Dan Neil Contests HD48 Election

Dan Neil, the Republican candidate for State Representative, district 48, has filed a contest to the election results. There were several irregularities found during the election recount, which reported him as behind Democrat Donna Howard by a mere 12 votes. His campaign released the following statement:

“With all the mistakes made by Travis County election officials that we have seen and discovered, we believe that a contest must be filed for every legal vote to be counted. I believe that when all of the legally cast ballots are counted that I will be the new representative for House District 48.

“Travis County did not provide us with all of the information we requested, but from the information given to us, we have found several mistakes made by election officials. Many of the overseas ballots were improperly marked, and the county remade these ballots when they realized their mistake. They compounded their mistake when 3 of the straight-Democratic ballots were not remade and their votes counted in this election, while the intent of the other overseas voters was disregarded. If they counted 3 of the straight ticket overseas voters, all of those should be counted.

“During the recount we found several straight-Republican ballots that had been remade, and we requested copies of all the remade overseas ballots. To this day, Travis County has not provided us with the copies of all of the remade overseas ballots, and the only way we can view them is to file the contest and go through the process of discovery. I sincerely believe that when all these votes are counted, there will be a new state representative in House District 48.

“We also found mail ballots that should have been counted, but they were not, due to mistakes made by election officials. Two ballots were not counted even though their ballot signatures match their registration applications. One ballot was rejected because it was mailed from within the county even though the law does not say it can be rejected for that reason. We have also found about 1900 felons who may have been ineligible to vote. We are in the process of confirming whether these voters should have been allowed to vote.

“According to the final vote tally after the recount, we are also missing two votes. On November 18th, the final vote tally was 51,554 votes. During the recount process, we found one vote not counted that should have been counted, so the final vote tally should have been 51,555. Instead, the final vote tally is 51,553. Where are those two votes? No matter how we look at this, the numbers just don’t add up. This is just another example of why we must file a contest to make sure that every legal vote has been counted.”