DAVIS IN THIS ELECTION; A BADLY-DESIGNED BALLOT: BISD VOTER BEWARE, FLIP THE BALLOT OR LOSE YOUR VOTE!

D. Recommend approval of the following Contract(s)/Agreement(s):
19. Recommend approval to contract with Cameron County Elections Office and to pay 60%
deposit for estimated costs of election services for a joint Election to be held on Tuesday, November 4, 2014 and to authorize the Superintendent to sign the contract.
Item on BISD agenda for meeting of Sept. 2, 2014


By Juan Montoya
ast month during the meeting of the Brownsville Independent School District board of trustees, the members voted to pay Cameron County Elections Department Administrator Chris Davis 60 percent of the $95,714 it will cost to print the district's election ballots and run the polls.
Everyone at the district assumed that there would be separate ballots for the district, until they saw the sample ballots handed out by the Cameron County Elections Office headed by Director Chris Davis.
After all, there are some 50,000 registered voters in the precincts within the BISD.
Instead of two separate ballots – one for the general election and propositions, there was only one. The BISD election – a nonpartisan election – was printed on the back of the ballot.
Theoretically, if a palanca voter for either party (Republican or Democrat) blackens the oval in the front of the ballot, he or she may think they are done with the voting and ignore the propositions and the school district race.
Did Davis prepare the ballot – which by the way, was signed off by both parties on the elections commission – in the interest of economy and for the county to make a little extra cash?
Or was there some other motive involved?

It hasn't taken long for some supporters of school district candidates to point out that Davis' father-in-law Joe Rodriguez is a candidate on one of the positions for the BISD. Rodriguez is running for Position 4 against Shirley "La" Bowman and Mary Rey. Rodriguez drew the last place on that position. Rey drew the first and Bowman the middle.
The conventional wisdom is that the candidate in the first position on the ballot will benefit by at least 10 percent of the impulsive vote by voters who just glance through the ballot.
Who would it benefit most not to have a big voter turnout in the district elections?
County reps have told us that elections workers have been trained to tell voters that there are also races on the back side of the ballot. But is that really enough for traditional straight-party ticket voters who blackened the oval in favor of their party to scrutinize the back side of the ballot searching for the proposition and district election races?
 An elections administrator should strive to enfranchise as many voters in as many races as possible. Davis, in this case, opened the door and did the exact opposite. Can we attribute this to a sense of frugality, or was there an ulterior motive in the design?
If the totals of the vote of races that overlap the BISD yield different totals, one can deduce that the design of the ballot disenfranchised some district voters from exercising their right to choose their BISD representatives.