas, Davis’ death would have triggered a report to the Texas AG as well as an independent police investigation. After Davis died in Louisiana, Texas jail reform activists struggled for months to find out what happened to him. This year, activists finally tracked down a coroner’s report, which concluded that Davis died from the result of “multiple blunt force traumatic injuries during a fight in custody” and ruled his death a homicide. 

Armstrong said Louisiana law doesn’t require any particular investigation into deaths in custody other than by a coroner, so it’s unclear what, if any, other inquiry occurred into Davis’ death. (Sheriff’s officials in LaSalle Parish, where the facility is located, didn’t respond to my questions for this story.) “In our work documenting deaths in Louisiana prisons and jails, one of the most difficult facilities to obtain information from is privately operated facilities,” Armstrong told me. “My students often end up in extended conversations with legal counsel. It’s a difficult undertaking.” 

Brandon Wood, executive director of the Texas jail commission, acknowledged the outsourcing of detainees may decrease oversight of the conditions in which they’re detained. “I don’t know if I want to use the term, ‘black hole,’” he told me, “but it is one of those things where once they are no longer within the state of Texas, we lose a lot of our authority regarding those inmates.” 

Advocates for jail reform in Harris County have urged local officials to prioritize reducing the jail population over more outsourcing. Krishnaveni Gundu, executive director of the Texas Jail Project, which monitors jail conditions and advocates for incarcerated people and their families, says there have long been other options. 

For instance, she pointed to a 2020 consulting report commissioned by the county that recommended prosecutors dismiss all non-violent felony cases older than nine months in order to cut the county’s case backlog—especially since more than half of those cases eventually wound up dropped or deferred anyway.

Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg has balked at such recommendations, calling them unrealistic. Ogg, who faces a heated primary challenge to keep her seat next year, was also admonished by her own party earlier this month, with Harris County Democratic Party precinct chairs voting overwhelmingly to pass a resolution that condemns her for, among other things, “[standing] in the way of fixing the broken criminal justice system.” Ogg has also clashed with local judges who have supported bail reform and pursued efforts to relieve the local jail.

Gonzalez, the local sheriff, has said that outsourcing is “not a preferred solution” and has made halting efforts to release people—including flagging people in his jail system who present no public safety risk for consideration by the DA’s office and judges. “We incarcerate way too many people,” the sheriff told the grieving families who had gathered in November to confront him. “Right now, law enforcement is on the front lines of three things in this country: mental health, addiction and poverty,” he said. “We should not be on the front lines, we should find other alternatives to that, instead of people ending up incarcerated.”

Even with such rhetoric from officials, Harris County continues to double down on jail-based solutions to the crisis. In addition to the increased outsourcing, the county earlier this year approved an additional $645,000 to expand services for people in the jail who have been found incompetent to stand trial—a program that county administrators have proposed expanding even further. Gonzalez himself has suggested that the county should seriously consider new jail construction. 

All five members of Harris County’s governing body, even those who have clashed with the DA, approved the new outsourcing contract last month. County Judge Lina Hidalgo, who leads the county government and supported the contract, told Houston Landing that it “breaks my heart” and that she wants to be “figuring out a solution.” But, she added, “I don’t have it yet. It’s a little scary to say I’m working on one and I don’t know if we’re going to find one.” (Hidalgo’s office didn’t respond to my questions for this story.)

But Gundu insists there are many alternative policies for the county to pursue. “Instead of lining the pockets of private prison companies, we could be investing those taxpayer dollars in robust evidence-based solutions that actually promote public safety,” she told me. “Such as access to affordable and stable housing, crisis respite centers, psychiatric ERs, community based mental health care, guaranteed income programs, equitable access to healthcare—any of these solutions is guaranteed to keep our communities safer than a jail.” 

Meanwhile, families of people who died in Harris County jail custody say they will continue to pressure officials for accountability, including by attending the next state jail commission hearing. “I want to let the commissioners know that we’re watching and we care about our loved ones, even when they are in their worst state,” Lee-Griffin said after the last commission hearing. As it approaches two years since her son’s death, Lee-Griffin told me she tries to focus on good memories of him, like his love for sports and for his community. 

For others at last month’s jail commission hearing, the pain of losing a child to jail still felt fresh. Dianne Bailey Rijsenburg showed me photos of her 30-year-old son, Ramon Thomas, who died after being incarcerated at the jail this summer. Tears welled in her eyes as recalled praying to herself and pacing around her house after she got the call that he had died this summer, as if trying to stabilize herself with movement and faith.

“How can those people come and rip your children from you like that, like they’re nobody?” she asked, holding a photo of her son bordered by blue flowers. 

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Whitmire, a fixture of Democratic politics in Texas and state lawmaker for half a century, has made the story central to his campaign for mayor of Houston this year, weaving it between calls to jail more people, aggressively hire more police, and deploy hundreds of state troopers to patrol the city. “When I watch the crime that’s in Houston, it alarms me,” he said in a recent campaign ad where he talks about the robbery three decades ago. “You know, I was robbed at gunpoint in my garage, and I definitely thought he was going to kill me, my wife and my 9 year old daughter. And it just changes your life forever.”

Whitmire finished on top of a crowded field of 17 other candidates in the Nov. 7 election, winning 42.5 percent of the vote. He now faces a Dec. 9 runoff against Sheila Jackson Lee, the longest serving member of Houston’s congressional delegation and another towering figure in Democratic politics in the state, who came in second last week with 35.6 percent.

The mayor’s race has spotlighted the tough-on-crime politics that still dominate debate around public safety in the nation’s fourth largest city. Police in Houston have a long history of brutality and impunity, while Harris County, where the city is located, was until recently known as the death penalty capital of the world for how many people it has sent away for execution. 

In recent years, local debates and policies around criminal punishment started to shift as Democrats solidified control of the county government and as activists pushed for reforms. Throughout the two terms of Mayor Sylvester Turner, who could not run for reelection this year due to term limits, advocates lobbied him to implement police reforms, with mixed results: Turner updated policies to increase access to officer body camera footage and promised greater police oversight but he also balked at other requests. He resisted demands that the city make its contract negotiations with the Houston police union, which determine many oversight and discipline policies, a public process, as it is in other major Texas cities like San Antonio and Austin.

Heading into the city’s municipal elections this fall, advocates for police reform tried to turn the mayoral race into an opportunity for broader discussion around public safety and changes they want the city’s next mayor to prioritize. Under Houston’s “strong mayor” form of government, the mayor wields enormous power over city policy by appointing each department head, overseeing all administrative work, and setting the city council’s agenda. 

A coalition of community and civil rights groups, which called themselves RISE Houston (or “Reimagining Safety for Everyone in Houston”), developed three demands for candidates: reducing minor traffic stops that disproportionately target Black drivers, ending a controversial multi million dollar police surveillance contract that has proven ineffective, and freezing the city’s police budget. 

But when the coalition tried surveying each candidate on those issues, few responded or took any concrete positions. Neither Whitmire or Jackson Lee, the political juggernauts in the race, even attended a forum on public safety policies that the coalition held in early October—although Jackson Lee, who was in Washington D.C. at the time, spoke to the crowd virtually later in the event. 

RoShawn C. Evans, one of the activists who helped form the coalition, said the local criminal justice reform group that he co-founded in 2015, Pure Justice, had considered making endorsements for the first time this year but eventually decided against it.

“We chose not to because of the narrative around public safety,” Evans told Bolts. “It’s very bothersome that I’m watching all these candidates run to represent the city of Houston and the platform that they’re running on is a platform that is around the narrative of mass incarceration. Every dollar we put into law enforcement, every dollar we put into building a new court or hiring more DAs, it opens the floodgates to mass incarceration even wider than what it already is.” 

Whitmire, who has led in both polling and campaign funding throughout the race, helped set the terms of debate during the race with his promise to be “tough and smart on crime.” Like in cities across the country, violent crime rose in Texas’ largest city during the pandemic and remained a top concern for Houstonians surveyed before this year’s election, even as crime rates have started to fall. 

Whitmire is a rare Democrat with any semblance of power in the GOP-dominated Texas legislature. As chair of the Senate’s criminal justice committee since 1993, a position he has retained since the Republican Party solidified control of the chamber later in the 1990s, he has sat at the center of the state’s policies around criminal punishment for decades. In the 1990s, Whitmire was an architect of policies that scaled up incarceration in Texas, helping pass a legislative package that increased prison time for serious offenses and pumping $1 billion into an unprecedented prison-building boom. Later, in the 2000s, he helped expand diversion programs that reversed the trend and staved off even more prison building. 

In more recent legislative sessions, advocates have criticized Whitmire for being a barrier to change, saying the senate criminal justice committee has become a killing field for reform legislation under his leadership. He has refused to consider reforms the Texas House has passed, such as legislation raising the age of criminal responsibility to 18 (Texas is one of only three states that charges 17 year olds as adults) and efforts to install air conditioning in the state’s dangerously hot prisons. Even reforms he claims to support, like “second chance” legislation to allow reconsideration for people sentenced to life in prison as children, have derailed in the committee on his watch. 

Whitmire, who didn’t respond to questions for this story, has defended his legislative record and insisted reform advocates have unrealistic expectations, telling the Houston Chronicle recently, “I don’t think any criticism has an appreciation for the difficulty in Austin of doing criminal justice reform at any time in the 30 years that I’ve been chair.” 

Civil rights advocates in Houston are particularly worried about one of Whitmire’s core campaign proposals, to bring in more state troopers from the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) to help patrol the city, warning that it will worsen racial disparities in policing in Houston. The actions of the state agency, which is far whiter and less diverse than Houston’s police force, have raised concerns about racial profiling and police brutality when troopers have been deployed to patrol other cities and along the border with Mexico. 

When Austin city leaders tried the approach earlier this year, troopers primarily arrested people of color before officials called off the partnership. When Dallas brought in DPS troopers in 2019, some local leaders criticized the agency for acting like “an occupying force.” Christopher Rivera, an outreach coordinator in Houston for the Texas Civil Rights Project’s criminal injustice program, pointed to a report the group put out earlier this year showing minor traffic enforcement already disproportionately targets Black drivers in Houston. While activists have asked for an ordinance limiting traffic stops and police encounters for non-moving violations, like expired registration, they now worry Whitmire’s proposal for DPS patrols could exacerbate the problem. 

“Probably the most concerning thing that has come up in the race has been the DPS issue,” Rivera told Bolts. “When we bring more police into the city of Houston, they just end up over policing more neighborhoods of color and low income communities.”

Rivera said local activists hope that a change to municipal government that voters adopted last week will open the door to more reform discussions at city hall, regardless of who’s in the mayor’s office. More than 80 percent of voters approved Proposition A, which gives city council members more power to force the council to take up issues even without the mayor’s approval; beginning next year, any three of Houston’s 16 city council members can join together to put items on the council’s agenda.

Progressive advocates in Houston are hopeful that they’ve retained some footholds in municipal government in this fall’s elections. Council Member Tarsha Jackson, who was formerly a top staffer with the Texas Organizing Project (TOP), which has become a driving force in left politics in the state, won reelection last week. Council Member Letitia Plummer, who has advocated for changing how the city spends money on public safety, faces a runoff against challenger Roy Morales.

While Whitmire has the backing of local and state police groups in his run for mayor, Jackson Lee has garnered endorsements by more outwardly progressive organizations and leaders, like TOP and also Lina Hidalgo, Harris County government’s chief executive, who has supported bail reform and pushed back against some of the district attorney’s funding requests. While Jackson Lee has used a different tone from Whitmire when talking about crime, she has done little to carve out a competing vision around public safety and has offered few specific policy priorities on the campaign trail. 

Jackson Lee, who did not respond to questions for this story, expressed some caution about Whitmire’s plan to deploy state troopers during one of the final televised debates in the race last month. 

“I give them credit for their investigative skills, they will be used for that, but not patrolling our neighborhoods where our families are looking to those they know and those who know them,” she said, promising instead to “expand” the presence of local police.

On election night, Jackson Lee thanked her supporters and spoke in broad terms about combating gun violence, increasing mental health services, and “making sure that every corner of this city will be represented at the table of empowerment.” Across town, as he addressed his supporters, Whitmire again returned to his own brush with crime three decades ago. 

“Let anyone who can hear my voice: I don’t apologize for being tough on crime,” he said. “I’ve had to beg for my life and my wife and my nine year old daughter in our garage. That person put a gun in my face and I thought I was finished. I was worried about my daughter and my wife. But God had a plan for me.”

Correction (Nov. 17): An earlier version of this article misstated the result for one of Houston’s council seats; Letitia Plummer and Roy Morales will face off in a runoff.

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That all changed after just a couple months on the job, according to a transcript of Penley’s interview with investigators for the Texas House earlier this year. In December 2019, Paxton asked Penley to meet him at a Dallas Starbucks before walking his senior deputy out to his car for a conference call about a matter of personal importance to the attorney general. “This is a friend of mine, Nate Paul, and he’s had some issues with the FBI,” Paxton said as introduction after putting the call on speaker. “I want you to listen to his story and then let’s talk about it.” 

Penley’s call with Paul, a Paxton donor and Austin investor with an imploding real estate empire, was one of many meetings where Paxton’s subordinates have said he pressed them to use the immense powers of his office to help with his friend’s legal woes. By Oct. 1, 2020, Penley and several other senior aides had blown the whistle and alerted law enforcement to say they believed that Paxton had broken laws by intervening in legal cases on Paul’s behalf. They claimed the attorney general had even gone so far as to help his friend orchestrate subpoenas targeting his foes—including banks that were in litigation against the real estate investor and law enforcement agents who were investigating him for financial crimes (Paul was ultimately indicted in federal court this past June).

Paxton fired most of the whistleblowers, including Penley, but some of them sued and earlier this year succeeded in forcing the AG to apologize and agree to a $3.3 million settlement—which Paxton then asked Texas lawmakers to pay for with state funds. 

That bold request to settle his legal problems with taxpayer money triggered an investigation by lawmakers, which ultimately led to a landmark vote in the Texas House on the Saturday before Memorial Day of this year. That day, an overwhelming number of House members, including a majority of Republican members, voted to impeach one of the nation’s most powerful and prominent conservative politicians. 

Paxton’s impeachment—the second ever of a statewide official in Texas—resulted in his suspension without pay and set up a trial in the Texas Senate, which is tasked with deciding whether to convict and permanently remove the attorney general.

The trial is scheduled to start on Sept. 5, in a chamber also controlled by the GOP, and at least some Republican senators would have to vote to convict him. 

The impeachment has deepened a rift among Republicans who dominate Texas politics and often fight over how far to the right they should push the state, turning his trial into the latest battlefield for the factions jostling to control the party. 

A leader of the state’s far-right, Paxton was a flag-bearer in 2020 of Donald Trump’s legal efforts to overturn the presidential results. He has ramped-up policing of elections, championed attacks on the families of trans youth, and refused to defend state agencies in lawsuits by his far-right supporters, including attacks on state campaign finance laws.

Far-right activists and lawmakers, whom Paxton has helped empower while in office, have been his most vocal supporters since the impeachment, which they have called a coup against the voters who elected him. Paxton and his lawyers have argued that his problems have been public and known for years to Texas voters, who still delivered him an overwhelming victory when he last ran for re-election last November. 

But in recent weeks, the prominent Houston lawyers hired by the Texas House to prosecute the case against Paxton have published thousands of pages of documents and interview transcripts that bolster the allegations and hint at how difficult the upcoming Senate trial, which is expected to stretch on for weeks, could be for Paxton. Those documents also allege that Paxton went to great lengths to hide his relationship with Paul by using a burner phone, a secret email account and even a fake name on his Uber account. 

The investigation has also resurfaced news of Paxton’s extramarital affair; after he turned his office into what the House impeachment managers have called a “concierge law firm” for Paul, Paxton’s friend allegedly returned the favor by giving the attorney general’s mistress a job in Austin so she could move closer to him, as well as remodeling Paxton’s Austin home. And it has dragged many of Paxton’s other long standing legal problems back into the spotlight, including criminal fraud indictments that have loomed over him for almost as long as he’s been attorney general. 

Paxton’s impeachment may mean his luck has finally run out, but as recently as March, Penley worried the scandals surrounding his former boss and his firing of whistleblowers hadn’t made a dent on public opinion. When he sat down with House investigators, Penley voiced frustration that none of the people Paxton had hired to replace his executive crew seemed troubled by what all had happened. 

“It’s a complicated story,” Penley told investigators, “but if you understand what was going on, this was outrageous conduct by an attorney general that’s supposed to be the chief law enforcement officer for the state of Texas, not the chief lawbreaking officer.” 

Serious allegations from within Paxton’s own party looked like they could tank his career as Texas Attorney General before it even took off. 

During his first run for AG in 2014, Paxton, who was then a state Senator, faced a bruising GOP primary, with fellow Republicans accusing him of using his influence to pad his pockets. One prominent attack ad that primary season highlighted a lawsuit from a Dallas couple accusing Paxton of failing to disclose kickbacks he got for steering them into what turned out to be a doomed real estate scheme with an investor buddy of Paxton’s. 

Paxton’s legal problems intensified later that year after the Texas Tribune reported that he hadn’t been registered with the state when finding investors for his friend, a violation of a law meant to protect people against fraud; as a state representative, Paxton in 2003 had himself even voted for a bill that made such conduct a felony in Texas. Paxton called the lapse a mistake, signed a reprimand with the state securities board agreeing to pay a fine and waive his right to appeal, and went on to win the attorney general election in November 2014. 

Then in August 2015, a grand jury in Collin County, where Paxton lives north of Dallas, indicted him on multiple charges of defrauding investors and for failing to register with state securities regulators. His defense strategy almost immediately raised red flags for funding his top-dollar defense team with money raised from political donors, including a $100,000 “gift” from a CEO whose company was under government investigation, including by Paxton’s office. 

After outside lawyers were called in to prosecute Paxton (the local district attorney, a college friend and occasional business partner, was pressured to recuse himself), his far-right supporters inside and outside of government conspired to defund his prosecution. After one of Paxton’s rich supporters sued to block the county’s payments to the outside lawyers tapped to prosecute the AG, other right-wing activists began attending county commission meetings to accuse local officials of funding a “witch hunt.” Commissioners eventually agreed to block payments to the special prosecutors, who haven’t been paid for their work on the case since 2016. 

That strategy has helped stall any potential courtroom reckoning over the criminal charges for more than eight years. Even with the indictments, Paxton faced little opposition; Justin Nelson, a Houston attorney and Democrat who ran against him in 2018, was the only major party candidate who even challenged the AG that year. Nelson lost by less than four points despite running on a shoestring budget. 

“Paxton’s whole strategy was not to bring attention to himself or to the charges against him,” Nelson recalled. “That was explicit, in both turning down interviews and not wanting to talk about it, and also downplaying the closeness of the race, which turned out to be very close.” 

Since that election, Paxton has hewed even harder to the far right wing of his party, achieving hero status among the MAGA base after helping lead the legal efforts to overturn Trump’s loss in the 2020 election. After Paxton’s lawsuit seeking to overturn election results in four key battleground states was summarily rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court, the attorney general also appeared with his wife at a pro-Trump rally in Washington D.C. on Jan. 6, 2021. “We will not quit fighting,” he told the crowd, pumping them up with more false claims of voter fraud before people stormed the U.S. Capitol. 

Being the most MAGA was enough for Paxton to clinch Trump’s endorsement in 2022 and clear what had initially looked like a potentially daunting Republican primary field for the AG race, which included a right-wing congressman, a state supreme court justice, and the last scion of the Bush political dynasty. They all pointed to the criminal indictments and whistleblower allegations against Paxton, but the incumbent whalloped the field, prevailing 68 to 32 percent against George P. Bush in the primary runoff. In November, he beat his Democratic opponent, civil rights attorney Rochelle Garza, by more than 10 points. 

After his 2018 loss to Paxton, Nelson went on to help represent Dominion Voting Systems in its defamation lawsuit against Fox News over the lies it broadcast about the 2020 election, helping negotiate a settlement ordering the right-wing news network to pay the company nearly $800 million. Nelson, who said he can’t comment on the Dominion matter, has continued to follow the developments around Paxton’s legal drama since running against him. 

“Paxon has recognized that his corruption and indictments are a real problem for him, and he made the considered political choice to embrace Trump over everything else,” Nelson said. “I think he both literally and figuratively saw embracing Trump as his get out of jail free card that would allow him to basically be inoculated from any of these charges by saying, ‘Well, look I got the Trump base behind me.’” 

Nelson pointed to an Associated Press report in late 2020 showing Paxton had quietly acknowledged his affair to senior staffers ahead of the 2018 election but told them it had ended, an apparent effort to keep it from coming out before a tight election. He also cited records and testimony from whistleblowers recently published by House impeachment managers that allege the affair continued. 

“We know now, based on what has come out in these impeachment proceedings, the affair not only continued it became the reason why he was doing favors for Nate Paul, according to the evidence that’s been out there,” Nelson said. “It really has been a concerted strategy of Paxton to not have the facts come out in public.”

Paxton has developed a symbiotic kind of relationship with his supporters since they paved his rise to statewide office in Texas. The far-right conservative base has helped Paxton weather his mounting scandals and legal problems, and the attorney general has helped push their key policy priorities, from anti-LGBTQ laws to school vouchers. 

Millie Black, a political science professor who teaches at Collin College in Paxton’s home turf of the north Dallas suburbs, said his impeachment is testing the far-right’s influence on the GOP politics that dominate state government in Texas—what she calls a “triangulation of religion, politics and the law.” 

“When it comes to the Republican Party and these ultra conservative, socially conservative, evangelical principles, these things do not happen overnight, these things are systematically developed,” Black said. 

There are already signs that Paxton’s impeachment has chipped away at support among his base and could end up being a turning point regardless of what the Senate does. State Representative Jeff Leach, a Collin County Republican who once helped defund the prosecution and derail the criminal case against Paxton, was one of several House Republicans from Paxton’s hometown who voted to impeach him in May. Text messages obtained by the Dallas Morning News showed Leach fuming after the attorney general asked lawmakers to pay for his settlement with whistleblowers.

“I don’t think y’all understand how pissed members are, including many of your conservative friends in the house and senate,” Leach texted a senior advisor for Paxton. “I don’t know a single legislator who believes taxpayers should be expected to be on the hook for this.” (Leach didn’t respond to questions for this story.)

Paxton still has many diehard supporters who have vowed to go after Republican lawmakers who supported impeachment in the next GOP primary. To defend Paxton, they have also pushed an alternate version of reality in which the Texas House, despite being run by a Republican majority and regularly churning out red-meat legislation, is actually run by Democrats. 

Some members of the Texas House even said that Paxton personally called them on the floor ahead of his impeachment to bully them out of voting yes. “I would like to point out that several members of this House, while on the floor of this House doing the state’s business, received telephone calls from General Paxton threatening them with political consequences in their next election,” state Representative Charlie Geren, a Republican who helped lay out the impeachment case ahead of the House vote, said during the proceedings. 

Now Paxton’s supporters have been similarly leaning on Texas senators, who will act as jurors. Removing him requires a two-thirds vote among the 31 members of the Texas Senate, so even assuming all 12 Democrats vote to impeach, they would still need to bring at least nine of 18 Republican senators on board. A 19th Republican senator, Angela Paxton, is Paxton’s wife and won’t be allowed to cast a vote under rules the Senate adopted before trial.

Senators this week declined to take up a motion to dismiss the articles of impeachment against him, signaling that most of them are at the very least willing to let the trial play out. 

The documents and interviews published by the House leading up to the trial have added to the fire, showing an attorney general who had become increasingly brazen, defiant of pushback even from top advisors, and conspiratorial about other law enforcement because of his own legal problems. 

Penley, the whistleblower who had been recruited to run the AG’s criminal division in 2019, told House investigators that Paxton remained fixated on the legal drama surrounding Nate Paul, even after his top staffers pleaded with him to stop intervening in legal matters on behalf of his friend and warned that he could be risking bribery charges. According to testimony from Penley and other top staffers, Paxton still kept pushing his deputies to meet and discuss Paul’s allegations—including wild claims that federal agents had doctored search warrants to target the real estate investor, which Paxton’s staff had already determined to be baseless. 

In September 2020, Paxton again asked Penley to meet to discuss his friend’s legal problems, this time on a Saturday afternoon at a Dunkin Donuts in north Dallas. Penley told House investigators he woke up before dawn that morning, which he took as a sign from the divine. 

“I’m a Christian, and I believe God woke me up and what I felt an urgent need to do was sit down and think about what I was going to say to the attorney general,” Penley said, explaining he wrote down several pages of notes, which he studied before the meeting but didn’t bring with him; he didn’t want Paxton to feel like he was interrogating or cross-examining him. 

“I was trying to make any appeal to him, you know, ‘I’m trying to be your friend, I’m trying to be loyal to you, I’m trying to keep you out of trouble,’” Penley recalled telling Paxton, urging him to drop his friend’s case. Penley said that Paxton seemed frustrated, at one point leaning back in his chair and throwing up his hands, asking his criminal division chief, “So you won’t help me?” 

After pressing Paxton and asking why he cared so much, Penley said the attorney general told him, “You don’t understand how I feel. I have been the victim of an unjust prosecution.”

The post The “Chief Lawbreaking Officer” of Texas Finally Faces Trial appeared first on Bolts.

Brown explained that eligible voters in the jail could request and mail ballots, since confinement in jail is one the few situations that allow people to vote absentee in Texas. “Some people would have you think that we’re not allowing people to vote,” the Democratic sheriff continued. “Such is not the case. They are voting. It’s just that they’re not doing so at a polling station.” 

A few months after Brown’s video, in the November midterms, just one person voted from jail via an absentee ballot, according to county data obtained by Bolts, which is in keeping with the historical trends. Roughly 6,000 people are held inside the massive jail on the edge of downtown Dallas. The vast majority are incarcerated pretrial and many are likely eligible to vote, but few actually do. Only two people voted by mail from the jail in the 2016 presidential election. That number rose in the 2020 presidential election but remained a tiny share of the jail population, with 34 people returning a mail ballot.

Dallas activists had asked for a polling place to be installed at the jail for last year’s midterm elections, but faced pushback from some officials, including a county commissioner who called the issue “less than last on my list.” In her message posted to social media last summer, Brown questioned the feasibility of a polling place at the jail and claimed that adding one could compound short staffing at her lockup. 

But activists got their wish this past spring, when officials quietly approved a jail polling place for the May 6 municipal elections. “This is something we have actively been working on for some time,” Brown said in another post. “We are pleased to be able to expand voting for our inmates in Dallas County Jail.”

Twenty people voted in person at this new polling place on May 6. An additional ten returned an absentee ballot from the jail. While an increase from November, especially for generally low-turnout local elections, the numbers are still pale compared to the county’s immense jail population. Brown said in her announcement that her office would use the spring’s low-profile elections to iron out any logistical issues. “The municipal elections afford us the opportunity to do a trial run to fill these gaps,” she said. 

As far back as 1974, the U.S. Supreme Court has affirmed voting rights for people held in pretrial detention who, unlike people in state prisons, haven’t been convicted of a crime. But whether people in local lockups can actually exercise that right often depends on county sheriffs, who run the majority of county jails. 

Nearly all jails make incarcerated people who want to vote request an absentee ballot through the mail and then send it back, which can be tricky given tight deadlines and mail delays. This system also misses people who enter the jail after the deadline to apply for an absentee ballot. In 2020, for instance, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Ohio officials were not required to help eligible voters incarcerated after this deadline, even though election officials provide voting options for people hospitalized after that deadline. 

“There are a lot of issues with absentee ballots as the primary means for ballot access in custody,” Nicole Porter, senior director of advocacy for the Sentencing Project, told Bolts. “People in mailrooms don’t know how to treat ballots properly… And the jail facility itself lacks training and accountability.”

Activists have played a vital role expanding voting access behind bars by visiting local jails to register eligible voters and provide election day information. But in recent years they have also started pushing for election-day polling sites in lockups.

 In 2020, the Cook County jail in Chicago became the first jail system in the country to install a polling place for eligible voters incarcerated on election day, and voting there continues to rise, with turnout at the jail surpassing the citywide turnout in the June 2022 primaries. The Harris County jail in Houston, the largest in Texas, followed suit with an election day polling place in 2021 after a long campaign from local activists to expand ballot access to eligible voters detained there. Dallas this spring became the second jail in Texas with an election day polling place. 

Still, emails from the Texas Secretary of State’s Office obtained by Bolts under an open records request show how jail and elections staff across the state often question how and even whether to let people vote from jail, a dynamic Bolts has covered elsewhere in the country. The state discouraged at least one large urban county from setting up a jail polling place after Harris County established one; when a county attorney in Bexar County, home to San Antonio, reached out for guidance last summer, an attorney with the secretary of state’s office wrote them back saying, “a jail would not be a permissible polling location.” 

This year, Texas Republicans, ever hostile to expanding ballot access, filed a bill to prohibit polling places in a jail or any other detention facility, but it never advanced. Voting rights activists say changes to voting laws that Texas lawmakers already passed in recent years could compound the problems people face trying to vote from jail, pointing to new absentee voting rules that resulted in more than 20,000 rejected mail ballots during the 2022 midterm primary elections. 

Alex Birnel, advocacy director with MOVE Texas, a voting rights group that pushed for a polling place at the Dallas County jail, told Bolts that, in addition to working with the county sheriff, activists also had to persuade other county officials. “While sheriffs deal with the logistics, you’ve got to be in conversations,” Birnel said. “It cannot be done solo. You need the commissioners’ court and county institutions to be involved.”

Dallas’ Democratic county executive, County Judge Clay Jenkins, eventually backed the idea, and last year he started pushing other county leaders to support putting a polling place inside the jail for the November 2022 midterm elections. “Most Texans agree that voting should be safe, easy, and accessible to all, and while Dallas County has taken several steps to ensure access to the ballot box, there is, unfortunately, one group of eligible voters who have been denied their right to vote for far too long: the over 5,000 pretrial inmates at our Dallas County jail,” Jenkins wrote in an op-ed last September. “Denying thousands of Dallas County voters the opportunity to cast their ballot, as we have done for so long, is wrong, and we need to fix it.” 

A coalition of advocacy groups, including the ACLU of Texas and the Texas Civil Rights Project, kept up the pressure, writing a joint letter to the sheriff after she publicly dismissed the possibility of election-day voting at the jail. “Despite your claim that people in the Dallas County Jail already vote by mail, voting by mail on its own is insufficient to provide people in jail with the opportunity to vote,” the groups wrote in a Sept. 27, 2022 letter. 

“Because people of color are disproportionately incarcerated, denying ballot access to people in jail disproportionately disenfranchises Dallas County’s voters of color,” the groups argued, writing that failing to facilitate election day voting for eligible detainees “may give rise to liability under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.” The letter also pointed to the county’s continued reliance on cash bail for determining who is jailed pretrial and said, “because many pretrial detainees are incarcerated solely because they cannot afford to pay bail, there is effectively a poll tax—wherein they must pay bail to vote.” 

While they resisted the idea before the midterms, Brown and other county officials ultimately agreed to election day voting at the jail by the time they were determining polling locations ahead of this year’s municipal elections. When asked if the jail will continue to host a polling place in future elections, the sheriff’s office told Bolts, “Yes, the plan is to continue having a polling location at the Dallas County Jail for inmates and one outside for the public as we did in May.”

As Dallas shifts on the issue, and while Republican lawmakers in Texas continue to create barriers to voting, Porter urged other local officials to prioritize expanding ballot access where they can. “Democracy should be a priority for everybody and access to the ballot should be a priority for anyone who has influence and concern for liberty,” Porter said. “It should be a priority for sheriffs and county officials to guarantee ballot access for people to be eligible to vote during custody. They are humans and eligible.”

The post Dallas County Jail Adds Election Day Polling Place After Pressure from Activists appeared first on Bolts.

Trudy Hancock became the first elections administrator in Robertson County, a rural area northwest of Houston, after the county ditched their old model of running elections in 2005. 

Until then, a county clerk was in charge of the voting process and a tax assessor-collector was responsible for voter registration; officials then unified those duties under an elections office managed by someone they would appoint—eventually Hancock, a longtime elections worker. Officials in nearby Brazos County, home to one of the nation’s largest universities, plucked Hancock to run their new elections office in 2016, after they too switched to the new unified system.

Hancock, who still runs elections in Brazos County and is now president of the Texas Association of Elections Administrators, says voters were sometimes confused by the old split system. “If you were a county clerk and their question had to do with voter registration, then you had to send them somewhere else, and lots of times those offices aren’t even in the same buildings,” Hancock told Bolts. 

Counties across Texas, including most of the state’s largest urban centers, have adopted that new unified model for running elections over the past two decades as a way to streamline operations and better serve voters. Besides increasing efficiency, some local officials say this also erases a relic of the Jim Crow era; Texas tax assessors took on voter registration in the early 20th century because they also collected poll taxes. In 2020, Harris County, the state’s most populous and home to Houston, also switched to that unified system for running elections.

But Republicans pushed a bill through the legislature last week that will force Harris County to turn back to the old model for running elections. Senate Bill 1750, which abolishes the Harris County elections administrator position and returns those responsibilities to the county clerk and tax assessor-collector, is one of two bills specifically targeting election administration in Harris County that passed the GOP-dominated legislature and are now heading to Governor Greg Abbott, who is expected to sign them. 

The second bill, SB 1933, grants the secretary of state’s office new powers to investigate complaints of “irregularities” in Harris County elections, and ultimately to petition to remove the local officials overseeing elections.

The two bills are an escalation in GOP attacks on election administration in Texas’ largest county, which has become an increasingly reliable Democratic bulwark against a deep-red state government. During the last session, in 2021, the legislature passed a sweeping set of restrictions aimed at some of the boldest initiatives that Harris County elections officials implemented to expand safe voting options during the pandemic, like drive-thru and around-the-clock voting, which are now banned under state law. 

The bills that passed this session, however, differ from the last in that they explicitly target Harris County: The measure forcing a return to the split system for running elections only applies there, as does the bill granting the secretary of state new investigatory powers. While neither bill specifically names Harris County, SB 1750 and SB 1933 were tailored to only apply to counties of more than 3.5 million and 4 million residents, respectively, a threshold that only Harris County meets.

Bolts reported after last year’s midterm elections that Texas Republicans had seized on ballot shortages Harris County voters encountered at a handful of polling places to push for state intervention and more policing of elections. Nearly two dozen Harris County GOP candidates have pointed to those problems to challenge their losses, claiming the ballot shortages led to thousands of voters being turned away in Republican-leaning precincts. Reporting by the Houston Chronicle, however, has largely debunked that narrative, showing that the ballot shortages weren’t widespread (affecting about 20 of 782 polling places in the county) and impacted Democratic and Republican areas evenly. 

Harris County elections administrator Cliff Tatum, whom the county hired barely two months before early voting started in the November election, issued a report in January saying the problems during the midterms pointed to the “immediate need of upgrades or replacements” in the elections office. Tatum has said his office implemented several changes after the midterms to respond to those problems, from hiring more helpline operators to respond to problems at polling places to implementing a new system for tracking requests from election judges. 

In a statement to Bolts, Tatum stressed how the new legislation would reshuffle elections administration ahead of another important election; Democrats tried but failed to get Republicans to amend the effective date for SB 1750 until after Nov. 7, when Houston will elect its next mayor. Tatum said the law is now set to force changes to election administration on Sept. 1, 39 days ahead of the voter registration deadline and 52 days out from the first day of early voting. “We fear this time frame will not be adequate for such a substantial change in administration, and that Harris County voters and election workers may be the ones to pay the price,” Tatum said. 

Voting rights advocates worry that the bills targeting Harris County will set up whoever runs elections there next to fail, or at least trigger the new oversight powers by the state established under SB 1933. Harris County also saw problems under its earlier split system of administering elections, with past clerks accused of bungling elections and tax assessor-collectors wrongly suspending voter registrations. The oversight bill, which allows for the secretary of state’s office to investigate and petition to remove election officials, would also go into effect in September if signed. 

Katya Ehresman, voting rights program director with Common Cause Texas, said that both Harris County election bills “create a feedback loop of problems down the road.” 

“I don’t think it’s unreasonable that we can expect a huge turnout this November because of the multi millions of dollars that are probably going to be spent in this mayoral race, and the conditions for the elections are completely changing right before it,” Ehresman told Bolts. “That’s something that lawmakers were cognizant of, because they used that as a reason to blame the elections administrator for the problems we saw during the last election. And yet now the legislature is just replicating those conditions, and they will be uniquely to blame for any problems voters encounter because of it.” 

Harris County officials have already vowed to fight the bills in court. Harris County’s clerk and tax-assessor collector, both elected Democrats, declined to comment on any plans to reassume election duties, with representatives of both offices telling Bolts they’d issue statements if and when Abbott signs the legislation. 

Hancock told Bolts she worries that, even if the bill expanding investigations is limited to Harris County, it could erode the relationship between the office and local elections workers. Currently, the secretary of state is largely an advisory role to assist local election officials. “If you’re having a problem, you’ll be less likely to call and talk to someone about that problem if you’re worried they’re going to come back and later feel the need to assert their role as oversight,” Hancock said. 

“We’re worried it will have a chilling effect with the relationship that we currently have with the SOS,” she added. 

Republicans have also targeted election administrators in other parts of the state, most notably by ramping up policing around elections in Tarrant County, home to Fort Worth and the Texas GOP’s last urban stronghold; their actions led the county’s election administrator to resign in April. 

Ehresman warns that the GOP meddling won’t stop there. She pointed to a host of other proposals—from ending countywide polling to giving the secretary of state even greater oversight powers—that failed in this year’s regular session but right-wing officials are already trying to revive. 

“This was an unprecedented move by the legislature to use the entire weight of their branch of government to eliminate an office, effectively fire one man, and target one specific county,” Ehresman said. “So I don’t think it’s unreasonable now that the legislature has gone this far for one county, that they won’t do it for other large urban counties.”

The post Republicans Escalate Attacks on Election Administration in Texas’ Largest County appeared first on Bolts.

Activists in Austin have advocated for greater civilian oversight in response. A coalition of progressive organizers pushed the city council to amend the city’s contract with the Austin Police Association (APA) in order to reduce barriers to accountability and to create an Office of Police Oversight. But the police union fought back, attempting to leash the newly empowered watchdog by blocking it from conducting independent investigations into complaints of misconduct against officers. 

Their confrontation came to a head this weekend. Activists put an ordinance on the municipal ballot to bolster and codify the powers of civilian oversight in the city. The police union and its supporters retaliated with a petition drive of their own, which deceptively bore the same name as activists’ version, and succeeded in putting a competing ordinance in front of voters to weaken oversight.

Austin voters on Saturday decisively sided with police reformers. A resounding 70 percent approved Proposition A, the measure that would bolster oversight of police. They overwhelmingly rejected Proposition B, the version supported by the police union, which received support from only 20 percent of voters.

Kathy Mitchell, a longtime advocate for police accountability in Austin who helped organize the campaign for Prop A, says the results illustrate strong support in the city for robust civilian oversight of police, and voters’ frustration at police efforts to push back against their organizing of recent years. 

“We have literally tried everything, there was no other way to enforce the stronger standards for oversight other than going to the voters and saying, ‘Okay, you’re going to have to show that this is something you expect,’ Mitchell said. “And now they have.” 

Mitchell says she hopes that Prop A’s strong showing empowers city officials to begin changing police oversight as early as this week, including pushing for independent review of complaints against officers and cases involving police violence. 

The results in Austin were a stark contrast to the overwhelming defeat of a different police reform ballot measure 80 miles south in San Antonio, which also held its municipal elections on Saturday. As Bolts reported last month, San Antonio activists petitioned for a more sweeping ballot measure, also called Proposition A, that sought to decriminalize weed and abortion as well as reduce arrests and jail time for minor charges, but faced inflammatory rhetoric and well-funded opposition from the police union and much of the city’s political establishment. 

Only 28 percent of San Antonio voters supported Prop A on Saturday. The result was a decisive win for the San Antonio Police Officers’ Association, one of the most powerful and combative police unions in the country. “Tonight, the voices of our great city were heard and heard loudly,” Danny Diaz, the union’s president, said during a victory party Saturday night. “We will not become another statistic, we will not tolerate criminal leniency, and we will not allow our city to crumble.” 

Prop A’s organizers issued a statement after the election accusing the police union and its supporters of “spreading fear tactics and lies” in its campaign against the ballot measure. “We still have to do a lot of public education. We’ve been doing it for several years and we’re going to continue,” Ananda Tomas, executive director of the police reform group that led the effort, told reporters Saturday night, according to the San Antonio Current. “We know when we’re at the doors and we break all of these things down, that folks are with us.”

The police union in Austin was no less defiant than San Antonio’s despite its defeat. “The APA simply will not stand by while this city and anti-police activists operate with blatant disregard for state law and the rights and protections afforded to our hardworking men and women,” the Austin Police Association tweeted on Saturday night.

Mitchell says it’s telling that the union is talking about state law and seems to be appealing more to Texas’ Republican leaders at this point than to local voters.

The Austin Police Association is advocating for a bill drafted by Republicans in the legislature that would prohibit civilian oversight of police departments that has already passed the Texas Senate and is now pending in the House. The legislation, which would undermine Austin’s new oversight ordinance by blocking access to police information until the department finishes investigating itself, mirrors measures that Republicans have pushed through elsewhere in the country. 

State-level Republicans have stepped in to protect local police in other ways. Republican governor Greg Abbott has publicly decried the prosecution of Austin police who brutalized protesters, and even appointed one of the officers indicted for assaulting demonstrators in 2020 to a state law enforcement commission. 

“Increasingly, and this has been going on for a while, APA is turning to the GOP to save itself from its own community,” Mitchell said. “They have decided strategically to stop talking to Austin, and that is remarkable, because they are our employees.” 

The post Austin Voters Embrace Civilian Police Oversight in Saturday Election appeared first on Bolts.

The police union’s messaging, which has dominated San Antonio’s municipal elections this spring, wasn’t crafted to go after any particular mayoral or city council candidate, but rather to spread fear about Proposition A, a police reform charter amendment that local activists petitioned to get on the May 6 ballot. 

The so-called Justice Charter is broad in scope because it was drafted by a coalition of San Antonio groups representing causes ranging from organized labor to reproductive justice, which wanted to build on reforms local organizers have been pushing for years. It would add a “Justice Policy” to the city charter that calls for ending citations and arrests for low-level marijuana possession, an idea city council members have long paid lip service to but failed to fully implement, as well as decriminalizing abortion, which the council already directed the city’s police to do last August after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision triggered Texas’s criminal abortion ban. 

Prop A also calls for banning police chokeholds and no-knock warrants, both of which the San Antonio Police Department already has internal policies against. It would also direct police to prioritize citations over arrest and jail for people accused of certain low-level crimes, like theft below $750; this would codify and expand a cite-and-release policy that city and county law enforcement began implementing several years ago in the name of criminal justice reform. 

Police union rhetoric has already convinced many people in power in San Antonio to oppose it. The city’s chambers of commerce established their own PAC last month to raise money from business interests to campaign against the ballot measure and amplify the police union’s talking points. Most of the candidates running for city council this year oppose the Justice Charter, and Mayor Ron Nirenberg, who is expected to sail to re-election later this year, urged people to vote no in early April despite having previously voiced support for much of what’s in it.

Their opposition raises major questions about Prop A’s future even if it were to pass, as some local officials also signaled they would not implement whole swaths of the measure. Prop A could also be challenged by Republican officials who dominate state government and love to pick fights in Texas’ more liberal cities, and anti-abortion activists who already sued to try to stop the measure from appearing on the May ballot are likely to keep agitating should it win.

Still, Ananda Tomas, founder and director of ACT 4 SA, the police reform group that led the effort to get the Justice Charter on the ballot, says that the intense opposition from the police union and the backtracking from the mayor highlight why local activists are pushing reforms through citizen-led ballot initiatives in the first place. 

“I think not just here in Texas or San Antonio, but nationally, you’re seeing a lot more ballot initiatives as the people’s way of fighting back,” Tomas said. “When we have city or state leadership or even federal leadership that’s not moving with the people, then we’re going to take matters into our own hands, and that was the exact thinking behind this.”

Tomas’ group was born out of the massive protests and increased activism around police accountability that followed the murder of George Floyd in 2020. In 2021, Tomas and Act 4 SA gathered enough signatures to put a different measure on the ballot that sought to repeal police collective bargaining rights in San Antonio, which they had pitched as a means to begin addressing disciplinary procedures baked into the city’s police union contract that long shielded bad cops, sometimes even allowed awful ones back on the street, and yet had remained a third rail in local politics; officers the city’s police chief had tried to fire, but couldn’t, included a cop who berated and hurled racial slurs at a Black man while arresting him, an officer who was drinking on duty when he got into a gunfight and killed his girlfriend’s ex, and another who gave someone living on the street a sandwich with feces in it. 

Proposition B, the 2021 ballot measure, failed by two percentage points. But last year, when the police union negotiated a new contract with the city, it quickly agreed to tweak its arbitration process in order to give the police chief more power over firing decisions—a departure from previous contract talks, when disciplinary rules were essentially off limits and yet still negotiations could drag on in years of acrimony and litigation with city officials. 

“There was this whole narrative shift and power that the city was able to get in the negotiations by saying, ‘Hey, this is how close you guys came to losing your contract because people are so upset with how unaccountable it is,’” Tomas said. She thinks that the close vote over Prop B ratcheted up pressure to change the next contract. 

The history of the San Antonio Police Officers’ Association is a case study in how police unions amass and wield power in local elections. It dove headfirst into local politics in the 1980s when it started publicly endorsing and opposing candidates, created a political action committee to bankroll their supporters, and established a formidable phone banking operation ahead of elections. People running for city council who wouldn’t commit to better pay and equipment for cops were smeared as anti-police and pro-crime, and by 1988 San Antonio police had paved the way for other police unions by negotiating one of the best wage and benefits packages in the nation.

San Antonio’s police union became notorious for its brash approach to local politics. One former San Antonio mayor wrote in a memoir about turning down police union money ahead of an election in the 1990s and receiving a gift basket with a dead rat in return. Politicians started calling the police union president at the time “The 44 Caliber Mouthpiece.” In 2013, after San Antonio’s then-city manager Sheryl Sculley established a task force to study reforming officers’ generous benefits because she thought they were threatening financial disaster for the city, one high-profile business leader on the benefits task force reported being tailed in his car by police officers. Sculley felt so aggrieved after battling the city’s public safety unions that she wound up writing a book chronicling the experience, which she titled “Greedy Bastards.”  

With its fiery campaign against Prop A this year, the police union is again fighting back against what little reform it has been forced to accept in recent years. It has opposed the local cite-and-release program since Bexar County’s reform-minded district attorney spearheaded it after taking office four years ago, and which the Justice Charter aims to strengthen. The DA and his supporters say the program has saved the county $5.6 million in jail booking costs, helped alleviate overcrowding at the dangerous county lockup, and diverted thousands of people with petty, non-violent charges towards services.

Danny Diaz, president of San Antonio Police Officers’ Association, said in an interview with Bolts that cite-and-release policies have fueled an uptick in crime that was reported in San Antonio as well as cities across the country during the pandemic, even in places without such changes. But the city’s longtime police chief, William McManus, who does not support Prop A, has rejected that notion, and the DA’s office reports a recidivism, or re-offense, rate for defendants in the cite-and-release program of 9.6 percent compared 38 percent for people booked into the county jail. 

Diaz insisted that the police union’s terrifying vision of what could happen if Prop A passes is “realistic”—that decriminalizing marijuana and abortion, in addition to codifying and expanding cite-and-release, would really allow dangerous criminals to escape consequences, force business across San Antonio to close, and plunge the city into chaos. But he also struggled when asked for evidence. How, as he argued, would local businesses and the community at large be worse off if more people accused of low-level theft got a citation and summons to appear in court instead of being hauled to jail? “I’ll put it as simply as I can,” Diaz said. “As children, we were all taught not to lie, cheat or steal. This proposition is basically telling people you can steal.”

Diaz, a former SWAT officer, also insisted that decriminalizing marijuana was a slippery slope but again sputtered general talking points about lawlessness when pressed. “If they’re not convicting or going to court or going to jail or giving fines for maijuana, they’re gonna turn around and do the same thing for theft on cite-and-release,” he said. 

The police union’s ads and public statements over Prop A are also divorced from the reality of what’s actually in the ballot measure, claiming for instance that it seeks to decriminalize offenses like graffiti. But a cite-and-release program, which is meant to avoid people’s stay in jail, does not “decriminalize” since people would still be subject to criminal penalties.

Currently, it seems unlikely that any sweeping policy changes would immediately follow passage of the Justice Charter; San Antonio’s city attorney has already claimed that much of what’s in it is unenforceable. But part of what’s motivating the police union’s attacks on Prop A is the concern that a win would put pressure on future city councils to go further.

Diaz said he’s worried about more “activists” making it onto the council in the future and pushing to implement elements of the Justice Charter, especially if they see this year’s vote as a clear referendum by residents. He pointed to two progressive council members, elected in 2021, who voted against the union’s last contract for not going far enough on reforms to police discipline and oversight, and are now supporting the ballot measure. 

The single element of the ballot measure that city officials have said they would implement has also riled the police union. It would create a new position at city hall, a Justice Director, someone without ties to law enforcement appointed by city council to review public safety policy, hold regular stakeholder meetings with communities that are heavily policed or have complaints about officers, and help mediate conflict between police and the public. The police union has, unsurprisingly, ridiculed the idea of appointing someone without policing experience to monitor them. But Prop A supporters have called it their best attempt to bolster independent oversight of the San Antonio Police Department, which is currently paper thin, even compared to dysfunctional oversight bodies in Texas’ other large cities. 

Progressive organizers in other Texas cities have turned to local ballot measures to force reforms that local elected officials are refusing to consider or failing to fully implement. While most of those campaigns centered on marijuana, San Antonio’s is the most expansive and the first attempt by a Texas city to decriminalize abortion since the end of Roe.

But these initiatives are also a kind of end-run around an anemic and poorly organized Texas Democratic Party. One recently-formed statewide group, Ground Game Texas, has thrown itself into helping local organizers, including the coalition of San Antonio activists pushing Prop A, raise enough signatures to put reform measures on their local ballots.

Mike Siegel, who helped start Ground Game after twice running for a central Texas congressional seat on a progressive platform, said that the point of their work isn’t just to mobilize voters and build coalitions across the state, but also to force debates whenever people in power dig in their heels. “We’re starting fights,” Siegel said. “I think that’s the most important thing we’re doing, and I think that really is in some ways the core of Ground Game, kind of a catalyst, an allied group that partners with local organizations that have deep roots in the community.” 

“Now we are head-to-head as a coalition with the anti-abortion lobby and the pro-cop lobby, which are two extremely formidable forces,” Siegel said. 

Lingering questions over implementation, as well as fearmongering and misinformation by the police union, have clouded what’s actually at stake in San Antonio’s upcoming Justice Charter vote. But Yaneth Flores, policy director at the abortion rights group Avow Texas, insists that the threats pregnant people face in light of the state’s total abortion ban underscore the importance of taking a stand at the local level and codifying protections. 

“I think that’s the right path for us, to say that as a city we are not buying into the fascist policies of the state,” Flores said. “I’m not exaggerating when I say that, because we are being robbed of having autonomy to make our own health care decisions.”

In addition to presenting it as a local bulwark against increasingly extreme anti-abortion laws at the state level, Prop A supporters hope that it sparks a deeper debate about what kind of criminal legal system San Antonio voters want. “At the end of the day, a really significant part of this ballot initiative has to do with a fundamental question of whether or not we as a community think that sending people to jail and having them sit there away from their families, away from their job away from their lives, is the best way to solve crime in our communities,” said Alejandra Lopez, president of the San Antonio Alliance, the local teachers union that backs the ballot measure.

Lopez said that part of the reason she has been personally working to pass the Justice Charter is because, as a teacher, she’s seen first hand how a criminal charge for pot or a stupid mistake like graffiti can derail a young person’s life and disrupt their family. She added that she’s disturbed by the inflammatory, streets-on-fire message by opponents. “The lies that are coming out of the opposition on this, we should all be troubled,” Lopez said. “We should be troubled deeply to our core about those tactics.”

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