ORTIZ GLITCHES: BISD 2012 ELECTIONS MERRY-GO-ROUND IS NOT OVER

By Juan Montoya
Guess what? The Brownsville Independent School District elections aren't over.
Just when you though you had a few months before the campaigning began for the City of Brownsville Commission elections, we now find out that it will be another week at a minimum – and longer with the inevitable vote recount in Place 7 – before we know the makeup of the BISD board.
And if you though Cameron County Elections Administrator Roger Ortiz was going to go out with a whimper, think again. There will definitely be a bang at his departure.
The controversy that has erupted revolves around the four-vote difference in the Place 7 race for the board between Jose Hector (Mr. Easy  Money Overtime) Chirinos and Linda (I am Somebody )Gill-Martinez. The latest tally put out by the elections office and published online on the BISD website indicates that Gil Martinez got 14,709 votes to Chirinos 14,705, a 0.02 percentage difference.
But wait! There's more.
There are out there, apparently, an unknown number of "provisional" votes that were not counted in the final tally. Two days after the election, Ortiz said that the resolution board composed of five Democratic Party and five Republican Party appointees will have to go over the provisional ballots to determine whether they should be counted.
When we asked how many of these provisional ballots were cast during the Nov. 6 election, he said he did not know.
"You mean to tell me that you don't know how many provisional votes were cast on Tuesday?" he was asked.
"No, I don't know how many," he responded.
Apparently, neither the candidates nor the BISD administration were told that there were a number of these "provisional" votes still pending to be tallied. With the four-vote difference in the race, who will occupy Place 7 two weeks from now is in limbo.
"We were never contacted about the provisional votes," said a Gill Martinez supporter today at the elections office.
Some candidates – such as Texas State Board of Education winner Ruben Cortez – said that he had heard that 30 such votes existed. However, Ortiz could not confirm that number and Cortez did not say where he got that information.
If it is true that 30 votes are out there, it is a certainty that depending on which of the two candidates gets them, a recount is in the offing. If the votes favor Chirinos, Gill Martinez will surely file for one. If Gill Martinez is favored, then Chirinos – who has said he would ask for one based on his four-vote deficit – will surely file. Either way, the results of the race will not be known for at least another 10 days at the least.
State law requires that the elections office allow five days after the election for the provisional votes and the incoming mail-in military votes be counted. That means that the elections office and the resolution board have until Nov. 14 (next Tuesday) to resolve the matter.
But there are also questions surrounding the change of address votes that took place in the second week of early voting that stretched from Oct. 22 to Nov. 2. According to Maggie Galvan, a Gill Martinez supporter, she said she was informed by elections office staff that they were still counting military and mail-in votes as of 12:30 election night.
However, mail-in votes that are not by the military are supposed to be counted before the results from the election-day votes are tallied. Why did the elections staff wait until the election-day balloting was over before counting the mail-ins?
"I heard that they had counted some 200 military and mail-in votes at 12:30 a.m. election night," Galvan said.
A poll watcher at the mail-in count remembered that at least 144 military ballots were counted on Monday, the day before the election.
And there's another slight problem associated with this election. Sometimes people who live out of town and are registered in Cameron County walk in to the elections office during the early voting period and ask for a change-of-address form so they can vote locally. This year, during the second week of the early voting period, no less than 45 voters came in to change their address so they could vote. These votes will also be reviewed by the resolution board to see whether they will be allowed.
"I see a huge problem here in that the members of the ballot board are the same people who are the members of the resolution board who will determine if the votes count," said Mary Helen Flores, an activist with the Citizens Against Voter Abuse (CAVA) group.
"The parties are just as much to blame as the elections office for this mess," she said. "These people not only have to determine if the votes kicked out by the voting machines are legitimate, they also have to determine whether to count them. They (as the resolution board) were counting mail-in votes at 1 a.m. election night."
The Democratic Party members of both the ballot and resolution boards are: Maggie Gonzalez, Laura Lee Ortiz, Ida Diaz, Benita Torres, and Leonel Gonzales.
The Republican Party members are: Norma Tovar, Maria Laura Tovar, Rudy Tovar (all Tovars are related), Winifred Marshal, and Alba Padron.
And you thought Roger was going to go out with a whimper? No, sir. There will be a Cameron County certified bang before this merry-go-round is over.