A St. Louis Circuit Court Judge has called for a special election for the 78th district Missouri House Democratic primary race, after finding that the St. Louis Board of Election Commissioners collected almost 150 non-valid absentee mailed-in votes.
The board violated Missouri law when it failed to use the required ballot envelopes when it accepted and counted 142 absentee ballots placed in person at the election board’s central office, Judge Rex Burlison wrote in his 22-page memorandum.
Incumbent State Rep. Penny Hubbard won the Aug. 2 Democratic primary election by 90 votes against Ferguson activist Bruce Franks Jr.
Franks would’ve won against Hubbard if it had not been for absentee votes in Hubbard’s favor. To be exact, 78.5 percent of the absentee votes went toward Hubbard. However on election day, Franks garnered 53 percent of the votes, versus Hubbard’s 47 percent.
On Sept. 1 following a two-day trial, Burlison ruled in favor of Franks – who filed a lawsuit against the election board last month for failing to adhere to a sunshine request and challenged the primary election. The special election will be held on Sept. 16.
“No credible evidence was presented from which this court could find that any voter fraudulently cast a vote in this case,” Burlison wrote. ”The evidence presented shows that the absentee voters in the August 2, 2016 election did everything they were told to by election officials and staff.”
Burlison went on to say that the irregularities that were found were “solely the responsibility of the St. Louis Election Board of Commissioners.”
Prior to the August election, Franks began questioning the validity in absentee ballots whenever Hubbard and her husband Rodney — or one of their children — ran for office. The results were alarming according to Franks’ lawyer, David Roland, who was hired in July to help pursue challenging the Hubbards. Normal absentee ballots range from 2-10 percent per precinct, according to Roland. However, when one of the Hubbards ran for office, the number of absentee ballots spiked to 20 percent, according to Roland, who said in another year that number rose to 65 percent — all in high favor of the Hubbards.
“When you have other races, you almost never see that kind of discrepancy and you sure as heck don’t see that kind of consistency,” Roland told The American. “Almost every single election you got these extraordinary amount of ballots going in their favor.”
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch conducted a scathing investigation, where it found several issues within the St. Louis absentee voting process. One man told Post-Dispatch that people working for Penny Hubbard’s campaign came to his house days before the election asking him to sign something. The man claimed he did not know what it was and was shocked when Post-Dispatch showed him a copy of his absentee application that had handwriting that wasn’t his and checked off that he was with the democratic party when he is really with the Green Party.
During the trial, Hubbard’s lawyer Jane Dueker argued that contesting the election board would disenfranchise voters.
“I know it’s easy to try indict the entire electoral system,” Dueker said to the court during the first day of trial. “But this has to do with the votes.”
Prior to litigation, Roland said he and Franks tried to take up the matter with the election board commissioners, “but they had no interest.” One week prior to Burlison’s ruling, St. Louis Circuit Judge Julian L. Bush ruled in a lawsuit filed by Roland and Franks, that the board of election commissioners failed to adhere to a sunshine request that asked for copies of absentee ballot applications and ballot envelopes.
Roland says once he received the ballots he noticed that the election commissioners were “flagrantly disregarding what the law requires in terms of absentee voting.”
Because special elections are time sensitive, it was important that Burlison’s decision came in a timely manner. Roland says time played a deciding factor in his approach toward litigation and is why he did not include concerned absentee voters as witnesses.
“A lot of the witnesses [absentee voters] who were willing to talk to us, were really concerned about going public,” Roland said. “They were concerned about retaliation. A lot of them were concerned about being labeled snitches.”
In the two days of lengthy trial, only three witnesses were called to the stand, which including two current and one former election board workers.
Dueker told the media Friday that she and her parties plan to appeal Burlison’s ruling.
