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After losing by just 10 votes, Edinburg City Council candidate Gerardo “Gerry” Lozano has filed a lawsuit in state district court seeking to nullify the election that saw Place 3 incumbent David White reelected to a second term.
Lozano, through his attorneys, filed the lawsuit at midnight on Dec. 27, 2023, just a few weeks after a recount found a single-vote change in the Nov. 7, 2023 election results.
The lawsuit, which names White as the sole defendant, alleges that the true outcome of the close election cannot be known due to illegal voting.
Lozano’s lawsuit claims that illegal voting occurred in several ways, such as people using fake addresses on their voter registration forms, by receiving assistance they were not legally entitled to receive at the ballot box, or via anomalous mail-ballots that should have been excluded.
“Gerardo G. Lozano respectfully prays… That the Court determine that the election be declared void as it is impossible to ascertain the true results and an order issue for a new election for the contested office…” the lawsuit reads, in part.
Speaking with The Monitor last week, Lozano said the election loss did not appear to line up with the success indicators his campaign saw in the leadup to election night.
“It just seemed like it was a new direction the city was gonna go in with me, and then when the votes came in, they weren’t what it appeared to be,” Lozano said.
“To me, the amount of work that we did put in and the phone banking that we did does not match the outcome of the results of the election. To me, it’s just, OK, what went wrong?” he added.
Early voting and absentee results were the first to be posted once the polls closed on Election Day. They showed that Lozano trailed White by just four votes — 2,231 to 2,227.
More than two hours after the polls had closed, and while election officials were still tallying votes, an incomplete tally showed that White maintained just a 10-vote lead over his challenger.
Once all was said and done, however, it appeared White had emerged victorious by 11 votes.
Later, when Lozano requested a recount, that lead fell to 10 after a closer examination of one mail-ballot showed the voter had voted for Lozano.
Still, Lozano felt the results were incongruent with the voter roster data he had been collecting during the campaign — particularly with the mail-in ballots.
While the race had remained close in both early and Election Day in-person voting, Lozano got just 18 mail-in votes to White’s 53.
And it is in those ballots that the bulk of Lozano’s lawsuit’s claims lie.
“(Lozano) will also show that numerous mail-in ballots that were counted should not have been counted due to numerous violations of various requirements in the Texas Elections Code,” the lawsuit reads in part.
Among those alleged violations include allegations that some voters were not eligible to vote by mail, that they improperly received assistance to complete their mail-in ballot, that they did not sign their mail-in ballots or the envelope used to mail them, or that the signatures on the ballots and envelopes did not match, among other allegations.
The lawsuit makes similar allegations that illegal voting took place among in-person voters, including allegations that voters were coerced into who they voted for.
“Said illegal assistance included encouraging the voter how to vote and/or even pressuring or coercing votes in violation of the Texas Elections Code,” the lawsuit reads.
But the lawsuit does not provide a number, or even an estimate, of how many such ballots Lozano thinks there were.
Nor does it specifically allege that Lozano believes voters were coerced into voting for White.
When asked if he believed White participated in any wrongdoing, Lozano said no.
“What I know about Mr. White, he’s a man of integrity,” Lozano said. “I can’t say (the same) about his supporters.”
For his part, White scoffed at the allegations that either he or his campaign workers did anything untoward during the election.
“I ran a clean, honest campaign. I don’t know what he’s accusing me of,” White said.
Instead, the councilman said he could lob similar allegations against Lozano.
“I can say that about the same thing. All the ones he had were already indicted in Molina’s case,” White said, referring to former Edinburg Mayor Richard Molina, who was acquitted of election fraud in 2022.
More than a dozen other people were charged in the scheme, which prosecutors claimed involved multiple people changing their addresses in order to vote for Molina in the 2017 election.
“I don’t believe I had anybody that had already been under indictment,” White said of his campaign workers.
Suspicious addresses are part of the allegations of voting irregularities in the November 2023 election.
The councilman said he is disappointed to learn that Lozano is challenging the election, especially after Lozano requested the recount that confirmed the results.
“I can’t believe that somebody’s gonna spend this kind of money to try to get an election overturned for a position that pays zero dollars. Zero dollars,” White said.
