As early voting comes to a close for two seats on the Austin City Council where conservative challengers are attempting to unseat far-left Democrat incumbents, Texas Scorecard has made an alarming discovery.
According to numbers released by the Travis County Clerk, Democrat Dana DeBeauvoir, more than half of the votes cast at this point have been by mail.
Indeed, of the 35,644 ballots cast, 18,806 have been by mail—over 52 percent of the total.
This fact is noteworthy because, by contrast, the number of mail-in votes in November’s general election was only a little over 11 percent (69,559 mail-in ballots out of 612,696 cast).
Similarly, in July’s Democrat runoff election—held during the height of COVID for the area—only 16 percent of the total votes were mail-in ballots (20,641 out of 124,608 votes cast).
Why now, in the important council runoff election, is there such an overwhelming spike of mail-in ballots? Even this summer, in the supposed worst point of the pandemic, mail-in ballots didn’t even reach 20 percent of the total.
This discovery comes as mail-in balloting has become the center of well-documented controversies surrounding the presidential election.
Furthermore, Austin City Council runoff elections have a history of highly questionable election results. In 2014, former District 4 candidate Laura Pressley filed an election contest following a series of irregularities. The Texas Supreme Court subsequently ruled that Pressley’s challenge was valid, but by the time they issued the ruling, the term of the office Pressley sought had expired.
Election Day for the city council runoffs is Tuesday, December 15.
