The losing Democrat challenger for Dallas County District Attorney alleged voter fraud committed by fellow Democrats cost her the win in a March primary race, according to the lawsuit filed Monday in Dallas County District Court.
District Judge Elizabeth Davis Frizell (D-Dallas) is suing John Creuzot, the Democrat former state district judge, who beat her by a slim margin in the March 6 Democrat primary for Dallas County District Attorney. Her petition alleges serious instances of voter fraud. Frizell wants the results of the primary election to be “declared void as it is impossible to ascertain the true result.” This would prompt a special election.
In the lawsuit, Frizell also sued Dallas County Democrat Party Chair Carol Donovan, Elections Administrator Toni Pippins-Poole, and the sitting Republican DA, Faith Johnson.
The petition alleges voter fraud impacted the outcome of the Democrat primary race for DA because “illegal and fraudulent mail-in ballots were included in the vote total.” It also asserts “some voters voted by provisional ballots because someone submitted mail-in ballots for them. These voters’ provisional ballots were rejected by the Ballot Review Board and not counted.”
Recently, Breitbart Texas reported that Dallas County sequestered more than 1,200 of the March primary’s mail-in ballot applications as suspicious filings. This included 469 provisional ballots from West Dallas, Grand Prairie, and parts of Oak Cliff.
In her race, Frizell initially lost by 612 votes to Creuzot, of which 200 provisional ballots wound up in the questionable pile. Later tabulations revealed she lost by only 589 votes.
The lawsuit asserted some voters were victims of alleged mail-in ballot fraud and they could not vote and were “deprived of their right to vote.” It claimed “ballots were not secured” when counted and some of the mail-in ballots included in the final results “were not postmarked” by the March 6 election day deadline. The petition also called out Creuzot’s “campaign workers” for ballot harvesting. It indicated that “malfunctioning” voting machines resulted in long lines and delays at polling locations, even leading some voters to leave without voting.
Frizell charged that some voting locations were changed the day before the election because there “were not enough election judges.” The court document stated that Dallas County Elections Administrator, Pippins-Poole, contacted the county’s Democrat Party Chair, Donovan, to “issue an order designating different voting places.” Frizell said these changes were made with “inadequate” notice to the public.
In the claim, Frizell asked the court for access to all ballots cast in the Democrat race for DA “for review, inspection, and copying.” This included absentee ballots and their courier envelopes, voter lists, and participating polls in the election. Frizell requested that a special prosecutor intervene in this matter as she believes the current DA, Johnson, as the GOP nominee for Dallas County DA, poses a “conflict of interest.”
Briefly, Frizell considered resolution through a recount, but abandoned the idea. In a Facebook post, she explained: “Based on the Texas election code, a recount does not permit the review of rejected ballots. It also does not permit the contest of the validity of ballots. It merely recounts the ballots that previously have been counted.”
Last year, Breitbart Texas reported the Dallas County Elections Department sequestered roughly 700 suspicious mail-in ballots. This temporarily halted the results of a May election riddled with allegations of forged ballot signatures in two hotly contested Democrat Dallas City Council races. Johnson opened an investigation with support from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. This ended with the grand jury indictment of a man named Miguel Hernandez who used a pseudonym to forge signatures on absentee ballots of unsuspecting elderly voters.
In 2017, state lawmakers tackled this problem with a legislative fix, Senate Bill 5. It graduated voter mail fraud penalties for repeat offenders from misdemeanor to felony status, punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a maximum $10,000 fine. This law prohibits the use of electronic signatures and mandates signature verification on absentee ballots. Any vote by mail ballots suspected of fraud must be reported immediately to the Texas Attorney General. In fact, Paxton recently announced his office will prosecute three Nueces County residents indicted on a total of nine counts of voter fraud in the 2016 election cycle. He also offered assistance to the Starr County District Attorney in a voter fraud crackdown.
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Elizabeth Frizell v. John Creuzot by BreitbartTexas on Scribd
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