- They counted primary ballots by hand. Now a Texas county Republican party says they found errors.
The election was a low-profile party primary, but stakes are high. Gillespie County Republicans, led by Campbell, decided months ago to hand-count more than 8,000 ballots. Experts agree and studies show the method is time-consuming, costly, less accurate, and less secure than using machines, but local Republicans, citing unsupported concerns about the accuracy of voting machines, were determined to try and show otherwise. Workers recruited and trained by the party counted until the early hours of the next morning, and declared the effort a success. Proponents of hand-counting are now touting Gillespie as a model.
The U.S. Supreme Court has blocked the law from going into effect and federal court challenges remain.
- Gov. Greg Abbott wants the Texas Legislature to rein in investors behind large-scale home purchases.
Gov. Greg Abbott called on state lawmakers Friday to try to limit Wall Street’s presence in the Texas housing market.
As the nation’s housing affordability crisis continues unabated, lawmakers and housing advocates have increasingly concentrated scrutiny on so-called institutional homebuyers, meaning investors big and small as well as corporations who buy single-family homes to rent them out. They accuse corporations and hedge funds of playing an outsized role in the homebuying market and outbidding would-be first-time homebuyers, even though estimates show investors own only a small percentage of the nation’s overall housing stock.
A spike in investor activity in the housing market in the COVID-19 pandemic era has since prompted lawmakers to try to curtail or even ban it as a means to bring down home prices and give first-time homebuyers a leg up in the market.
