WILL IT BE STANDING-ROOM ONLY FOR SOLIS ARRAIGNMENT?

By Juan Montoya 
Th arraignment of Sonia Leticia Solis, the 54-year-old woman accused of voting five times in the 2012 runoff election, will be held Wednesday at 1:30 before U.S.Magistrate Ronald G. Morgan in Courtroom 2 at the federal courthouse on Harrison Street in Brownsville.
The court has appointed local attorney Rey Cantu as her public defender. Cantu is a former Cameron County DA and well acquainted with vote-harvesting in the southeast part of the county.
According to the federal government, Solis is accused of filling and mailing five mail-in ballots from a one-bedroom apartment on Shidler Drive where the five disabled voters allegedly lived.
She faces five year prison sentence and a $10,000 fine if convicted of the offense.
There has been much speculation about her political alliances, some going as far as suggesting that the hiring of one of her relatives by a local law enforcement elected official was as a result of her casting the allegedly illegal mail-in ballots on behalf of the five voters. That remains, however, pure speculation.
However, there are other issues behind the Solis indictment that will come out during the depositions and trial if it gets that far. What is known, for example, is that there are serious questions about the time sequence of the filing for the the applications for the mail-in ballots and even more questions surrounding the identity of the person filling out the applications and mailing in the ballot.
And, apparently, these are not the only mail-in ballots during that election where her name appeared.
She has been linked, variously, to Constable Abelardo Gomez, DA candidate Carlos Masso and J.P. Erin Hernandez. All were running as a ticket and some of their votes could have overlapped onto the others'.
This does not mean that the candidates condoned the actions of these political operatives, but let's face it, these people wouldn't take these chances for mere political loyalty.
Solis herself has been around the block a time or two. Her record lists a conviction for possession of marijuana in 2005 and she is awaiting trial for giving a false statement to a police officer in County-court-at-law.
The issue becomes curiouser and curiouser because of the political alliances that existed during the last runoff election.
When former candidate for city commissioner Zeke Silva reported to police that his father was involuntarily being led out of his adult day care center to vote in a van operated by politiqueros aligned with Norma Hernandez, he retrieved a filled-out sample ballot that each of the elderly day-care clients who was being herded into the vans were given.
He gave police a copy of the ballot which the Hernandez minions were handing out and showed them that they had filled in the ovals for Gomez, Erin Hernandez. and Carlos Masso.
If these candidates were working as a ticket, one would expect that the mail-in votes that were harvested during that run-off election would also overlap among all three. Only later, almost at the end of the voting cycle, Denise Blanchard, a Democratic congressional candidate, was added to the slate by the vote-harvesting machine. However, since the offenses occurred when a federal rep was being elected, this opened the door for the government to step in.
We hope that this case doesn't go the way of the Texas Attorney General's Office prosecution of Margarita Ozuna where the state accepted a no-contest plea and the defendant received a fine and a one-year probated sentence. Because of the plea, local residents were denied knowledge of the details surrounding her acquisition of not just one vote, but the scores of votes which she is reported to control.
Tuesday will only see Solis' arraignment. What follows and what chips may fall as she goes through the trial process may open a window into those who have manipulated the voted for decades.