Here’s the May 3, 2025 Joint Election Fact Sheet that I got on Monday. You will notice that on page 2, where the participating entities are listed, that Harris County is not among them. There are MUDs and services districts, but no general Harris County election. Which is a little strange, since May 3, 2025 was the date set by the judge for the whiny sore loser re-do election, in which Republican Tami Pierce was to get a second shot at Criminal District Court Judge DaSean Jones, who won in 2022 by 449 votes.
Now I know there was an appeal, and there was an appellate court hearing in January. Here are all the case documents, with a timeline of their filings. I have to assume that at some point, the order to hold a new election was put on hold, but I can’t say when or by whom – there’s no such pause in the written opinion. So, given that the First Court did not issue an opinion of its own since that January hearing, the hold must still be in effect, and thus no May do-over election.
Now, we could get an appellate decision in time for a November 2025 election, but if we don’t, or if the hold remains in place, then it seems unlikely to me that it will ever happen. What would the point of having it in May 2026 even be? That doesn’t mean that the case will get dropped – there’s real value in winning for both sides, not to mention that a win by Tami Pierce would serve as at least part of a legal justification for the state taking over Harris County’s elections in the future. All I can say at this point is that there’s no election in May, and it seems unlikely to me that there will be one in the future. Given how this decision was based on an extremely faulty understanding of math and probability in the first place, that’s fine by me.