JUDGE RULES AGAINST PENA WHO SAYS HE WILL APPEAL

By Juan Montoya
A state district judge ruled Wednesday against attorney Ruben R. Peña in his bid to have the results of the runoff election for the Cameron County Pct. 2 commissioner annulled and a new election ordered.
State District Judge Rudy Delgado said that Peña had failed to prove his case but did concede that some violations of the Texas Election Code had occurred in the mail-in voting.
Peña came up 49 votes short with 2,110 votes to Hernandez’s 2,159 votes and alleged that the Hernandez camp had committed fraud in collecting and mailing in the ballots of several individuals, many of them elderly.
However, Delgado found that the several examples provided as evidence by the losing candidate were not sufficient for him to to overturn the election or order another one.
Peña said that he will appeal the judge's decision to the 13th Court of Appeals.
The outcome of the decision will inevitably trigger a reaction from Peña came up 49 votes short with 2,110 votes to Hernandez’s 2,159 votes.
The decision will probably infuriate Peña supporters and will invigorate the write-in candidacy of former Brownsville City commissioner Leo Garza, who did not make the runoff along with four other candidates.
Peña came up 49 votes short with 2,110 votes to Hernandez’s 2,159 votes.
And lurking in the sidelines independent candidate Fernando Ruiz vows to attract the disaffected to his cause.
Peña received 34 mail-in votes compared to the 240 votes that Hernandez received.
He charged that politiqueras, among them Hernandez's wife Norma, made up the majority of mail-in vote applications and broke the law in assisting voters in filling them out and mailing them in.
One of the women, Herminia Becerra, did not answer a subpoena issued by Peña's attorneys but said that if Pena believed that the votes were fraudulent he should have claimed that when she helped his relative Blanca Vela win her election as the mayor of the City of Brownsville.
"Why didn't he charge fraud then?" she asked.