4/1/2015 3:00:10 PM

Chris Daniel - District Clerk Harris County

Envelope No. 4731157
By: KATINA WILLIAMS
Filed: 4/1/2015 3:00:10 PM

Case No. 2014-44974

In the District Court of

Harris County, Texas

152nd Judicial District Court

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Jared Woodfill; F.N. Williams, Sr.;

and Max Miller
Plaintiffs,
v.
Annise D. Parker, Mayor; Anna Russell,
City Secretary; and City of Houston
Defendants.

The Citys Response

To Plaintiffs Post-Trial Brief on Circulators Who Did Not Validly Sign the Petition

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The jurys verdict resolved the factual issues in this case, and the plaintiffs lost and

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should take nothing. This Court already has ruled in favor of the City on the matters at issue in

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plaintiffs most recent filing, and the Court found that pages from circulators who did not validly

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sign the petition must be excluded as a matter of law.1 At the Courts request (and reserving all

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rights), the City provided a neutral, fact-based signature count based on the Courts rulings in its

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February 20, 2015 order, and plaintiffs fell thousands of signatures short of their 17,269

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minimum signature threshold.

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Plaintiffs have taken a very different and improperly slanted approach. Plaintiffs March

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27, 2015 so-called audit is a thinly veiled attempt to circumvent the Courts rulings, as

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plaintiffs claim that many of the circulators at issue signed the petition. Plaintiffs yet again miss

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the Courts point: circulators had to validly sign the petition in order for signatures to count, and

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many circulators pages were excluded/disqualified because the circulators signatures were
crossed-out or because they did not validly sign the petition. Plaintiffs audit confirms that
many circulators did not validly sign the petition and confirms contrary to plaintiffs false
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Under the Court's 2/20/15 Order (as interpreted by the Court at the 3/13/15 conference), the
signature count shows that plaintiffs are several thousand signatures short. Thousands of
signatures are invalid/disqualified for multiple reasons, not simply that circulators did not validly
sign the petition. Thousands of signatures also are invalid/disqualified under the jurys 2/13/15
verdict, and the City reserves all rights, including the right to seek judgment on the verdict.

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assertions that many more circulators did not sign at all. Plaintiffs audit also confirms that
many of the petition pages they now (again) dispute still are not valid.
Every honest signature count following the jurys verdict shows that plaintiffs forgery,
false oath, and defect-ridden petition does not have enough legally valid signatures. Plaintiffs

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repetitious filings and false assertions that invalid signatures are valid cannot change the fact that
plaintiffs misguided petition falls well short of the threshold required for an election to be
ordered. Plaintiffs lost the jury trial they demanded and now are trying so hard to ignore. This

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Court should enter judgment for the City.

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I.
Plaintiffs Latest Ploy to Try to Validate Legally Invalid Pages

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On February 13, 2015, the jury returned a verdict in the Citys favor, found that 64 out of

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97 circulators did not sign and subscribe their oaths properly, and found that 12 out of 13 of the

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highest volume circulators submitted petition pages containing forgeries and false oaths.

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Plaintiffs only had about 2,027 valid signatures under the jurys verdict.

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On February 20, 2015, this Court ruled that petition pages where circulators did not

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validly sign the petition could not count as a matter of law: Regarding the petitions of

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circulators who either did not sign the petition or whose signature was invalidated, the signatures

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on those petitions shall not be valid. Under this and the Courts other rulings, plaintiffs

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remained thousands of signatures short.

Despite plaintiffs waiver they did not present a question or evidence on this issue at
trial they now say (contrary to what is memorialized in the current count) that individuals
responsible for circulating 246 separate pages actually signed the petition.2 Plaintiffs arguments

Plaintiffs 3/25/15 brief claims only 292 signatures relate to this issue, their audit, provided in
excel chart format just two days later on 3/27/15 raises that number to 847 signatures across 246
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are contrary to the Courts rulings, misleading, legally wrong, and these pages contain far fewer
signatures than plaintiffs need to validate their petition.
As the City, plaintiffs, and this Court have discussed multiple times (as recently as March
26), hundreds of pages and thousands of signatures are invalid/disqualified for multiple reasons.

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Under the Courts February 20 ruling, circulators who plaintiffs now say signed the petition had
pages disqualified for multiple reasons (which plaintiffs do not address), such as inability to
verify the circulator signed the petition, circulators signed the petition too early, circulators

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names were crossed-off the petition before it was submitted to the City, or circulators signatures

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suffered other legal defects. Plaintiffs so-called audit reviews pages that were disqualified for

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signatures and pages are invalid and disqualified.

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more reasons than plaintiffs brief suggests. Plaintiffs simply ignore those other reasons why the

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In many cases, plaintiffs do not resolve (or even mention) the fundamental legal defect

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with the circulators signature that is of concern to the Court they simply (and insufficiently)

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try to show where a circulator purportedly signed the petition.

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Plaintiffs say circulators Ernest Chandler, Maria Devlin, Stephanie Hart, Lucille
Punsalan, Michael Simen, and Daniel Tupa signed the petition. If so, that changes
nothing. Each of those circulators invalidly signed the petition before June 3. That
additional basis for invalidity ignored by plaintiffs independently renders each of the
pages they circulated invalid, as this Court has made clear multiple times.

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Plaintiffs say circulators Andrea Gonzalez, Barbara Maseberg, and Laurie Towns signed
the petition. Plaintiffs again side-step the Courts ruling. Those circulators did not
validly sign the petition because their names were crossed-out before the petition was

pages. Plaintiffs 3/30/15 Notice of Submission of Post-Trial Audit claims even more signatures,
865, are at stake. This brief focuses only on those signatures identified in plaintiffs so-called
audit and does not address the other arguments raised in plaintiffs brief which, as the Court
confirmed at the 3/26/15 conference, this Court already has rejected in full.

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submitted to the City or otherwise were excluded as legally invalid.3

As this Court held in its February 20 order and repeated at its March 26 conference, these and
other defects render circulators pages invalid.

verdict and repeat arguments this Court already has rejected.

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Plaintiffs March 25 brief and March 27 audit is their latest attempt to ignore the jurys

II.
Plaintiffs Try to Mislead the Court
By Attributing Circulator Signatures to Petition Signers With Different Handwriting

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The jury heard evidence from handwriting expert Janet Masson that (along with other

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evidence) fully supported the jurys finding that 12 out of 13 high-volume circulators submitted

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petition pages rife with forgery and other non-accidental defects, and signed oaths that were not

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true and correct. Plaintiffs have never tried to refute this evidence of forgery, false oaths, and

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other non-accidental defects.

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Now, in their latest brief to this Court, plaintiffs continue their pattern of brazen

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handwriting misdeeds in a desperate attempt to inflate their signature count. Plaintiffs try to link

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disqualified circulators signatures to petition signers with similar names but completely

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different handwriting. Perhaps most galling is plaintiffs claim that 15 pages circulated by an

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individual with the nearly anonymous signature S. Johnson should be attributed to a petition

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signer whose rather unique name is Servetra Johnson:

Plaintiffs audit also is misleading because plaintiffs claim circulators signatures appear on
pages where they in fact do not. None of these circulators names appear on the pages identified
by plaintiffs: Theresa Allen, Josefa Garza, Ronald McCleland, and Sherry Oradat.
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Servetra Johnsons signature and handwriting plainly differ from S. Johnsons in nearly

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all measurable respects, from slant to style of lettering to name. Worse, neither the address

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Servetra Johnson lists on the petition, nor her signature matches the address and signature of S.

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Johnson listed in the notary book of Judy Wright, offered by plaintiffs as an exhibit at trial:

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Plaintiffs appear wholly to have forsaken whatever moral compass they

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obvious flaw?

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Why didnt plaintiffs purported audit catch this?4 Why did plaintiffs stay mute about this

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(outrageously) once claimed to possess.

III.
Plaintiffs Improper Attempt to Shift Their Burden

It was the plaintiffs burden to identify circulators, including and especially circulators
with difficult-to-locate names. Indeed, the form and manner in the City Charter requires
4

Plaintiffs audit repeats this error in at least three other sets of signatures belonging to two
different individuals named Edward Martinez (one signing at 1164; one circulating at page
3645), two individuals named Richard Campbell (one signing at 1018; one circulating at page
1577), and two individuals named Linda Fair (one signing at 2879; one circulating at 1304).
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circulators both to identify themselves in the identifying I,______ part of the oath and sign at
the end of the oath to actually take the oath. Plaintiffs petition organizers altered the form and
created problems they cannot overcome.
This Court ruled in its February 20 order that it is the duty of the party submitting the

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petitions to identify the circulators instead of that duty being placed on the City of Houston to go
through 5,199 petitions to identify the circulator in question. At the March 26 conference, the
Court reiterated that petition organizers, not the City, had the duty to identify circulators with

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illegible signatures. Plaintiffs admitted at page 5 of their legibility brief that requiring City

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officials to resort[] to extrinsic evidence outside the parameters of the physical pages of the

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petition itself can, indeed, be daunting.

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Plaintiffs now disregard this Courts rulings and their own prior admission, and urge the

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Court to count pages gathered by circulators with illegible signatures. Plaintiffs say 119 petition

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pages circulated by an individual with an illegible signature, who they simply record on their

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audit as D. Anderson, see, e.g., petition page 2568, were circulated by an individual named

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Deborah Anderson, who signed the body of the petition on page 2314:

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The illegible signature plaintiffs identify as D. Anderson looks nothing like the
signature of Deborah Cook Anderson in the body of the petition.

No other identifying

information is present on the pages circulated by the purported D. Anderson that this is the

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Deborah Anderson on page 2314 as opposed to one of the 27 other Deborah Andersons (or
hundreds

of

other

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Andersons)

registered

to

vote

in

Harris

County.

See

http://www.hctax.net/voter/search (searches for Deborah Anderson and D. Anderson).

Plaintiffs also implausibly try to connect several petition pages circulated by an

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individual to an illegible signature from Robert Joseph, Sr. who signed the body of the petition
on page 1754. Really? The illegible circulators signature, see, e.g., page 1722, looks nothing
like Mr. Josephs signature in the body of the petition:

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Plaintiffs audit repeats plaintiffs rather obvious error with other circulators and other

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petition signers, including Molynda Allbright, Sandra Hayes, Wanda Hughes, Sean Leo, Gay

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Moore, Dana Moya, Linda Spaulding, Jerry Stringer, Jessie Strohman, Roberta Swank, and in

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two cases, Monica Duplechain and Cynthia Payton. Plaintiffs have not met their burden of proof

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to show that any such pages should be counted, and have not disputed that counting them

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improperly would undermine this Courts ruling about the burden to identify circulators.
Conclusion

This Court should enter final judgment for the City, and should reject plaintiffs attempts
to back-fill their failed petition.
All defendants join in this response.

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Respectfully submitted,

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By: /s/ Geoffrey L. Harrison

Geoffrey L. Harrison
gharrison@susmangodfrey.com
State Bar No. 00785947
Alex Kaplan
akaplan@susmangodfrey.com
State Bar No. 24046185
Kristen Schlemmer
kschlemmer@susmangodfrey.com
State Bar No. 24075029
SUSMAN GODFREY L.L.P.
1000 Louisiana Street, Suite 5100
Houston, Texas 77002-5096
Telephone: (713) 651-9366
Facsimile: (713) 654-6666

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Lead Counsel for City of Houston

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CITY OF HOUSTON LEGAL DEPARTMENT

Donna L. Edmundson
Donna.Edmundson@houstontx.gov
State Bar No. 06432100
Judith L. Ramsey
Judith.Ramsey@houstontx.gov
State Bar No. 16519550
James Martin Corbett
Jim.Corbett@houstontx.gov
State Bar No. 00783875
Patricia L. Casey
pat.casey@houstontx.gov
State Bar No. 03959075
900 Bagby, 4th Floor
Houston, Texas 77002
Telephone: (832) 393-6412
Facsimile: (832) 393-6259
Attorneys for Annise D. Parker, Mayor

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Of Counsel:

NORTON ROSE FULBRIGHT US LLP

Edward B. Teddy Adams, Jr.
Teddy.Adams@nortonrosefulbright.com
State Bar No. 00790200
Andrew Price
Andrew.Price@nortonrosefulbright.com

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Certificate of Service

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HAYNES AND BOONE, LLP

Lynne Liberato
Lynne.Liberato@haynesboone.com
State Bar No. 00000075
Kent Rutter
Kent.Rutter@haynesboone.com
State Bar No. 00797364
William Feldman
William.Feldman@haynesboone.com
State Bar No. 24081715
Katie Dolan-Galaviz
Katie.Dolan-Galaviz@haynesboone.com
State Bar No. 24069620
1221 McKinney, Suite 2100
Houston, Texas 77010-2007
Telephone: (713) 547-2000
Facsimile: (713) 547-2600
Appellate Attorneys for All Defendants

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State Bar No. 24002791

Seth Isgur
Seth.Isgur@nortonrosefulbright.com
State Bar No. 24054498
Geraldine W. Young
Geraldine.Young@nortonrosefulbright.com
State Bar No. 24084134
1301 McKinney, Suite 5100
Houston, Texas 77010-3095
Telephone: (713) 651-5151
Facsimile: (713) 651-5246
Attorneys for Anna Russell, City Secretary

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I certify that on April 1, 2015, a true and correct copy of this document properly was served on
the following counsel of record in accordance with the TRCP via electronic efiling and email by
agreement with the parties.
/s/ Geoffrey L. Harrison
Geoffrey L. Harrison

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