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December 1, 2008

Hopson-Walker recount to begin Dec. 1

By Kelly Young

kyoung@jacksonvilleprogress.com

Approximately one hour before the deadline to officially request a recount in the Nov. 4 race for representative of House District 11, the Brian K. Walker campaign filed a recount petition with the Texas Secretary of State’s office. Walker filed the petition at 4 p.m. Friday, Nov. 21.

The recount will begin in all four HD 11 counties — Cherokee, Houston, Panola and Rusk — during the morning hours of Monday, Dec. 1. Walker said he does not know how long it could take before final results are known.

“There is a seven day rule that once a recount petition is filed, the recount must commence within seven business days. We intentionally waited until Nov. 21 to file because had we filed any sooner than that, the recount would have had to take place during the week of Thanksgiving,” Walker said. “We didn’t want to put the burden of a recount on our county employees during a holiday week, so we purposefully waited to request a recount.”

Walker lost his race against Chuck Hopson by a scant 102 votes out of 52,830 ballots cast. Since election day, absentee ballots from around the district have been added to the tally stretching Hopson’s lead to 104 votes.

The recount will begin in Cherokee County Monday morning at 9 a.m. Panola and Rusk counties will start their work at 8 a.m., and Houston will initiate their recount at 10 a.m.

According to Walker, those counties which used paper ballots will have their votes hand-counted, and a cast-vote record will be produced to determine how many times each candidate was selected via an electronic machine.

On election day, Hopson carried Cherokee and Houston counties, garnering 55.32 percent and 51.99 percent respectively — while Walker won the majority of votes in Panola (53.67 percent) and Rusk (53.17 percent) counties.

While he said he has heard a number of unsubstantiated stories of voter fraud which may have helped tip the scales in the favor of his opponent, Walker said his margin of defeat was so slim that, even without the rumors of voting improprieties, he likely would have chosen to pursue a recount anyway.

“When you have an election where some 53,000 votes are cast, and the result is as close as this, there is just too much room for errors to take place to not look into it,” he said. “The optical scan machine might have scanned ballots improperly, a clerk may have written a figure down wrong or something like that. All it takes is a small mistake like that to change the whole outcome of the election. If I was a betting man, I would be willing to bet that the numbers are going to change some after the recount. The question is to whose benefit will they change?”

Legally, the loser of the recount could potentially challenge the result before the Texas House of Representatives, but Walker said that course of action is “not something we are necessarily going to pursue.”

While not confident of his chances, Walker remains hopeful the recount will swing the vote margin in his favor.

“We would not be going through the process of a recount if we didn’t think there was an opportunity for the results to change. We’ll just have to wait until next week to see what happens,” Walker said.

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