In Floresville, voter suppression under radar
We’re living in the season of voter suppression.
In response to a 2020 election in which a record number of mail-in votes helped carry Joe Biden to the presidency and swing control of the U.S. Senate to Democrats, GOP lawmakers in Texas, Arizona, Iowa and Georgia have filed bills to restrict voting access.
In the small town of Floresville, the City Council has been waging a persistent voter-suppression effort for nearly two years, but few people outside of Wilson County have taken notice.
It all started on July 17, 2019, when the Floresville City Council voted to cancel its scheduled November municipal election — three days before candidates were set to start filing.
The council repealed a 2011 city resolution which established that Floresville elections would be held every November, with three council seats on the ballot in odd-numbered years and the other two (plus the mayor’s office) up for grabs in even-numbered years.
The council pushed back the 2019 fall election and all future city elections from November to May. In doing so, council members effectively added six months to their own terms.
Wilson County Attorney Tom Caldwell immediately fired off a letter to Floresville’s city manager, calling the council’s action “illegal,” “unconscionable” and “voidable.”
Floresville Mayor Cissy Gonzalez-dippel and three residents who had planned to run in November 2019 agreed with Caldwell and filed a lawsuit challenging the council’s move.
While the case was still pending, the COVID-19 pandemic prompted Gov. Greg Abbott to move all scheduled May 2020 municipal elections to November, meaning that the Floresville council didn’t get the May election it wanted.
District Court Judge Lynn Ellison has repeatedly ruled that the Floresville council violated the Texas Election Code.
Even after Ellison issued a binding oral order in December voiding the council’s resolution, the council proceeded with its plans for a May 1, 2021, general election.
Ellison eliminated all legal ambiguity with a written order, signed Feb. 8, declaring that Floresville’s “regular municipal elections shall remain on the November general election date.” The council nonetheless refused to rescind its planned May election.
On March 4, Ellison issued an injunction which canceled the May election, but Floresville has yet to budge.
So we’ve got city elected officials playing a game of chicken with our legal system, basically daring the courts to stop them from doing what they’ve been ordered not to do.
What has driven this blatantly undemocratic crusade?
For one thing, voter turnout tends to be highest in November (particularly during even-numbered years), so moving city elections to May was an attempt to reduce turnout, thereby giving council members more control over their electoral fates.
Also, the switch meant taking election administration away from the county and giving it to the city.
Consider that Floresville, a town of roughly 8,000 people located 30 miles southeast of San Antonio, has a population that is 61 percent Latino.
Wilson County, which has a population of 51,000, is only 40 percent Latino and votes overwhelmingly Republican. (Former President Donald Trump carried the county by almost a three-toone margin over Biden last November.)
Supporters of the council’s 2019 action will tell you that they don’t trust the county to run honest elections for the city of Floresville. They suggest that county elections administrators have allowed Wilson County residents who live outside the city limits to vote in city elections and dilute the power of Latino voters in Floresville.
It’s a conspiracy theory. Just like all the conspiracy theories that Democrats decried when they heard Republicans across the country blame Trump’s loss on widespread voter fraud.
If you hated that kind of conspiracy mongering when it came to the presidential election, you should hate it when it’s used to justify voter suppression in Floresville. It doesn’t matter which end of the political spectrum benefits or suffers.
If politicians can arbitrarily lengthen their terms of office and repeal laws to push back imminent elections, our system has no chance.
Art Martinez de Vara, the former mayor of Von Ormy, represented the four plaintiffs in their case against the city of Floresville.
“I think it’s the most egregious case of voter suppression I’ve ever seen,” Martinez de Vara said.
“It’s a city trying to manipulate the outcome of the election by changing the elections, then violating court orders and persisting at it. Usually, when courts say you’re wrong on the law, people fall into line.”
During the past two years, the Floresville City Council has been nothing if not stubborn. Too bad all that obstinance has been in the service of voter disenfranchisement.