Harris County Tax-Assessor Collector Refuses to Purge Voter Rolls

Imagine having an ailment and going to the doctor for it.  The doctor examines you, runs blood work and tells you in no uncertain terms what you have. Great, right?  Then, the doc looks you in the eye and tells you that he isn't going to do a damn thing about it.  Knowing full well what you're sick with, he or she won't help you fix the problem.

Now, think of the 'health' of our elections here in Harris County.  I know that the Republican Party here in Harris County does a heck of a lot to protect the ballot box.  We've set a precedent across the state of Texas with our Ballot Security Committee headed up by former True the Vote stalwart, Alan Vera.  He along with other members of the committee staff the polling places during elections to ensure that integrity at the polling place is maintained.  Alan also drafts legislation to help protect our ability to cast our votes.

There is something else called the voter rolls that have to be kept up with.  The Tax-Assessor Collector is in charge of maintaining the health of the voter rolls.  What ARE the voter rolls?  It's basically a list of names of people who are eligible to vote in our elections.  If you're like me, you think that the only people who should be allowed to vote in elections are American citizens.  Well, Ann Harris Bennett, our current tax-assessor collector would disagree.

Ms. Bennett is aware of the ailments of our voter rolls, and just like that doctor who refused to fix your problem to make you well, she's doing the same thing.  According to a Washington Times article, Ms. Bennett is quoted as saying,
         "Once a person is officially registered to vote, a state may only remove them from the voting list if: the person dies, changes residence, asks to be removed from the list, or becomes ineligible under state law because of criminal conviction or mental incapacity,” Ms. Bennett said in court papers. The National Voter Registration Act “does not create any obligation for a state to conduct a list maintenance program to remove the names of voters who may be ineligible due to lack of citizenship.”

Unbelievable.  I disagree that non-citizens should be allowed to vote in our elections, obviously.  So does our current County Clerk, Stan Stanart.  I read the article and found that he was not quoted in it at all.  So, I sent the article to him to get his reaction.  Here's what he had to say,  

          "This is ridiculous and just plain wrong.  It is her responsibility to investigate and remove all ineligible people on the voter rolls – including non-citizens.  I wish the voter registrar would share with me the names of anyone they know who voted and whom they later found to not be a citizen.   I would quickly turn then over to the DA or Attorney General for investigation and prosecution."

For context, Stan Stanart runs the elections in Harris County and he works to head off voter fraud at every turn.  

More from the article: "Ms. Bennett is fighting a request by the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a conservative group pushing to clean up voter rolls, which asked the county to turn over records of people who’d signed up to vote then later admitted they weren’t citizens.

She is one of what appears to be a trend of registrars arguing that groups looking to add more names to the voter rolls are protected by the  NVRA (National Voter Registration Act), but those looking to trim bloated lists of old or erroneous names are not entitled to use the 1993 law to pry loose records."

 To Ms. Bennett, I would say, you have an obligation to the voters in Harris County to keep our voter rolls clean.  There is such a thing as election integrity, and you should be striving to maintain it. 

Parental Rights Deserve Eternal Vigilance: Arizona's SB 1473 Proves It

"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty; power is ever stealing from the many to the few." -Wendell Phillips
Eternal vigilance.  That means you have to keep your eyes on things, right?  For like, a really long time.  As an activist, eternal vigilance over our freedoms is something that comes to mind for me.  One of those freedoms is the right to parent a child the way that you, the parent, see fit.  Fighting for parental rights was actually my first foray into politics back in 2009.  It's a subject that I will always be passionate about.The gubmint don't always agree with that sentiment.  Take a look.

Recently an article on that topic came across my email and I thought it was worth sharing. Texas Public Policy Foundation puts out a daily email about stuff that's happening around the U.S., not just Texas or Harris County.  They published an email about a bill in Arizona about drug addicted babies being removed from their mother's care and their parental rights being terminated.  Now, that might sound logical to you, especially if the mother has proven the capability to harm her child.  As Paul Berlin would say, Now, for the rest of the story..."

The idea of the bill is to actually remove the provision that so many states have which is known as 'next of kin' or 'kinship' law.  The state of Arizona wants the default to be that the child be placed with total strangers, not with grandma or an aunt or uncle.  Say what?!?   
        "When children really must be taken from their parents, study after study has shown the children do better when placed with relatives than when placed with total strangers,” reports Richard Wexler in the Arizona Daily Star  and tucson.com“That’s why 45 states have a preference for kinship care in their state laws. SB 1473 would remove the kinship care preference in Arizona law and set up new barriers to relatives that create a subtle de facto preference for affluent strangers.”

I share this with you because no one's parental rights are ever free from the danger of being removed.  Think it can't happen to you?  Think again.  As I said in my opening quote: 
"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty; power is ever stealing from the many to the few." -Wendell Phillips