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Politics & Government

Clay Jenkins Asks Republican Candidates to Condemn GOP Lawsuit

The county's top official speaks out on a lawsuit threatening to remove 128 local Democrats from election ballots, calling it 'disgusting' and 'bad for democracy.'
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Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins, a Democrat, is calling on Republican candidates for office to denounce a lawsuit filed Friday by the local GOP, which aims to boot 128 Democrats off the March 6 primary ballot and effectively clear the way for uncontested and otherwise unlikely Republican wins in November. The county’s Republican Party — kept largely out of power in Dallas County electoral politics since 2006 and broke as of two years ago, but led by an ambitious new chair — seized on an apparent clerical snafu to blindside local Democrats.

The lawsuit accuses Dallas County Democratic Party Chair Carol Donovan of failing to sign the petitions of her party’s candidates as required by the state’s electoral code, an alleged unforced human error that fits with a portrait of a local Democratic Party that can’t get out of its own way.  In some cases, the lawsuit alleges that someone else signed Donovan’s signature. State Sen. Royce West denounced Republican “shenanigans,” while state Rep. Eric Johnson painted the move as an attempt by the GOP to “disenfranchise minority voters.”

Jenkins, who sat down Monday for a brief interview with D Magazine to address the lawsuit as both a Democrat and the county’s top elected official, seemed to agree with those characterizations. The county judge, running unopposed in the primary but facing Republican contender Todd Gottell, the former mayor of Rowlett, in the general election, also called on Republican candidates to condemn what he called the “desperation tactics” of their own party, describing the lawsuit as a threat to a fair and equal election. Here are some excerpts from that interview, condensed and edited for clarity.

D Magazine: So what’s on your mind?
Clay Jenkins: I’ve been asked about the lawsuit filed by the Republicans to knock most of the Democratic candidates off the ballot. I’m looking at that from two standpoints, really. The first standpoint is the 2.6 million people that live here and the half a million or more who cast a vote. It is a bad thing for insider politicians to try to deny people a choice at the ballot box, because they feel like they can’t win an election based on ideas. So they’re going to win an election through lawsuits. That is bad for democracy, and I find that to be disgusting and bordering on cowardice. And I hope that does not represent the Republican candidates for office. And I hope that those Republican candidates will come out and condemn this. Elections should be won based on the power of ideas and the quality of the candidates, and not based on legal maneuvers that deny voters a choice.

As a legal maneuver, do you think it holds any weight?
C.J.: As a legal maneuver, it will fail. In America we favor letting people remain on the ballot as long as the candidate themself has met the base parameters of qualifying for the ballot. For most offices that is residency in the district, the paying of a filing fee, and for some, it requires signatures. As long as those signatures were honestly obtained –not forged or something — then the law favors leaving people on the ballot. And democracy favors that. In this lawsuit, the attack is not (on the) candidates themselves. The person who accepted (the candidates’) paperwork either filled it out incorrectly when they sent it off to the secretary of state, or the wrong person signed in the blank–not the candidate, but some party functionary (signed it). That shouldn’t be something that allows voters to not have a choice.

Did (Dallas County Democratic Party Chair) Carol Donovan screw up?
C.J.: I haven’t had a chance to read the entire lawsuit, and I don’t want to get into the politics of that. I have endorsed her opponent in that race, but I think the important thing now is that we all work together to make sure that people are kept on the ballot. Then when I look at it not from the standpoint of the voters, but from the standpoint of county government, we need clarity on what names we put on a ballot. After more wrangling and lawsuits that we had to wait on, we were finally able to print our first batch of ballots, and we mailed our military overseas ballots on Saturday. And early voting starts on Feb. 20. So these lawsuits, which I think are in bad faith and are cowardly and wrong, are also poised to cause trouble for the county, in letting us run an election and know who to put on and leave off. In some of these we’ve been told, ‘Take them off, put them back on, take them off again.’ If that continues to happen, then that makes it very difficult for us to run an election in a neutral and fair way.

Just from a logistical standpoint, how does (the county elections department) handle this? How much will this cost to sort out?
C.J.: It’s hard to put a pin to it, but just to give you an idea from the past: not this lawsuit, but some lawsuits that were filed that were just settled before that — another one filed by the Republicans to try to knock Staci Williams, one of the sitting judges, off the ballot. They filed a lawsuit which resulted in us not being able to print ballots and finally having to send people home because people were mandamus-ing the judge who knocked her off the ballot. A ruling came out in that lawsuit at 1 o’clock in the morning on Saturday morning, and then our people had to go back up there and work all day to print ballots. So they get them to the post office by 4:30 so they can make it out by the bare deadline for military ballots. All that time, things that we normally would be doing in the regular course of business that are delayed and had people working on the weekend. There’s an expense to that, certainly. I haven’t calculated what it is, but it’s costing the taxpayers money.

Does this kind of tactic from the local Republicans seem like something you haven’t seen before?
C.J.: It’s something that we haven’t seen before, and it could be that, with what’s perceived as a Democratic wave year, that this kind of desperation tactic is what’s come up with. The more concerning thing we’re seeing in elections now, (are) concerted efforts on a variety of levels to take democracy out of the hands of voters and put it in the hands of backroom insiders. Whether it be changing the voting laws to restrict the hours of voting or make it harder for people to vote, which has now become a rallying cry with some politicians. We’re the only democracy in the world, that’s a true democracy, that’s doing that right now.

We have pretty overwhelming evidence of Russian interference in elections. The beneficiaries of that interference are saying it didn’t occur and trying to stop the investigations into it. And if we can’t agree that we don’t want dangerous communist dictatorships interfering in our election, and we’re not going to work to try to stop that, then that’s a real danger. In that sort of an environment, it’s just kind of the next step of that for these local parties to say, ‘You know what? I’ve come up with a plan where I’m going to stop the voters from having a say, and I’m going to control the outcomes of these elections.’ What I hope is that the candidates on the Republican side of this will condemn that.

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