Ciro, Ciro, Ciro!
By Vince Leibowitz on Feb 28, 2006 in 2006 Texas Elections
Google News Alerts are a great thing. In my inbox today (just checked after being busy all day yesterday) I found a number of Alerts tagged to Ciro Rodriguez. Here are some of the hilights:
First off, the MainStreamMedia, by way of the San Antonio Express-News has picked up on the Webb County early voting controversy. The SAEXN had this to say:
Luis Vera, a San Antonio attorney representing the campaign, asked the Texas secretary of state’s office to investigate the number of votes cast by people 90 and older.
Vera said Democrats 90 and older cast 93 ballots in the first four days of early voting, which started last Tuesday, and 51 people 100 or older turned out to vote. The information was gleaned from voter rolls, which include birth dates.
“It just seems like a very high number, especially the people over 100,” campaign manager Oscar Sanchez said. Statistically, “certainly it would be an anomaly.”
In Bexar County, 39 people older than 92 had voted through Sunday, an election official said.
The secretary of state’s elections division agreed Monday to station an inspector in Webb County for the March 7 primary, although Vera had asked for the immediate appointment of an inspector.
National Journal’s The Hotline noted this in a story on unions and turnout:
All of organized labor, Ackerman said, was behind ex-Rep. Ciro Rodriguez (D) in his bid to reclaim TX 28 from Rep. Henry Cuellar (D). Cuellar has raised the ire of labor and liberals for his vote in support of CAFTA and backing of other business-friendly measures. Asked about payback for the other so-called “CAFTA 15,” Sweeney noted that while the nat’l AFL would not directly weigh in, that did not necessarily mean that these wayward Dems would not “be punished.”
Finally, Ciro’s campaign got a mention on AlterNet:
The good news is that groups like MoveOn and Democracy for America are starting to get it. MoveOn is supporting progressive Dems over their corporate opponents in primary challenges for the very first time. Money from the grassroots has poured into the Texas 28th CD, where Henry Cuellar, a right-wing Democrat who supported Bush in 2000 and who got a standing ovation from corporate lobbyists after he had worked so hard to push CAFTA through congress, is being challenged by Ciro Rodriguez, a Dem with a good labor record. Expect to see big bucks flowing from the netroots and grassroots to Ned Lamont, who’s challenging Joe Lieberman in the Connecticut primary.
This is a positive development for the left as it will be, eventually, for the Democratic Party as a whole.
Did some analysis on a chunk of the Webb County voter file. File I have has activity through the 04 primaries for TX-23, and it is full of 99 year old voters, with none any older than 99. These voters would be 101 now. Of the almost 40,000 voters, 883 (2.2%) were shown as age 99. In contrast, only three were 98.
131 99-yr-olds voted in the 2004 D primary. Can’t say whether they voted in alphabetical order or not.
OK. I’ve wondered about this, George. Here in VZC, anyone without a birthday listed used to be given the birthdate of “01/01/1900″ in the voterfile. So, last cycle, we had a lot of 104-year old people voting. Nevertheless, I think most counties keep their lists cleaner than ours.
I think you interpret things correctly, since there is a huge bump for that one age and noone older. There used to be some date format thing in Excel which would interpret a blank in a date field as 1904, so as of Jan 1, 04 all the blank birthdates would show age as 99.