May to challenge election in House
A Republican who lost his Houston-area race for a Texas House seat by 15 percentage points is formally contesting the result, arguing Harris County’s Election Day woes mean the outcome should be “declared void and a new election be ordered.”
Mike May, the GOP nominee who ran against state Rep. Jon Rosenthal in House District 135, filed a petition challenging Rosenthal’s win with the Texas Secretary of State’s Office on Tuesday morning. May contends that the result “is not the true outcome” because some voting locations in Harris County ran out of paper used to print ballots in voting machines.
Texas Democrats cast the election challenge as a bad-faith political stunt spawned by Donald Trump’s baseless accusations that Democrats stole the 2020 election from him through voter fraud and other illicit means. Some Republicans also criticized the effort, arguing it distracts from their more serious efforts to address Harris County’s election administration issues.
May’s challenge also draws attention to the little-exercised House procedure used to vet these claims, one that is typically invoked in contests decided by
dozens of votes, not the several thousand separating May and Rosenthal.
State election law directs the secretary of state to deliver May’s petition to House Speaker Dade Phelan, R-beaumont, who will then refer it to a committee of House members to consider whether to recommend that the full House uphold the result or declare it void, thus triggering a new election.
Phelan is also directed by state law to appoint another House member as a “master of discovery,” who can throw out the contest by declaring it “frivolous.”
Rosenthal received 57.6 percent of the vote, to May’s 42.4 percent, in House District 135. The contest was decided by a margin of more than 6,000 votes, out of over 40,000 total.
May could not be reached for comment Friday.
Larry Veselka, a Houston lawyer who represented Democrat Hubert Vo when Vo’s 2004 election to the Texas House was challenged by his Republican opponent, said the legal standard for voiding an election result and ordering up a redo typically requires “clear and convincing” evidence that would be near-impossible for May to obtain.
“It’s too speculative,” said Veselka, who previously served as chair of the Harris County Democratic Party in the 1980s. “I mean, how do you say who walked away at this hour or at this one location where they were short of ballots?”
May’s election challenge sparked outrage among Houston Democrats, including Rosenthal, who called it “more a political stunt than any type of serious complaint or concern.”
Harris County Democratic Party Chair Odus Evbagharu, who previously served as Rosenthal’s chief of staff, said the petition “reeks of Republican desperation.” “The Republican candidate is attempting to alter a certified election with this baseless charge,” Evbagharu said. “Clearly, they’re running out of options in the election-attack playbook.”
Mark Mccaig, a Houston attorney and conservative activist, also condemned the election contest in a tweet.
“There were HUGE problems with the election in Harris Co, but frivolous election contests like this are a gift to Dems (which is why Rosenthal is eating it up),” Mccaig tweeted.
State Sen. Paul Bettencourt, Rhouston, said he expects a number of other election challenges to come down the pike, particularly from Republican judicial candidates who narrowly lost countywide races.
“This is the first of many election challenges that will be filed,” Bettencourt said. “Look, it’s simply not normal nor acceptable that in the nation’s fourth-largest county, you’ve got dozens of polls that ran out of ballot paper because an election administrator either couldn’t or wouldn’t get the ballot paper out for people to vote on. I mean, it’s beyond preposterous. The question is, is it
malevolent?”
Since the election, Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg has launched an investigation into “alleged irregularities” that occurred, after her office received a referral from the Secretary of State’s Office. Ogg also asked the Department of Public Safety director for assistance from the Texas Rangers, a division of DPS.
That same day, Gov. Greg Abbott called for an investigation into the election, and the Harris County Republican Party filed a lawsuit accusing Elections Administrator Cliff Tatum and the county of numerous violations of the Texas Election Code.
It’s unclear how many polling sites ran out of paper on Election Day, though Tatum has said “at least 12 to 17” locations out of 782 countywide had requested shipments of more paper. The Harris County Republican Party claimed in its lawsuit there were paper shortages at 23 voting locations.
Tatum has said his office is contacting each election judge to gather feedback and assess what technical difficulties and other challenges they faced, as part of a “full assessment” of what went wrong during the election.
Beyond the paper shortages, a trio of voter advocacy groups won a court order requiring all Harris County polling locations to remain open an extra hour because a number of locations failed to open on time, confounding some early-morning voters’ attempts to cast their ballots.
Bettencourt and other Republicans have also taken issue with the county’s release of early voting results before the new courtordered 8 p.m. deadline for voters to get in line to vote.
Numerous countywide races came down to less than a percentage point, including what became a closely watched election between Democrat Dasean Jones and Republican Tami Pierce for the 180th state district court. Pierce led Jones by more than 1,200 votes the morning after the election, but absentee and provisional ballots posted by election officials in the days after the midterm flipped the race in Jones’ favor.
He ultimately won by 449 votes, out of more than a million votes cast in the race.
May’s election challenge is not unprecedented, though prior efforts have rarely resulted in new elections being called, even for narrowly decided races.
After the 2004 election, three Republicans challenged the outcomes of their Texas House races — including then-state Rep. Talmadge Heflin, who lost by 33 votes to Vo in House District 149, which includes Alief and Katy.
To oversee those challenges, then-speaker Tom Craddick appointed a nine-member special House committee, filled by five Republicans and four Democrats, known as the Select Committee on Election Contest. After a short-lived effort to force a new election, which included the House subpoenaing voters who cast contested ballots in the Heflin-vo contest, Heflin dropped the challenge.