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Poor planning
If the Tarrant County Elections Department’s objective was to discourage voter participation Tuesday, then it succeeded.I took me nearly two hours to vote. I went to the regular voting station. A notice there said to go to another location. I went to that location and was sent to a third. I finally got to vote. At the final polling place, I was told that this kind of experience was occurring all day. While there, two other people came in to vote. They also said that they had been bumped from place to place. Even in the most important elections, we have a hard time getting good voter participation. This kind of poor management will not help improve voter turnout. I almost wonder which of the amendments it was that the Elections Department did not want Tarrant County residents voting on. Do you?— Claude A. Eyler, Benbrook Different view of TLRIn what can only be called free advertising for the self-styled Texans for Lawsuit "Reform," Roy Shockey claims in his Nov. 2 column that Texas is better off because a small band of moneyed interests used their influence to convince lawmakers that polluters, developers and insurance companies should be free to harm individual Texans without having to answer for their actions.Shockey claims that before TLR came sauntering into the Capitol in 1994, Texas was facing a downward economic spiral. Really? Forbes magazine reported in April 1994 that Texas experienced a 311 percent increase in industrial development over the previous 25 years, and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that from August 1993 to July 1994, Texas led the nation in job creation. Sounds like Texas was doing pretty well before TLR pushed through its corporate immunity agenda.How are we doing since then? Texas leads the nation in the percentage of population without health insurance, the cost of our homeowners insurance has skyrocketed while coverage has been slashed, and our constitutional protections have been shredded and stomped on. This isn’t about lawyers, as Shockey claims. Rather, TLR’s agenda is about stripping individual Texans — patients, seniors, homeowners, insurance customers and small-business owners — of their constitutional rights in an effort to shield a handful of bad actors who want to be free to act with impunity when they cause needless death or injury.— N. Alex Winslow, executive director, Texas Watch, Austin If tort "reform" is as wonderful as Roy Shockey claims, then why haven’t our insurance premiums and healthcare costs decreased?— Kay Fulgham, Fort Worth I don’t know if Roy Shockey is affiliated with Texans for Lawsuit Reform, but he’s clearly peddling the same rotten goods TLR has been trying to sell. Mr. Shockey and TLR tout a report from the Perryman Group as "evidence" that legal reform has financially benefited Texas. They fail to disclose that TLR paid $100,000 for this report, and the methodology is "proprietary" and "confidential." In other words, there is no way to verify the calculations or assumptions therein. If TLR’s report were submitted in court, it would be thrown out as "junk science." What we know about this report is that it’s unsound, as it even counts the multimillion-dollar salaries of insurance executives as a "cost" of the tort system.
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