in Houston, Texas

(Continued from page 2.)

Leo Vasquez, Harris County voter registrar, manages Harris County's voter rolls. (He's also the tax collector, as of late December. Prior to that, Paul Bettencourt held the dual role.)

The office has pledged to review the more than 4,000 names flagged in Texas Watchdog’s October investigation but had not begun its review when we interviewed his staff a few weeks ago. At this writing, Harris County's official in charge of voter registration, Ed Johnson, had not returned a phone message left at his office Friday.

Beverly Kaufman, Harris County clerk, who is charged with running elections.

A spokesman for Kaufman defended the office's record.

"In our estimation, one case of possible fraud is one too many," spokesman Hector de Leon said by e-mail. "But if you look at it in the context of a handful of errors in a March Democratic Primary election where a little over 400,000 persons voted, I would say our elections system is in pretty good shape."

De Leon could not say in January whether the office turned over the cases to the district attorney --- the official handling such cases was on vacation. When contacted on Friday, De Leon said he would follow up with that official. We'll post his response to the comments below when we hear from him.

De Leon said the office referred 17 such cases, concerning voting and election-related questions, to the DA's office following the November election.

District Attorney Pat Lykos, who prosecutes cases for the people of Harris County. Lykos' office has a public integrity division, which prosecutes cases of public corruption, election-related violations and basically any sort-of legal charge against a government official.

After reviewing the documents, the district attorney’s office explained that such cases are nearly impossible to prosecute. The perpetrator is long gone, and the only evidence is the slip of paper where he or she signed in. It’s also impossible to tell whether someone signed in and pushed the ballot box buttons, or just signed in.

Secretary of State Hope Andrade coordinates local officials' implementation of election-related rules. The office maintains a statewide list of registered voters and, together with county officials, is responsible for keeping the list up-to-date.

A spokeswoman said in January the office had forwarded Texas Watchdog's notes and questions to the attorney general's office and could not comment further.

"If our office receives credible information about voter fraud, we will forward it to the Attorney General's office, which will decide whether or not to look further into the matter," spokeswoman Ashley Burton said by e-mail. Burton said the office had referred a little more than two dozen alleged election-related criminal violations to the AG's office since May 2007.

Attorney General Greg Abbott.

A spokesman for the office confirmed by e-mail that the AG's office received the information from the secretary of state's office. Spokesman Tom Kelley declined to comment further.

About the story

Texas Watchdog began its look at voting irregularities in October, when we compared a federal listing of deceased persons with the local voter rolls database. More on that here.

We found some 4,000+ voters whose names and birthdates matched the names and birthdates of people listed as dead. Then we isolated dozens of dead folks whose names may have been used to vote. That was according to the electronic information.

When we examined polling place books, made available to us in November, we found that clerical errors accounted for most of the cases.

Election officials use a system similar to what you see in many retail stores.

And like the cashier scans in the barcode at Wal-Mart, so, too, the election workers scan in a barcode that corresponds to each voter in the records.

When voters sign in at a polling place, the barcode and number is listed by each name. After the election, workers scan in the barcodes of voters participating in the election, to an electronic database. But in some cases, workers apparently scanned in voters who didn’t cast ballots. See an example here.

By contrast, the cases of Gloria Guidry and Wanda B. Greene point to election fraud. See more about those examples on page 2 of this story. And backtrack to page 1 here.

Contact Lee Ann O'Neal at leeann@texaswatchdog.org or 713-980-9777.

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