Juan Montoya's " 'He Voted from Heaven,' The Hernandez Mail-In Legacy"

Guest Columnist Juan Montoya from El Rrun Rrun

ESDAY, APRIL 3, 2012

"HE VOTED FROM HEAVEN," THE HERNANDEZ MAIL-IN LEGACY
By Juan Montoya

This election cycle, said Maria Ybarra, an elderly disabled Cameron County voter, she might just sit this one out. And, after hearing her story, who can blame her?
Home bound and using a walker, she sits at the dinner table of her modest North Brownsville home and recalls how the vote harvesters first appeared at her home, and, after suspicions about the three mail-in votes from her home were deemed suspect in the last election cycle in 2010 where Ernie Hernandez was competing in the race with Ruben Peña.


"My husband (Martin Ybarra Jr.) met a young man (whom we'll call JR) who was also taking dialysis treatments," she said as she ate a modest dinner. "After a while JR told him he helped local politicos and that he could help him mail in his vote because of his disability. Because they were both taking the treatments together, he had gained my husband's confidence and he invited him to come to out house."


That initial invitation led to a meeting at the couple's home where JR and Norma Hernandez, Ernie Hernandez's wife, huddled with Ybarra and talked with him at length about supporting Ernie and how to go about applying for the mail-in ballots.


By this time, the 62-year-old Ybarra, a Brownsville Public Utilities retiree, even though he might not have known it, was in his last days.
A few weeks before the March 2 Democratic primary election, the Ybarras (Martin, Maria and Dalia) received their mail-in ballots. By now, as in many local homes, the whole family was going to vote for the father's choice, in this case, Ernie Hernandez for commissioner of Cameron County Pct. 2.


JR and Norma Hernandez (the candidate's wife) showed up at her home after they learned they had received the mail-in ballots and told the family they would mail in the ballots for them to save them the inconvenience of leaving their home.


"They were very helpful" recalls Maria. "In between the times that JR first talked with my husband at the dialysis center, he told me that Norma would show up at the center with coffee and pan dulce for the people getting their treatments there."
After the March 2 election, no one candidate received the required 50 percent plus 1 vote necessary to win outright, and a runoff election was called 30 days after, on April 3, to determine the winner. The closest to the magic number were Ruben Peña and Ernie Hernandez, with Peña getting 2,076 to Ernie's 1,919, a slim 157 difference.


But it was during the runoff, that the full impact of the mail-in votes would manifest itself.
Unfortunately, on March 16, only two weeks after the primary, Martin Ybarra died. The family buried him on a Friday, and AJR appeared on their door the following Sunday. Maria said she had already filled out her mail-in ballot, but that those of her late husband and her daughter were still on the table. Her husband's was blank. Her daughter's only needed her signature.
"JR said he had come to pay his condolences and to ask us if we needed help filling out our ballots," she recalled. "I had already filled out mine and he took it, but since my husband had just died, it was still on the table."


Her daughter's ballot, on the other hand, had been filled out for Hernandez, but was mot signed. After JR left, Maria looked in vain for her husband's ballot to no avail. Later, she learned from her niece that JR had told her laughingly: "He voted from heaven."
"I knew then that he had taken it, filled it out, signed and mailed it himself," she said.
But the show wasn't over just yet.


A few days later, Norma Hernandez appeared at her door asking her if her daughter had mailed in her ballot yet. Maria said she told her that Delia was at work and that she had filled it out the ballot, but had not signed it.


"She told me that it didn't matter if I signed for her," Maria recalled. "I thought that I should call my daughter first and I did. Delia said that if it wasn't wrong to go ahead and do it."


After she signed the ballot for her daughter, she said Norma Hernandez took it and mailed it in for her.


Not long after the election, partially as a result of the recount and investigation that followed, Maria got repeated visits from State of Texas investigators who asked her who had signed the ballots. The woman told the investigators the truth, that she had lost her husband's ballot and that she had been told it was alright for her to sign her daughter's.


A check of the mail-in ballots for the runoff election indicate that Martin Ybarra Jr.'s mail-in ballot was not counted, but rather discarded for the runoff election. JR was wrong. Ybarra had not been allowed to vote for Ernie Hernandez from heaven.


However, the mail-in votes that did count were enough to put Ernie over the top of Peña even though he beat Ernie by 162 votes in the early and election day vote. Hernandez got 206 mail-in votes to Peña's 34, a difference of 206, enough to overceome Peña's 162-vote advantage and win the election.


Mari Ybarra knows that this year, for example, Ernie's daughter Erin Hernandez Garcia is in a tight race with at least a half-dozen other candidates and that the family is hustling votes to get her in.


But, now, sitting alone at her dinner table, the elderly woman says she's had enough of the intrigue that politiqueras and their ilk have brought upon her.


"I don't want to have people coming into my house investigating me like I was a criminal," she said. "After all that, I don't even feel like voting anymore."