Houston TV Station Reveals That Harris County Improperly Rejected Voter Registration Applications

Last week, Harris County Tax Assessor Paul Bettencourt mouthed off about rejecting voter registration applications. Based upon what Bettencourt said, we speculated that Harris County had, in fact, wrongfully rejected a significant number of voter registration applications. It turns out we were right.

KHOU-TV in Houston has done the legwork and found some alarming stories about rejected voter registration applications:

Whichever side you believe, the 11 News Defenders have discovered real problems are blocking qualified Americans from registering to vote.

“I’m shocked this is going on,” said Frances Graham who is with Houston Votes.

Voting is a serious matter for Graham.

“My family has been in Texas since 1840. Many of them fought in the American Revolution,” she said.

So this year, Graham worked with the registration organization Houston Votes. The former certified public accountant registered more than 130 new voters.

But she noticed a trend.

“A lot of the people that I had registered are being rejected,” said Graham.

Graham then noticed another important detail.

“They’re being rejected even though the application is very clear, and they had filled it out very legibly and they’d done a good job,” she explained.

Brothers Amir, Navid, and Omid Kamali registered separately, yet each got rejected by Harris County. The county claimed the brothers didn’t give proper ID or the last four digits of their social security numbers.

But Graham said that isn’t so.

Greenblatt: “So they do everything right?”

Graham: “They do everything right.”

Greenblatt: “Yet they’re still getting rejected?”

Graham: “They’re still getting rejected.”

And the Kamali brothers weren’t alone. Potential voters like Ian Meyer, Cathy Sotello, Donna Wiley and more than 30 others were all rejected for mistakes they apparently did not make. The same thing happened to one out of three voters Graham registered.

“It makes me very angry,” Graham said.

But Graham isn’t the only that noticed the trouble.

“There is a problem in Harris County,” elections expert Lauri Van Hoose said.

Van Hoose was appointed to a state advisory committee on voting. She has testified for both Democratic and Republican backed legislation.

“People register to vote and they’re not being put on the rolls,” the elections expert said.

Van Hoose said that in Harris County there are “a high number of people being rejected due to inconsistent practices of reviewing applications.”

Van Hoose knows this because she reviewed registration records from the tax assessor’s office.

It isn’t surprising that Republican Paul Bettencourt’s Harris County Tax Office is responsible for this kind of garbage.

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