Attorneys made their closing arguments Thursday in a case aimed at throwing out Harris County’s November election results, the first to go to trial out of 21 pending lawsuits brought by defeated Republican candidates in hopes of convincing a judge to order new elections.
At the end of the eight-day trial, GOP attorneys summarized their claims that thousands of voters were prevented from voting in November, while thousands of illegal ballots were counted that shouldn’t have been. The defense team berated the GOP for failing to get testimony from a single voter who was unable to cast a ballot, arguing their case instead was built on a stream of non-expert witnesses whose allegations about voting irregularities fell apart under scrutiny.
The contestant in the lawsuit, GOP judicial candidate Erin Lunceford, lost to incumbent 189th District Judge Tamika Craft by 2,743 votes — a 0.26 percent margin, much narrower than most of the contested races in which some candidates trailed the winners by up to 35,000 votes….
While Lunceford’s case initially centered around allegations that up to 3,000 voters were turned away from 29 polls on Election Day, it gradually broadened into a collection of over a dozen grievances more closely resembling an unofficial audit of the November election conducted by members of the Harris County Republican party.
The judge will sort through numerous disputes, as the two sides in the case don’t agree on what the GOP needs to prove in order to win, whether a key election code statute applies to Harris County or even whether the race was a close one.