Vote Fraud Made Easy

"I'm very particular about what my father signs his 'X' to," explained Roy's daughter. "If I had been here this wouldn't have happened. I can't understand how they got to him. They must have come in the evening."

Ironically, Roy's and his wife's mail-in ballots for the February runoff in the Council race are still sitting on a bookshelf in Roy's home. For whatever reason, no one attempted to collect them.

Mail ballot fraud is unlikely to result in penalties in Harris County. Assistant District Attorney Chuck Noll once told a legislative election committee that election law covering vote fraud is virtually unenforceable. And County Clerk Kaufman, a Republican, doubts that much can be done to eliminate the misuse of mail-in ballots.

"Once you provide a convenience to a voter, you're not logically ever going to be able to take it away from them," she says. "And it's unfortunate that there are some unscrupulous people around that want to manipulate the system to their own good."

Doris Hubbard of the Acres Homes Community Relations Club dismisses questions about the validity of mail-in votes from her home turf as contrived and racial in origin.

"Every time that there is any kind of early vote activity in the black community, they want to make an issue of it," says Hubbard. "When it goes on in the white community, nobody says nothing. It pisses me off, it does! These seniors have good sense. They're intelligent. It's like there's a national conspiracy to keep black people from voting!"

Hubbard says she was unfamiliar with the case of Roy H. and his wife, and she declined to provide phone numbers for members of her club who collected their ballots. "I know a lot of people in Acres Homes, baby, and I'm not going to tell you who I know and who I don't know," she says.

A visit to the Acres Homes Community Relations Club office also proved unenlightening. No one was inside the locked storefront office in the Masonic Lodge building on West Montgomery. Stickers for Attorney General Dan Morales and Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee peppered the windows and door. "It's not open right now," offered a helpful hairdresser at the beauty salon next door. "They're only open during elections.