Early voting concludes tomorrow (Tuesday) in most jurisdictions holding May 4 elections.
Non-citizen Voter Probe: A federal judge has approved a settlement signed by all parties in the lawsuit over the state’s efforts to remove suspected non-citizens from the voting rolls. As part of the settlement, the Secretary of State will implement a new “agreed matching process” and rescind the process, and its accompanying list of 95K voters, it adopted three months ago.
Under the new “agreed matching process,” the Secretary of State’s office will:
- Obtain from the Texas Dept. of Public Safety a list of all individuals who are at least 18 years old, hold a current driver’s license or personal identification card, and presented documents at their last DPS visit indicating they were not citizens (at the time).
- Match those records against the voter registration database.
- Identify those matched records belonging to people who registered to vote before presenting those documents to the DPS; and
- Send county voter registrars only those records.
The Secretary of State’s office can update its information on a weekly basis going forward, and DPS will send the Secretary of State the records for which the U.S. citizenship field changed to “Yes” from “No” on a daily basis.
Meanwhile, Secretary of State David Whitley has asked for another meeting with the Senate Democratic caucus to discuss his stalled nomination, and the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Reform wrote to Attorney General Ken Paxton giving him a May 3 deadline to comply with a late March request for documents on the matter.
CD3: 2018 Democratic nominee Lorie Burch has suspended her 2020 campaign, citing the birth of her daughter last month. “As much as I wanted to win the election in 2018, I cannot even imagine the moments I would be missing if I had won,” she said in a video posted to the campaign’s Facebook page. “Campaigns will always be there, but the first few months and years of my daughter’s life will be gone in a moment, and I want to soak it all in.” Burch received 44% of the vote in 2018 and raised $37K during the first quarter of 2020.
PRES: Former Vice President Joe Biden (23%), former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke (22%) and U.S. Sen. Benie Sanders (17%) lead the Democratic presidential primary field among “Democratic primary voters,” according to a new poll by Emerson College. Former San Antonio Mayor Julián Castro is sixth at 4%, but well within the margin of error of the candidates lacking double-digit support. The poll, which was in the field April 25-28, has a stated margin of error of ±5.3%.
San Antonio: Mayor Ron Nirenberg out-raised council member Greg Brockhouse, $132K to $30K, and outspent him, $356K to $27K, between March 26 and April 24. Nirenberg has an $88K to $11K advantage in cash on hand. Since January 1, Nirenberg has out-raised Brockhouse, $284K to $81K, and outspent him, $515K to $72K. The other mayoral candidates collectively spent less than $2K, although some candidates’ reports are not yet available.
©2019 Texas Election Source LLC
