Burnt Orange Report

Recounts Give Cuellar Lead over Rodriguez

By Byron LaMasters

Holy Shit!

In a dramatic turnaround certain to add to the lore of South Texas politics, Laredo lawyer Henry Cuellar first took a 197-vote lead over U.S. Rep. Ciro Rodriguez after recounts in Webb and Zapata counties Tuesday.

Then, just a few hours later, state Democratic Party officials said the final recount tally in Webb County showed 115 more votes than there were ballots cast. A re-recount won't be done until Sunday, officials said.

Meanwhile, Bexar and Hays will have their recounts today, and Comal and Guadalupe will conduct theirs Thursday.

The drama began Tuesday, when recount results in Zapata for Congressional District 28 showed 237 new votes for Cuellar, which came from a controversial batch of 304 ballots previously uncounted.

He then gained 177 votes in his home county of Webb.

Rodriguez, a San Antonio native, picked up only 67 votes in Zapata and none in Webb.

His 145-vote lead from election day had grown to 150 Monday, according to partial results in the 11-county district.

Rodriguez's camp is already planning a lawsuit.

"I've been doing this for over 30 years and I've never seen 300 or so ballots appear suddenly," said Rodriguez attorney Buck Wood, a former elections director for the Texas secretary of state's office.

"To tell you that I'm suspicious and baffled is an understatement."

Something looks fishy to me. There were 115 more votes than ballots cast in Webb County. 300 ballots appeared out of nowhere in Zapata County. I'm not typically a conspiracy theorist, but I do find it odd that the two strongest counties for Henry Cuellar have significant irregularities (not to mention that Zapata County didn't report their returns until the day after the election). So is their fraud going on in south Texas?

The San Antonio Express-News goes on:

"There will be a shadow over the election almost no matter which one comes ahead now," said Jerry Polinard, a political scientist at the University of Texas-Pan American in Edinburg.

It was unclear late Tuesday what the problem was in Webb, but in Zapata, a tabulation error apparently missed 304 early votes, said Zapata Democratic Party Chairman Teo Garza.

Contrary to rumors that new ballots were discovered, Garza stressed that the 304 votes had been counted, but weren't properly recorded.

"There's no funny business going on," said Garza, who's running his first election as party chairman.

Nevertheless, alarms went off in the Rodriguez camp and around South Texas, which has a marbled history of corruption including the infamous Box 13 that catapulted Lyndon B. Johnson to a slim victory in the 1948 U.S. Senate race.

"There's no doubt that there's some fraud going on, some illegal activities," said Rodriguez, a four-term congressman from San Antonio.

I still have my fingers crossed that Rodriguez will pull this out, but regardless of who wins, there will certainly be a cloud of uncertainty over the result.