Going forward, Healy said, Rove will forgo the exemption and tax cap on his Washington house -- valued at more than $1.1 million -- rather than give up his status as a Texas voter. But that raises a new set of questions.
Rove sold his longtime home in Austin in 2003. He was getting a homestead exemption there, too. So for three years, from 2001 until the sale, Rove was claiming homesteads in Texas and Washington, which is, technically, illegal, according to tax collectors in both cities. "Strictly speaking, you can only have one homestead," said Art Cory, chief tax appraiser in Travis County, Tex.
Cory said he would, nonetheless, probably not bother to investigate.
Anyway, Rove is now registered to vote in Kerr County, about 80 miles west of Austin in the Texas Hill Country. He and his wife, Darby, have owned property there, on the Guadalupe River, since at least 1997, according to county property records.
But as far as the locals know, the couple have never actually lived in either of two tiny rental cottages Rove claims as his residence on Texas voter registration rolls. The largest is 814 square feet and valued by the county at about $25,000.
"I've been here 10 years and I've never seen him. There are only, like, three grocery stores in town. You'd think you'd at least see him at the HEB" grocery, said Greg Shrader, editor and publisher of the Kerrville Daily Times.
Charles Ratliff, secretary of the Kerr County Democratic Party, said he's never even heard rumors of Rove's presence. "I have no memory of anybody saying to me, 'Hey, Karl Rove is in town, and he's speaking at the courthouse.' Or, 'Karl Rove is in town and I saw him at the grocery store.'
"Now, you do hear people say that all the time about Kinky Friedman," Ratliff said, referring to the novelist and lead singer for the Texas Jewboys. "If somebody famous like Rove lived near Kerrville, I think I would hear about it all the time."
Down in Texas, when you register to vote in a place where you don't actually live, the county prosecutor can come after you for voter fraud, said Elizabeth Reyes, an attorney with the elections division of the Texas Secretary of State. Rove's rental cottage "doesn't sound like a residence to me, because it's not a fixed place of habitation," she said. "If it's just property that they own, ownership doesn't make that a residence."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/02/AR2005090202397.html They all fly in the same family, the architects of fraud. :eyes: