Thank you, fellow Toastmasters.
Thank you for that very warm introduction.
My name is Dale Frey, and today I'm going to
talk to you about the Denton County Commissioners Court and
what they do.
But first, what is a commissioner and what is it
that they do?
I know that you might think to yourself, well, I
think of Commissioner Gordon from Batman.
It's the job to man the bat signal.
Well, not exactly.
So let's talk about what the county commissioner's job is,
because it's a very wide spectrum.
It's not just to facilitate the county budget and tax
rates and manage the roads and bridges, but it's also
to oversee our libraries, our public buildings, and very much
importantly, our elect uh our elections is something they manage
as well.
When it comes to health care, right now I want
to advocate for trying to settle our opioid settlement fund,
which is still not allocated even after two years.
We also need to stand tall against a lot of
book banners who have come out and tried to uh
have funding cut to our libraries.
Full disclosure, the county commissioners' court does not have the
ability to administer over libraries that are being administered by
an ISD or a city council already.
However, if a library is receiving funding from the county,
then that could be cut.
And we've seen some uh advocates on the other side
of the aisle advocate for that and past time.
But when it comes to the county commissioners court, the
most important job is overseeing our elections.
The county commissioners are the ones who approve the voting
locations.
The county commissioners are the ones who decide what voting
equipment that we have and use and don't use in
our elections.
This is really important.
For example, if you notice that your voting location seems
to change constantly all the time or more frequently than
you would like, well, then you should be mad at
your county commissioner.
It is their job to manage the voting locations.
I will also say, according to Texas Election Code section
43.031c, all schools should be able to be
voting centers or voting location rather,.
Uh that is according to Texas law
So when it comes to these primaries where Democrats and
Republicans seem to have to vote in different buildings, that
is kind of needless because we should be able to
put them together, uh, which would be a little bit
more efficient.
But most importantly, I'm going to spend a good half
of my time, if not more, talking about voting centers
or count county-wide voting here in Texas.
This is something we do not have right now in
Denton County, and is at the fault of the Denton
County commissioners.
When I say we do not have voting centers, I
mean that while you can vote at any voting location
throughout the county during early voting, you cannot vote in
any voting location on the last day to vote or
election day itself.
This is something that is very confusing to people to
go to a place and realize that they cannot vote
at that location, and then when and when they get
uh redirected, they get very mad about that.
Doesn't matter if you're Democrat or Republican, no one likes
being told that you can't vote here and you have
to go somewhere else.
We've seen this happen to 15% of voters on the
May primary runoff election on that election day, and we
saw that happen to 11% of voters on uh the
following election later.
But don't just take it from me, take it from
Jane here.
She's an election worker, and she has a lot to
say about this herself.
Some were sent to precincts as far away as Sanger
and Auburn.
Quite a few of these people came from another wrong
prowling precinct before they reached us, and several had been
sent to two wrong precincts before they reached us.
These people included a man in a wheelchair with an
oxygen tank strapped on the back.
Who had a cannula up his nose.
He had to be hydraulically lifted out of his vehicle
and back into it when we told him go someplace
else.
They included two people on walkers who struggled to stay
upright as they came in, and we told them, sorry,
you can't vote here.
a And
they included woman so disabled she could not get out
of her car.
And we had to go help her in her car
and then say, sorry, you're in the wrong place.
Go someplace else.
This is very frustrating to people, and it's really not
fair.
Uh, this is something that we, the Democratic Party, have
been advocating for.
We've been advocating for voting centers so that people don't
get redirected like that.
Uh, unfortunately, we still don't have voting centers.
Unfortunately, it has become partisan.
Apparently, the current uh commissioners right now, who are all
Republican, all four of them, and the judge are Republican.
In private, they say they won't vote in favor of
voting centers because they're afraid of getting primaried.
And I see why, because while we in the Democratic
Party have been advocating in favor of voting centers or
countywide voting, we have seen the other side of the
aisle do the opposite.
Melinda Preston, for example, has pushed all sorts of conspiracy
theories saying it would make things easier it make it
cheating easier, uh but yet not giving eviden evidence as
to why she says so.
Charles Lee is another guy who referenced a whole bunch
of conspiracy theories by Beverly Fo uh Beverly Foley.
Beverly Foley, for those who don't know, is the owner
of the secure your vote texas.com website, where the top
headline is we need to take back control of our
elections from our county commissioners court, even though they're all
Republicans.
What we're seeing right here, right now on this website,
among other things, is Republican precinct chairs being against their
own Republican county commissioners.
In fact, not only that, but the RNC itself has
come out with mandates as well being against voting centers,
among other things.
Republican Party, I'm this morning.
I'm here as a representative of the Denton County Republican
Party.
I'm precinct chair.
We passed the resolution. at our last county executive committee
meeting and like to read this to you
Resolution to the Denton County Commissioners Court regarding the use
of electronic voting devices, elimination of voting centers, and placing
the county clerk in control of elections again.
Whereas we represent a minimum of 53.2% of the electorate,
whereas we believe voting should be in our precincts on
paper, hand marked, hand counted using manual poll books.
Therefore, be it resolved that the executive committee of the
Denton County Republican Party hereby requests the Denton County Commissioners'
Court to turn to handmarked hand-counted paper ballots and use
manual poll books and vote in our precincts.
Further, we ask that the commissioner's court withdraw from the
Texas Secretary of State's voting center program and its required
use of electronic poll books immediately.
So in conclusion, because I'm running out of time, we
have seen that this unfortunately has become partisan and it's
become so partisan.
I almost kind of think to myself that I might
not be facing Brandon Faulkner, our current county commissioner of
precinct two when I run, because he might get primaried.
So we really need to focus on advocating our county
commissioners to be in favor of these things that I
talked about, especially voting centers.
And I look forward to trying to advocate for voting
centers myself.
It may be that we we may have to flip
seats in order to get these voting centers, but I
look forward to advocating for it and continuing to push
for this.
Thank you, fellow Toastmasters, for your time.
Thank you.
Thank you, Bill.
That was a wonderful, wonderful dispute, and I got to
learn.