Texas Vote-Buying Case Casts Glare on Tradition of Election Day Goads
DONNA, Tex. — In this Rio Grande Valley town of trailer parks and weedy lots eight miles from the Mexico border, people call them runners or politiqueras — the campaign workers who use their network of relatives and friends to deliver votes for their candidates. They travel around town with binders stuffed with the names and addresses of registered voters, driving residents to and from the polls and urging those they bump into at the grocery store to support their candidates.
Despite rumors that some politiqueras went over the line in encouraging voters, the tradition continued in Donna and other border towns and cities, and campaigns for nearly every local office or seat have paid politiqueras to turn out the vote in contested races.
But in recent weeks, the suicide of the school board president here and accusations of vote buying against three politiqueras have rocked the system. The charges may threaten the existence of politiqueras in Donna, an impoverished community of 16,000, where politics and jobs are inseparable. The school system is the largest employer, and city government is the second largest; local politics rivals high school football as a favored pastime.
Three women working as politiqueras in the 2012 elections in Donna were arrested by F.B.I. agents in December and accused of giving residents cash, drugs, beer and cigarettes in exchange for their votes.
According to court documents, the typical payment to a voter was $10, a sign of the extreme poverty in the Rio Grande Valley, which is home to some of the poorest counties in America. Two of the three women — Rebecca Gonzalez and Guadalupe Escamilla — are accused of paying some voters as little as $3 for each of their votes. One voter was given a pack of cigarettes. Others were taken to buy drugs after they received cash for voting for a politiquera’s candidate.
Ms. Gonzalez, Ms. Escamilla and the third woman, Diana Castaneda, said the candidates and their campaign managers would give them the cash and instruct them to use it to pay voters in the 2012 primary and general elections, the F.B.I. said in court documents. The three women worked for several candidates running for seats on the board of the Donna Independent School District, though court documents do not identify any candidates or campaign managers.
No candidates have been arrested, although the investigation continues in an area that, unlike most of Texas, is overwhelmingly Democratic. Days after the three women were arrested in December, one of the four Donna school board members who won re-election in 2012 — Alfredo Lugo, the board’s president and a former administrator at a nearby school district — committed suicide at his home. Officials have declined to talk about the motive, and a spokeswoman for the F.B.I. said she could not comment on whether Mr. Lugo had been a focus of the investigation.
Lawyers for Ms. Gonzalez and Ms. Escamilla declined to comment, and several candidates who ran for seats on the school board in 2012 did not respond to requests for comment. Ms. Castaneda, 48, the widow of a former Donna police chief, said in a statement that the allegations were not as clear-cut as they appeared.
“Not all politiqueras do illegal or inappropriate payments to buy votes,” Ms. Castaneda said. “There are many who walk a straight line. People know me as a people person who would take pennies out of my pocket to help those in need.”
After the arrests, politiqueras have become a tricky issue for many of the elected officials in the Rio Grande Valley. Some officials are reluctant to discuss their past involvement with politiqueras, or they say their campaign managers were responsible for hiring them. Other politiqueras have been accused of various forms of voter fraud over the years — including acquiring and filling out the mail-in ballots of elderly or disabled voters — but the arrests were one of the first times that politiqueras were accused of paying cash directly to voters. Last year, Sonia Leticia Solis, a politiquera in the Rio Grande Valley city of Brownsville, pleaded guilty to voting more than once in a 2012 primary runoff, by obtaining mail-in ballots using forged absentee-voter applications and casting five votes.
“In Donna, we’ve always had suspicions that some people were not running clean campaigns,” said René Guerra, the district attorney in Hidalgo County, which includes Donna. He said that if a shady practice could be part of school board elections, “I’m sure it happened in the county election.”
Mr. Guerra said that vote buying was hard to prove, and that he lacked the manpower to investigate the 2012 elections.
The allegations of vote buying, as well as the death of Mr. Lugo, have made people in Donna rethink the central role that politiqueras play. “In South Texas politics, you have to have them,” said Mayor David S. Simmons, who has used politiqueras in his campaigns.
“There are good ones that really are sincere and try to really help, but the majority of them are leeches,” said Mr. Simmons, 60, who is also the city’s volunteer fire chief and the school district’s director of custodial services. “They get ahold of you, and they know how to play you.”
Mr. Simmons, who was a friend of Mr. Lugo’s, said the recent events might finally put an end to the politiqueras.
“Now, we don’t have to hire them anymore,” he said. “People are not going to trust them. I think it’s going to do away with them. You’re not going to see them in this next election.”
Others are more skeptical.
“Until we have candidates who pay for this service who go to jail, they’ll keep paying for votes,” said Mary Helen Flores, the founder of Citizens Against Voter Abuse, in Cameron County, which includes Brownsville. “It’s infuriating that we’re at this point. The voter apathy here stems from the knowledge that votes are paid for.”
Dozens of politiqueras worked for various campaigns in Donna in recent years. Most of them are women — mothers, grandmothers and neighborhood gadflies who work as runners to earn extra money.
A woman who worked as a politiquera in Donna said paying cash or trading drugs for votes had been common in recent elections.
She estimated that in the 2012 elections, 2,000 votes were bought with cash or drugs. Low-income voters, she said, had come to expect a payment in exchange for their vote.
“People are asking to get paid because they already know,” said the woman, who did not want to be identified out of fear of retaliation and because of the investigation. “People look forward to it. You have to understand the poverty. So if they can make an extra buck, they’re going to make an extra buck.”
This article originally appeared in the New York Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/13/us/politics/texas-vote-buying-case-casts-glare-on-tradition-of-election-day-goads.html
