IN AN IRONIC TWIST, PENA DEFENDS SAN BENE "POLITIQUERO"

By Juan Montoya
In an ironic twist of fate, local attorney and former candidate for county commissioner and county judge Ruben Peña now finds himself defending a social worker who claims he was defamed by a San Benito resident who reported him to the state board of social workers alleging he had collected mail-in ballots from some of his clients.
Encarnacion "Chon" Lopez Jr. hired Peña after Benito Cortez mailed copies of the ballot envelopes showing that Lopez may have collected votes from his long list of clients in apparent violation of his profession's code of ethics.
This, in turn, led Lopez to file a defamation lawsuit against Cortez and he hired Peña to represent his interests in court.
If you remember, in 2010  Peña filed suit in court and vowed to show that former county commissioner Ernie Hernandez had used the politiqueras to harvest votes form the elderly and mentally impaired to inflate his vote totals.
In the 2010 Democratic primary, Hernandez received 1,206 votes to Peña’s 1,121 votes. But in the runoff, after Peña had beaten Hernandez in the runoff election day votes 1,863 to 1,701, it was alleged that the mail-in votes harvested by Maggie Ozuna and Herminia Becerra (240 for Hernandez to 34 for Peña) gave Hernandez the win.
Peña brought Hernandez to court and came within 7 votes of the 49-vote difference to overturn that election before a judge from Hidalgo County put an abrupt halt on the process.
Hernandez was declared the winner over Peña, who was able to prove fraud, but due to Hernandez's abuse of the discovery process, was unable to prove a sufficient number of illegal votes to overturn the election.
"Hernandez and his wife (Norma), who is also a politiquera, avoided being served with subpoenas and did not attend the trial. The politiqueras also avoided service and absconded rather than appearing at trial. Numerous persons who supposedly voted by mail refused to appear at trial after being served, " the lawsuit charged.
A judge decided that there would not be enough time for the lawsuit to be heard before Hernandez took office.
The impact of those harvested votes was never more apparent than during the runoff election between Yolanda Begum and Erin H. Garcia in 2012.
The same politiqueros and politiqueras identified with the vote-harvesting machine that delivered the votes to Ernie through his wife Norma were identified by Begum in a lawsuit in 2012 for manipulating the mail-in vote of the elderly and mentally impaired. In a couple of cases, illiterate voters were said to have voted by mail.
In that primary, Erin Hernandez Garcia had lost by some 500 votes and ended up winning with less than 200 during the runoff.
So, where else but in Cameron County could a former candidate who blamed politiqueras for losing his race end up defending a client who is suspected of doing the same thing?
The irony isn't lost on supporters of the Citizens Against Voter Abuse who Peña has supported to uncover fraudulent mail-in ballots and the paid political workers who harvest them.