HD11: Alto Marine Corps veteran Danny Ward filed paperwork establishing a campaign committee for a potential primary challenge of Rep. Travis Clardy (R-Nacogdoches). Ward’s Facebook page indicates he is running as a “conservative” against “false republicans in the state legislature.”
See our 2018 Challengers page for all 181 challengers and open seat candidates who we confirm have taken a formal step toward running for state and federal office from Texas in 2018.
Campaign Finance: Today (June 30) is the last day of the current fundraising period for federal and state candidates. Federal officeholders and candidates file quarterly campaign finance reports on July 15. These will include contributions, expenditures and loans between April 1 and June 30. State officeholders and candidates will file semiannual campaign finance reports on July 17. These include contributions, expenditures and loans between January 1 and June 30. A moratorium on contributions was in place for state officeholders, including the Legislature, for all but the last few days, so many officeholders are expected to report very few, if any, contributions.
Meanwhile, the Texas Supreme Court upheld the state’s ban on corporate political donations. The Texas Democratic Party sued the King Street Patriots, a Tea Party group, claiming it unlawfully accepted political contributions and made political expenditures as a nonprofit corporation. The group asserted that provisions of the Texas Election Code unconstitutionally infringed upon its First Amendment rights to free political association.
Voter Fraud: The Texas Secretary of State’s office said it would provide only publicly available information on voter registrations and participation to the federal Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. The commission issued a broad request for data – including conviction histories, military service records, voting history since 2006 and partial social security numbers – from the chief election officer of every state. Texas is one of at least 19 states to decline to provide some of that requested information. One of those states is Kansas, whose secretary of state is vice chair of the commission.
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