{"id":58070,"date":"2025-11-20T18:44:07","date_gmt":"2025-11-20T18:44:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/58070\/"},"modified":"2025-11-20T18:44:07","modified_gmt":"2025-11-20T18:44:07","slug":"lawsuit-halts-texas-3-billion-dementia-fund","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/58070\/","title":{"rendered":"Lawsuit halts Texas\u2019 $3 billion dementia fund"},"content":{"rendered":"

Audio recording is automated for accessibility. Humans wrote and edited the story. See our AI policy<\/a>, and give us feedback<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The state\u2019s new $3 billion dementia research fund has been blocked temporarily by a trio of voters who claim voting machines used in this month\u2019s election are faulty. <\/p>\n

The plaintiffs \u2014 Shannon Huggins, Lars Kuslich and Jose Silvester \u2014 filed the action Nov. 13 in Travis County against the Texas Secretary of State\u2019s office. In it, they claim that some voting machines were not certified by federal law and that the election results should be scrapped and a new election be ordered.<\/p>\n

The plaintiffs, who are representing themselves without an attorney, do not say why they are only protesting the results that overwhelmingly approved the funding of the Dementia Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (DPRIT)<\/a> and not the other 16 propositions <\/a>Texans considered on the same ballot. Two of the three plaintiffs \u2014 Huggins and Kuslich \u2014 have filed previous challenges about voting machines in other elections. <\/p>\n

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick championed the fund during the legislative session and listed it as a priority for lawmakers. On Wednesday, he slammed the plaintiffs for singling out Proposition 14, which was the funding of the research effort. <\/p>\n

\u201cSurprisingly, none of the other propositions were challenged in court under this pretense,\u201d Patrick said in a statement. \u201cThis attack on DPRIT is disgusting and is a disservice to the roughly 500,000 Texans who suffer from some form of dementia, and their families who suffer along with them.\u201d <\/p>\n

Patrick called the plaintiffs\u2019 efforts lawsuit abuse. \u201cThis frivolous lawsuit has prevented the DPRIT constitutional amendment from taking effect, despite Proposition 14\u2019s passage with nearly 70% of the vote!,\u201d Patrick said. <\/p>\n

He also urged the legal system to take expedient action to allow DPRIT to become law. <\/p>\n

The Texas Tribune reached out to the plaintiffs for additional comment but they did not immediately respond. <\/p>\n

This is a developing story. Check back for updates. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Audio recording is automated for accessibility. Humans wrote and edited the story. See our AI policy, and give…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":58071,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[9063,9064,288,27,29,28],"class_list":{"0":"post-58070","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-texas","8":"tag-alzheimers-disease","9":"tag-dementia","10":"tag-elections","11":"tag-texas","12":"tag-texas-headlines","13":"tag-texas-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58070","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58070"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58070\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58071"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}