A funny (tragic?) thing happened on the way to a primary election.
The number of mail-in votes that were cast in the 2014 Democratic Party primary election were 99. If you remember, that was the year that law enforcement closed off a two-year investigation into mail-in voter fraud and rounded up a half dozen politiqueras who were accused of harvesting the votes of elderly people in adult-day care centers, the Brownsville Housing Authority High Rise and in the barrios of Brownsville.
For a while, many thought that the days of vote harvesting were over. Now, with more than a nearly eight-fold increase (783) in the number of these votes cast in Cameron County fur years later, some believe that desperate politicians have returned to their bad old ways to remain in power.
"If you remember, when the 2014 primaries came around in March, there was a politiquera roundup in progress," said Citizens Against Voter Abuse director Mary Helen Flores. "They were afraid they would get arrested."
But while politiqueras were active predominantly in the barrios of southeast and west Brownsville and in the Cameron Park colonias, the newest increases are in San Benito and in the mid-county areas, poll watchers report.
A telling statistic – the number of mail-in ballots that were rejected for not including the statement of residence, in effect an affidavit asserting that the address you give is actually your address – was 14, a number considered high by any standards. Additionally, poll watchers say that very few – if any – show that anyone assisted them to vote in the space provided for that purpose on the ballot.
To CAVA's Flores, the lack of an address indicates that some of those gathering the mail-in ballots are new at the game.
Only two mail-in ballots came from the military, watchers said.
To give the increase a context, in the 2014 Democratic Party primary there were 10,564 early votes cast in Cameron County and an additional 99 by mail before election day.
This year there were 9,372 Democratic Party early votes and 783 more cast by mail in the same period.
Have politiqueras reappeared four years later to manipulate the vote and potentially skewer the vote in favor of those candidates who paid them harvest the mail-in ballots?
Who will be the candidates who will benefit from the huge increase in mail-in ballots, and did they pay politiqueras for those votes? As soon as the mail-in ballots are tallied, we should know.