Burnt Orange Report

Republican Election Stealing in Kaufman County?

By Byron LaMasters

Kaufman county is just to the southeast of Dallas, but it apparently was the home of some Republican election shenanigans. I'll be sure to look into this story in more detail, but here's what's coming out about a county commissioner race in that county:

Brenda Denson-Prince wanted to be the first woman County Commissioner in Kaufman County, not the latest example of what the Republican juggernaut can do.

"As I look back over the General Election held on Nov. 2, 2004, I know that voting is a 'right' that is being taken away everyday," writes Brenda Denson-Prince. But she is not writing about far away places like Ohio or Florida. She is writing about her own attempt to become the first woman in Kaufman County, Texas to sit on the County Commissioners Court. On the day after Christmas, Denson-Prince faxes me forty pages.

For the past three years the 50-year-old Texas native studied up for the position of County Commissioner by going to meetings. And she recruited the outgoing Commissioner, Ivan Johnson, to be her campaign manager. In the Democratic primary, she won handily. And right up to ten o'clock on election night, she felt pretty good about her chances. That's about the time she says she left Democratic Party headquarters in the town of Kaufman to return home to Terrell. With virtually all nine voting boxes counted, she was about 200 votes ahead.

"Y'all better get back over here," is what Terry Crow told Ivan Johnson over the telephone not too long after ten o'clock. "They're about to steal the election away from Brenda." Johnson was watching the phone at the Denson-Prince campaign headquarters in Terrell. So Johnson called Denson-Prince, they hopped in their cars, and sometime between 10:30 and 11:00 that night, they walked through the back door of the Kaufman County courthouse annex, where the votes had been counted.

"In the hall, there was the election administrator," recalls Denson-Prince. "She said, 'Brenda, it's a tie, so you can flip a coin if you want to.'" Denson-Prince would prefer to keep it off the record what she said in reply to that flip remark.

"Did you say, 'God bless you'?" I ask Denson-Prince over the telephone on the day after Christmas. Her voice over the past two months has been reduced to a bare whisper. She spent Christmas weekend in bed. "No, I didn't say that," answers Denson-Prince in a whisper of pure air and electricity. "I said what are you talking about, a tie?" According to the official returns, each candidate had received 2,867 votes.

"Come out here and explain," said the administrator to an assistant. Between the two of them, who both seemed pretty nervous, Denson-Prince caught the words "glitch" and "disk."

"Deja-Vote," hollered the headline in Wednesday morning's Terrell Tribune. "A computer software glitch is being blamed for controversy that occurred Tuesday night as ballots were being counted by Kaufman County election officials," began the story.

"The problem occurred when data taken from one counting machine to another computer for collating became corrupted. The data roughly doubled the amount of votes counted for several precincts, according to Kaufman County information technology director George York." A two-column photo of York showed him testing a ballot-counting machine on Wednesday morning.

Read the rest of the article for the details about the recounts that followed. I'm going to try to investigate the matter further to get an idea of what the heck happened in Kaufman County, but it has all the looks of GOP election stealing.