Posted on 11/18/2013 9:44:48 AM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
Longtime Houston Community College Board Trustee Bruce Austin said he will request a recount after narrowly losing his District 2 seat to his challenger in Tuesday’s election.
Small business owner Dave Wilson was ahead of Austin by 26 votes, based on complete, but unofficial results. A candidate needs to garner a majority of the vote to win. Wilson had 50.1 percent, while Austin got 49.9 percent.
HCC officials must canvass the votes and declare them official before Austin can request a recount. The canvassing process usually takes up to four to five days.
Black district:
Four other seats were up for election. Three runoffs will take place next month. One incumbent won re-election outright.
Austin, who was first elected in 1989, said “Wilson won the predominantly Black district, which covers parts of north and northwest Houston, by deceiving voters. Wilson, who is White, deliberately did not have pictures of himself on his campaign website and his campaign materials, said Austin, who is Black.”
“He never put out to voters that he was White,” Austin said. “The problem is his picture was not in the League of Voters (pamphlet) or anywhere. This one of the few times a White guy has pretended to be Black guy and fooled Black people.”
Wilson called Austin’s remarks racist. Running a campaign without pictures shouldn’t matter, he said, noting that his picture was posted on one of Austin’s campaign mailers.
Wilson said he won the face “fair and square” by campaigning on the issues. He complained that Austin voted for spending $40 million to establish a campus in Qatar and against spending money on scholarship for needy students.
“That’s why he lost,” Wilson said. “People were not fooled. They’re tired of him wasting money.”
This election was strange.
But, what does it say, that so many voters didn’t know who this guy was? What does it say about, sad to say, low information voters, who were swayed by misleading ads to think that this candidate was black? What does it say about black voters, that they only want to vote for a candidate who they think is also black????
....I thought race didn’t matter?
/sarc
Detroit election officials tried to eliminate Mike Duggan (who is white) by removing him from the primary ballot for the Mayoral race. When he won as a write in candidate they simply threw out 40% of his votes to give Benny Napoleon (Black) the primary win. The state stepped in and made them count all of Duggan’s votes to return the win to him.
In the end, Duggan won the mayor’s office by nearly 10%.
More often than not, I think racist election officials are a bigger problem than racist voters.
This election is just one example of what is wrong with Houston politics. Don’t consider it particularly strange, since Houston also is home of the infamous Sheila Jackson Lee.
Don’t think I remember reading anything that said that HCC Board members must be Black. Poor Mr. Austin - he really had a cushy job and now some Whitey is messing in his sandbox.
Too bad Mr. Wilson can’t go to DC and replace Prebius. Nice to see someone thinking outside the box for a change.
That needs to be repeated over and over and over.
That they’re the biggest racists in the country, their racism is tolerated by one party and encouraged by the other, and that their racism will get worse before it gets better.
Guess who will win.
But when a white man does it? Lynch him.
This country is BEYOND repair.
The black candidate is angry that the white candidate found a way to nuetralize black racism and win on issues.
So, black people voted for him when they thought he was black, but they wouldn't have if they knew he was white?
Obviously, the white guy is racist. Right?
Pretending to be black got Obama elected. Nobody made a big deal about him doing it.
The GOP puts too many things out of reach by choice.”
Spot on. IMO the vast majority of the GOP likes things just like they are and would rather lose - as long as their cushy jobs are not in jeopardy.
I think conservatives need to learn to make the right compromises too though.
1 instance that comes to mind is Herman Cain’s idea of making Detroit an economic recovery zone with the elimination of things like sales taxes for a period of time. A lot of FReepers threw a fit because they wouldn’t be getting the same thing and in the process, they miss the point.
The point was in proving that conservative low tax ideas could get the city back on its feet which would be good for Michigan and the country. A republican doing such things would put a lot of people to work and pull a lot of people off the democrat plantation.
Except it isn’t true.
MLK Jr wasn’t a Republican?
This has been based on a poorly-researched article by Frances Rice written several years ago (she misidentified certain figures as Republicans when they were, at least in one instance, a (NY) Socialist Party politico). I debunked it almost immediately after it was written, but it has been frequently cited by some FReepers as correct.
While we do know that MLK, Senior (an important distinction) was a Republican up until 1960 (switching to JFK in that election), there’s never been any solid evidence of MLK, Jr’s voting record. He may have voted for Eisenhower in 1956 (not that unusual, and NY Democrat Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. crossed party lines to support Ike), clearly at no point after 1960 did he support GOP candidates for President. He denounced Goldwater (ironically a civil rights supporter, but who opposed the ‘64 CRA for being an anti-Constitutional overreach) as being a tool of Southern racists.
When some try to link MLK, Jr. to the GOP, they’re implying he would be for Conservatism today. It simply isn’t so. He was a big believer in big government intervention and Socialist policies, all of which have been a disastrous failure, not just for the country as a whole, but for the Black community especially. Were he still alive today on the trajectory he had taken ideologically, he would be very much in the Jesse Jackson, Sr. & Al Sharpton camp and an apologist for the current White House occupant.
My father saw him in person at Berkeley in the mid 60s and essentially said he was a political opportunist, always looking for the next issue (by then, he was migrating to the extremist anti-war position on Vietnam indistinguishable from Communist propaganda).
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