The Texas Civil Rights Project wants a recount.
A day after the city secretary said a petition to put a paid sick leave ordinance to voters this fall had fallen just hundreds of “valid signatures” short of the necessary threshold, the legal nonprofit is calling for the city to give thousands of rejected signatures a second look.
A lot of numbers incoming: As was reported Monday, activists last month submitted close to 120,000 signatures supporting a ballot vote on whether the city should require employers to give workers paid time off when they are sick. About 41 percent of workers in Dallas do not get paid sick leave. For the petition to succeed, it needed to get the signatures of 10 percent of the registered voters in Dallas, or 53,765 people. Despite seemingly being well over that mark, the city secretary’s review found that only 52,885 signatures belonged to qualified voters—meaning actively registered voters who live within the city limits of Dallas, and signed the petition within the 60-day drive period. That’s more than 60,000 signatures that were tossed, leaving activists 871 names short of what they needed. City Secretary Bilierae Johnson defended her office’s signature count on Monday, and said there had been a quality control check after the initial tally. (She said most of the rejected signatures belonged either to people who were not registered to vote, or did not live in the city of Dallas.)
In a letter to the city secretary’s office., the Civil Rights Project hones in on 31,473 rejected signatures it says were not re-reviewed, and another 2,841 signatures it says were invalidated because “the signature line lacked both a date of birth and a voter registration number.” In the case of the latter signatures, there wasn’t enough of an effort made to match names to registered voters, according to the Civil Rights Project. It wants the city to re-examine both.
Without a recount, the lawyers representing the coalition of progressive groups (including the Texas Organizing Project and Faith in Texas) that led the petition drive raised the specter of pursuing “legal options.” If Dallas were to adopt a paid sick leave ordinance, the city would likely wind up in court with the state, which is already suing to block a similar policy adopted in Austin in the latest Texas battle over local control. Instead, now Dallas could find itself in a legal fight with the workers and workers’ rights activists themselves.
