Rick Perry Calls Texas A&M Student Election a ‘Mockery’

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Rick Perry, the former Texas governor and current United States energy secretary, says the recent presidential election was stolen.

It isn’t the legitimacy of his boss, President Trump, that Mr. Perry is calling into question. No, he has reservations about last month’s election for student body president at his alma mater, Texas A&M University.

In a piece published by The Houston Chronicle on Wednesday, Mr. Perry took the remarkable step of weighing in on the most local of politics. In it, he argues in great detail that the election of the school’s first openly gay student body president was mishandled and that the true winner was denied victory, an outcome that never would have been allowed were he not a straight, white male.

The process, overseen by the school’s Student Government Association, at best “made a mockery of due process and transparency,” Mr. Perry wrote. “At worst, the S.G.A. allowed an election to be stolen outright.”

At issue was the election of Bobby Brooks, who is reportedly set to become the school’s first openly gay student body president when he takes office next month. Mr. Perry wrote that Mr. Brooks’s victory initially made him proud, but he soon found cause for concern.

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As Mr. Perry laid out, Mr. McIntosh received more votes than Mr. Brooks, according to initial results. But, after receiving a number of anonymous complaints detailing acts of voter intimidation by Mr. McIntosh and his campaign, the election commissioner, Rachel Keathley, chose to disqualify Mr. McIntosh, according to a ruling by the Judicial Court of Texas A&M. Ms. Keathley also separately disqualified Mr. McIntosh for failing to account in a finance report for glow sticks used in a campaign video.

The court, whose members are students, later cleared Mr. McIntosh of the first charge, but not on the second. Once the results were recalculated, Mr. Brooks was declared the winner.

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