Voter fraud in Texas: "It's a lie."
May 17, 2007
Royal Masset knows as much about the nuts and bolts of Republican politics as anyone in Texas. He spent 15 years as the political director of the Republican Party of Texas. Masset is particularly disturbed by the voter identification bill that Republicans have been trying to push through the legislature.
Written by R.G. Ratcliffe, Houston Chronicle
(Photo: Sen. Eliot Shapleigh, D-El Paso, foreground, speaks during an anti-voter ID news conference outside the Capitol Monday, April 23, 2007, in Austin, Texas. AP Photo/Harry Cabluck)
Royal Masset knows as much about the nuts and bolts of Republican politics as anyone in Texas.
He spent 15 years as the political director of the Republican Party of Texas. And during that period, Masset invented a statistical system for identifying winnable races for Republican candidates.
But Masset has grown disenchanted with the current GOP.
"We fulfilled our conservative agenda. To appear new we took more and more extreme positions. We became arrogant and self righteous," he said in an email to me.
Masset is particularly disturbed by the voter identification bill that Republicans have been trying to push through the legislature.
Masset told me in an interview that during his years as political director of the party, every election cycle candidates would come to him claiming fraud in their elections.
"That's almost is a religious part of the Republican canon that democrats are stealing these elections.
"It's a lie. It's not true. It does not exist."
"I must have gotten 200 calls from people who wanted a criminal investigation of so-and-so because they lost by 100 votes and were sure there was fraud."
"They could never prove anything."
Masset noted that the 2005 election fraud study conducted by the House in the Herbert Vo/Talmadge Heflin race found no intentional fraud by voters in the defeat of Republican Heflin.
When Masset wrote an op-ed earlier this year saying the bill would keep his elderly mother from voting, the House added language to the bill exempting those over 80 from having to prove their identity.
But because of the past two days of fighting in the Senate, the bill now appears dead for the session.
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