NINE DAYS BEFORE EARLY VOTING: 1,900 MAIL-INS AND COUNTING

By Juan Montoya
With nine days left before the start of early voting for the Nov. 4 general election, the Cameron County Elections Department says that about 1,900 mail-in ballots have already been received at their office.
This, apparently, is the result of both the Republican and Democratic parties push to boost voting by mail among the 65 and over voters in their respective camps.

Now, with former Carmon County Judge Gilberto Hinojosa chairman of the Texas Democratic party, it appears that he is taking a page from the GOP book and trying to catch up with their efforts.
But there is yet another aspect to this mail-in strategy. Cameron County has been a traditional haven for politiqueros and politiqueras for pay who will go to the highest bidder. Their prey have been the elderly and disabled, who they recruit at local adult day-care centers.
There, they befriend the often lonely people and convince them to fill out a mail-in ballot application. The politiqueros then appear at their door after a week or two and ask them if they have received their "poll tax," or mail-in ballot.
If they have, the trusted assistant then offers to help them fill it out. Sometimes, they just have the elderly and gullible victim sign their name and they fill out the ballot on behalf of the candidates who pay them.
This thrust by both major parties to seek the elderly vote has a few local wrinkles as well.
The traditional politiqueras allied with Democratic candidates are guided by the lists provided them by the county Democratic party and know where the applications went. This saves the politiqueras the trouble of filling out applications themselves. The applications – through the mass mailings – are already there for them. Following a list of elderly voters by neighborhood will allow them to zero in on their intended targets.
Then, there's the existing lists of mail-in votes that have been cultivated over the years by these political operatives. These people have been accustomed over the years to see the politiqueras appear at their door. At the Brownsville High Rise of the Brownsville Housing Authority one politiquera showed up with a half-dozen tamales for her "clients," who willingly gave up their ballots to "la señora del poll tax." 
That was Tomasita Chavez. She was one of the five women indicted recently for voting fraud associated with the mail-in ballots.
Another, Margarita Ozuna, would show up in the barrios all over Brownsville but the voters at different barrios knew her under different names. At some barrios she was known as "Dora," and in others as "Maria," etc.
Ozuna was also indicted by a Cameron County grand jury after an investigation by the State of Texas Attorney General's Office.
The federal government was also busy sending a message to local politiqueras that there might be a price to pay for their manipulation of the mail-in ballots. The government indicted Sonia Solis after she voted five times from the same address as five different disabled voters. She was arrested in Ft. Worth by federal agents and brought to Brownsville for trial.
During the sentencing hearing, she named several other politiqueras who she said taught her how to manipulate the ballots in favor of their candidates. She said during the hearing that the lessons were held at Fiesta Graphics, a business owned and operated by Ernie and Norma Hernandez. Hernandez has been a politician who has won nearly every race that he's through mail-in ballots.
He was recently forced to resign from his Pct. 2 county commissioner position after he admitted manipulating the civil service hiring process on behalf of his brother-in-law. During the 2010 elections, his daughter Erin Hernandez Garcia was the beneficiary of mail-in votes that gave her the victory over runoff opponent Yolanda Begum.
The folks over at the Citizens Against Voter Abuse (CAVA) are hoping that these indictments and guilty pleas will throw a wet towel on the illegal activities involving the mail-in voting. But now with the push by both parties to increase that number, they admit that the potential for abuse has increased.
"We just hope that the politiqueras harvesting votes got the message through the indictments and convictions," said director Mary Helen Flores. "We won't know until the results are in whether they did or not."