Honor the vote, which went for Farenthold

A satirist of Swiftian talent could not have made up Thursday’s sequence of events in the real-life saga of U.S. Rep. Solomon Ortiz’s persistent refusal to concede to Rep.-elect Blake Farenthold.

The Ortiz campaign’s immediate response was not unlike the super-sleuth’s standard “A-HA!” reaction to the discovery of a clue. “Yesterday we urged caution,” the Ortiz campaign’s statement said, “and today that caution was proved warranted ...”

The bag was from a precinct in Robstown, Ortiz’s loyalist hometown. The bag contained seven votes, all for Ortiz.

To which many readers of Caller.com swiftly commented: “A-HA!” or words to that effect. Several allusions were made to a perceived failure to disenfranchise the deceased, and to the infamous Box 13 incident that helped Lyndon Johnson win the 1948 U.S. Senate election.

Fairly or not, those are the perceptions caused by Ortiz’s tardiness in conceding. Ortiz’s margin of loss, by election night count, was 799 votes. The bag of votes shrank the difference to 792. For perspective, that’s still 87 more people than survived the sinking of the Titanic.

It’s also still 57 more than all of the not-yet-counted provisional and overseas votes cast by mail or by deployed military. And it’s safe to say that if all of those votes turn out to be for Ortiz, this real-life satire would become real-life science fiction.

We admire the fight left in the 73-year-old Ortiz after nearly 28 years in office. We do not condone the damage it does to the people’s confidence in the health of democracy in these United States. His campaign’s own words undermine the process by specifically expressing a lack of trust in it: “It’s imperative,” according to Thursday’s release, “that the voters of this community have the chance to have their voice heard but this new revelation of uncounted votes that were apparently ‘misplaced’ combined with the well-known remaining votes to be counted and well-documented concerns about voting irregularities only reaffirm the need to be diligent and respect our election process.”

Well-documented concerns about voting irregularities? We haven’t seen this documentation, and we would consider it highly newsworthy. Also, Nueces County Clerk Diana Barrera had a plausible if embarrassing explanation for the bag of votes. Ballots were taken on paper briefly during a power outage that prevented use of electronic voting machines. Had there been a conspiracy to deny Ortiz those seven hometown votes, we’d think they’d have remained “misplaced” forever.

Ortiz has expressed much concern for the voters’ rights in his resistance to accepting the election’s outcome. “It is Representative Ortiz’s priority that every person’s vote is fully accounted and everyone’s voice is heard – anything short of that is an affront to the Democratic process. Until the votes are counted and, if appropriate, recounted to ensure accuracy, there remains no winner in this race.” (The uppercase of “Democratic” was by the Ortiz campaign, not us.)

Going into the election, Ortiz’s worldliness was perhaps his strongest advantage over his opponent. Postelection, he seems to suggest a third-worldliness in the system – and that this third-worldliness apparently worked against him rather than for him.

We don’t think it Pollyannish to doubt that Farenthold could have or would have stolen this election. The powerful longtime incumbent Ortiz would have been in a much stronger position to have done so, and clearly didn’t, as the outcome in Farenthold’s favor shows.

The best thing Ortiz could do in the interest of the residents of U.S. House District 27 is to assist its congressman-elect, Blake Farenthold, R-Corpus Christi.

Here's another article about a possible recount.

U.S. Rep. Ortiz asks for manual recount
November 05, 2010 10:52 PM
Michael Barajas
Valley Morning Star

U.S. Rep. Solomon Ortiz, trailing Republican challenger Blake Farenthold by 792 votes in the race for Texas’ 27th District, officially announced in a written statement late Friday afternoon that he would seek a manual recount, citing what he called “numerous voting irregularities.”
The call for a recount came after provisional ballot totals and outstanding military-vote estimates showed that even if all of those votes went for Ortiz, the congressman was still unlikely to pull ahead.
“It is my utmost desire to ensure that the votes of the people of South Texas be cast and counted and that no vote be left out. Therefore, we’ve begun putting together the documents necessary to request a recount,” Ortiz wrote in a statement.
Reacting to announcement, Steve Ray, Farenthold’s political strategist, sent out a statement that read, “Once again Solomon Ortiz has refused to listen to the people of District 27 who elected Blake Farenthold to Congress on November 2. Blake has already gone to work for the people of South Texas and is meeting with constituents on ways to jumpstart the economy and reduce the size of the federal government.”
Ray said earlier in the day that Farenthold was expected to meet with supporters in Brownsville Friday evening.
Regardless of the pending recount’s results, this year’s mid-term election marked a striking change in the politics of Texas’ 27th Congressional District, in which Ortiz won with 57.9 percent of the vote in 2008, 56.8 percent in 2006 and 63.1 percent in 2005.
While Election Night totals from the Texas Secretary of State’s website showed Ortiz with predictably large leads in Cameron and Willacy counties, results from the northern end of his district showed a clear Republican shift, said Anthony Knopp, University of Texas at Brownsville emeritus professor of history.
District 27 covers all or part of Nueces, Kenedy, Kleberg, San Patricio, Willacy and Cameron counties, including Brownsville and Corpus Christi.
“The significant and dramatic change in this race was in the Corpus Christi area — that’s where the big difference seems to have occurred,” Knopp said. A near-sweep from Republicans in Nueces County may have booted Ortiz out of his long-held seat, Knopp said, adding, “It wasn’t just a defeat for Ortiz, it was a Republican landslide up there.”
Kirsten Gray, a spokeswoman for the Texas Democratic Party, cited the anti-incumbent fever that led to the broad Republican takeover of the U.S House this election, saying, “We had a nationwide Republican tidal wave that a lot of Republican’s just got to surf in on.”
Michael Barajas is a reporter for The Valley Morning Star in Harlingen.

Here's a photo I took of Steve Ray on his cell phone outside Congressman-Elect
Blake Farenthold's campaign headquarters early Wednesday morning about 20 minutes
after learning about Blake's 799 vote victory.

If I lost by less than 800 votes I’d call for a recount, too, so that part doesn’t offend me. What does scare me a bit and what has me calling “bull-—t” on Ortiz is that he wants a “hand recount.” I’ve seen this movie before, and don’t want to see FL 2000 all over again. Of particular concern is the fact the when Gore asked for dimpled chads to be counted he based it on two precedents: the Dem primary in MA-10 in 1996 or so and an election in TX in which several counties had counted dimpled chads. If Ortiz grabs on to that TX precedent and succeeds in allowing Democrat county commissioners to use a subjective standard of determining “voter intent” (which is what counting dimpled chads is—if the chad didn’t break off it is just as likely that the voter changed his mind about voting for the candidate as that he meant to vote for him, but Democrats will err on the’side of giving votes to Ortiz and denying them to Farenthold), Ortiz could steal the election.

To the extent that the recount is conducted by county commissions, that gives me little solace, since Cameron and Nueces Counties are both controlled by Democrats (at least as of today).

Wrong, Republicans took over the County Judgeship in Nueces county in 2007 after the 2006 elections, and they took majority control of the county commission in 2009 after the 2008 elections. The Republican County Judge just got reelected with 62% of the vote on November 3. Judge Neal was such a strong candidate that the DemocRATS only fielded weak candidates for the office. The woman who got the DemocRAT nomination was in her early thirties and never has held elective office before. She also has four or five children all of them be different fathers, none of whom she married.

I was one of the recount workers in Nueces county that finished recounting the election yesterday. The recount result was "identical" to the canvass. We manually sorted (by precinct) and recounted all the paper absentee and emergency ballot that were counted by machine earlier. Not only was the overall count identical, but the precinct by precinct counts were the same.

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