Brehm’s last official act is typically graceless

Accepting defeat gracefully is not Cynthia Brehm's style.

So there was a sense of inevitability to the news release that the lame-duck Bexar County Republican Party chair sent out Thursday afternoon.

Brehm proclaimed that the local July 14 runoff had been “severely compromised” by the Bexar County Elections Office, and, as a result, she was refusing to certify the results of the election.

A few hours later, the Bexar County GOP held their canvassing meeting. Normally, it's a perfunctory gathering that enables the party's county chair to sign the vote canvass and make the election results official.

Nothing is ever perfunctory, however, when it comes to Brehm. She conjures conspiracies out of thin air and turns rubber-stamp gatherings into Dada theater.

Brehm recited a litany of alleged violations that her presiding election judge, sciencefiction writer Douglas Stearns, observed during the runoff.

The chief allegations were that the county elections office failed to produce an official “chain of custody” for early vote data from 31 election centers and that the county did not provide a guard to secure the early vote data.

“(Stearns) was so troubled by what he saw that he called the secretary of state and the attorney general to report it, and they were appalled with what he reported,” Brehm said.

None of the 40 or so precinct chairs in the room seemed to buy it, and for good reason.

State officials were not, in fact, “appalled” by what

Brehm's sidekick reported. If anything, they were appalled at having to deal with the latest in a long line of Brehm tangents. If they maintained the veneer of politeness, just to make the whole issue go away, Brehm didn't recognize it.

She also didn't recognize the validity of a runoff election in which John Austin, a self-effacing real estate appraiser, defeated her by a margin of nearly 2-1.

“When I was elected (in 2018), I was asked to True the Vote, to maintain the integrity of the election,” Brehm said. “We have literally been handing our votes over to the Democrats. That's why Bexar County is blue.”

Many of the 27,804 people who voted for Brehm's challenger would counter that it was Brehm's organizational ineptitude, rather than any fraud from the county elections office, that contributed to a disastrous 2018 midterm in which 55 of 60 local Republicans who faced Democratic opposition lost their races.

The precinct chairs at the Thursday meeting unanimously voted, by voice vote, to certify the runoff results.

Deana Abiassi, a former party secretary, asked Brehm when she planned to sign the vote canvass.

“I'm not definitely signing anything,” Brehm shot back.

That's how the meeting ended.

The next day, Abiassi emphasized that Brehm “stood alone” in her refusal to accept the validity of the election results. Abiassi also praised the work of Jacque Callanen, the county elections administrator.

“I've been an election judge for years, and Jacque is wonderful,” Abiassi said. “She is a straight arrow, she runs a tight ship, and she is amazing.”

Callanen likewise dismissed Brehm's allegations.

“The documents that we have for the chain of custody are as strong as anything that we possibly have,” Callanen said. “But the people that she hired and she gave some kind of training to, were looking for a document that had big block letters that said, ‘Chain of Custody.' And that's not what it's called.”

The Texas Election Code gives canvassing power to “the county chair or the county chair's designee.” The code also states, however, that the state chair of the party (or the state chair's designee) “may perform any administrative duty of the county chair.”

That's what happened four months ago, when Brehm pulled a similar stunt after the March 3 primary election.

Already, Allen West, the newly elected Texas GOP chair, has selected a designee, State Republican Executive Committee member Marian Stanko, to conduct a re-canvass Monday afternoon of the Bexar County runoff vote.

Brehm can't stop the certification process. She only slowed it down and complicated it.

This was her last act as a political player.

It was the final breath of a runoff campaign in which she alleged that the COVID-19 pandemic was being “promulgated by the Democrats to undo all of the good that President (Donald) Trump has done for our country,” and suggested on Facebook that the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer was “a staged event.”

The latter comment prompted Gov. Greg Abbott, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz and U.S. Sen. John Cornyn to call for her resignation.

Cynthia Brehm doesn't step aside for anyone — even the runoff voters who emphatically told her they wanted her out.