Democratic Legislators Call Out Harris County Employees For False Testimony On Voter ID

[Editor's note: CapitolAnnex has several segments of video from the committee hearing discussed below and will add links to this post as soon as the video is online; right now only part one is online.]

Harris County Tax Assessor Leo Vasquez is under fire this week amid accusations that staffers from his office misled the House Committee on Elections during testimony on a controversial voter identification bill last week.

The Houston Chronicle has more:

He said today that testimony in Austin last week on the “voter ID” bill by voter registration staffers George Hammerlein and Ed Johnson was no partisan move. The pair, called to testify by Republican lawmakers, took no position on the bill and provided facts as requested, Vasquez said.

Coleman and Hernandez never have taken their concerns to him, Vasquez said, and they owe his staffers an apology for making baseless allegations.

The Democrats today zeroed in on Hammerlein’s legislative testimony, several hours into hearing that ran past midnight, that thousands of Harris County residents who registered to vote on time were not eligible to participate in early voting two weeks later because they applied relatively late.

Hammerlein acknowledged today that his statement was wrong and said it was due to the strange hour rather than any attempt to mislead the Legislature.

The problem is that the early voting statement isn’t the only problem with Hammerlein’s testimony.

In just the first 20 minutes of Hammerlein’s testimony, he dodges questions about alleged dead voters on the rolls or casting ballots prior to the implementation of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which added provisions that speeds up the removal of the deceased from voter rolls. Too, he began his testimony with a video of a tabloid-style television news investigation that relied solely on the research of a watchdog group to proclaim that (a) two dead voters voted in the 2008 primaries and (b) there were 4,000 dead people on the Harris County voter rolls. The problem with the first part is that in later testimony, Hammerlein admits that his office didn’t bother to include for the House Elections Committee copies of voter rolls showing where the dead voters signed in. He is eventually forced to admit (a couple of times actually) that the sign-ins could be either clerical or voter error of someone signing on the wrong line.

You can take a look at the first 9 or so minutes of Hammerlein’s testimony below:

Too, the testimony is rife with examples of alleged voter registration fraud and Hammerlein is forced to admit time and again that the registration fraud never lead to any fraudulent votes being cast.

Rep. Rafael Anchia (D-Dallas) also brings up with Hammerlein testimony given by his cohort, Ed Johnson, on a previous occasion. He brings up some of Johnson’s outlandish claims and Hammerlein is seen dodging and weaving his way around that (you can see a 2007 incident of Johnson’s runaway freight train voter ID testimony here).

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