WeedVoter

Mark Ash Libertarian

Judge, Court of Criminal Appeals, Place 3

About this race: Texas's highest criminal court hears drug-possession and search-and-seizure appeals, so this race matters for cannabis even though no campaign is about it. None of the three candidates has ever served as a judge — two are criminal defence attorneys and one a special assistant attorney general — so there are no published opinions to read, from any of them, on any subject. That is the finding, not a gap in the search. And their silence here is required, not evasive. The Texas Code of Judicial Conduct, Canon 5(1)(i), says a judge or judicial candidate shall not "make pledges or promises of conduct in office regarding pending or impending cases, specific classes of cases, specific classes of litigants, or specific propositions of law that would suggest to a reasonable person that the judge is predisposed to a probable decision". Marijuana possession and hemp prosecutions are exactly such a class of cases before this court, so a candidate who answered a cannabis questionnaire the way a legislative candidate does would be risking a breach of that canon. This site therefore does not read their silence the way it reads a legislator's. (Texas Code of Judicial Conduct: www.txcourts.gov/media/1462935/texas-state-code-of-judicial-conduct.pdf)

Mark AshLibertarian

No source of this candidate’s own is on this card. Everything below was published by someone else. So the absence of a cannabis position here is weaker evidence than it looks: it may mean only that this candidate has not published a platform anywhere we have found, or has published one somewhere we are not permitted to read.

No record compiled yet. Nothing on cannabis — no vote, bill, statement or endorsement — was found in any source we could read. 2 limits on that search are recorded with it.

What was checked for Mark Ash, and the limits on it

Checked on 2026-09-18: he is a criminal defence attorney and has not served as a judge, so there are NO published opinions to examine. Profiles from earlier election cycles were located but none carries a dated cannabis or drug-possession statement for this cycle. The Libertarian Party platform addresses cannabis, but a party document is not an act by this candidate.

Also checked, and read in full on 2026-09-18: this candidate's Ballotpedia profile at ballotpedia.org/Mark_Ash, including any Candidate Connection survey answers published there, which contains no mention of cannabis, marijuana, hemp, THC or CBD.

Re-read independently on 2026-09-20: his Libertarian Party national candidate page and a party feature interview in which he discusses the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, searches and seizures and jury nullification at length. None of these contains the word cannabis, marijuana, marihuana, hemp, THC or CBD.

Their Ballotpedia profile was read in full on 2026-09-20 at ballotpedia.org/Mark_Ash (29571 characters). It contains no occurrence of cannabis, marijuana, marihuana, hemp, THC, CBD, delta-8 or Compassionate Use. When we re-read their Ballotpedia profile on 2026-10-15, it recorded that they had not completed Ballotpedia’s 2026 Candidate Connection survey.

⚠️This card does not tell you whether this candidate held a seat in an earlier Legislature, but the question is now narrower. Read on 2026-10-15, from each chamber’s own journal: the roll of members-elect that the Texas House Journal prints, district by district, on the first day of every regular session from the 75th Legislature (1997) through the 89th (2025), and every senator the Texas Senate Journal names with a district on the first day of every regular session from the 76th (1999) through the 89th.

For the 89th those are journals.house.texas.gov/hjrnl/89r/pdf/89RDAY01FINAL.PDF and journals.senate.texas.gov/SJRNL/89R/HTML/89RSJ01-14-F.HTM and every journal read is listed on this site’s corrections page. No one by this candidate’s name appears in any of them. That is narrower than a negative answer. Those rolls name the members seated as each session opened, and in most years the Senate’s names the senators who were not up for election by surname alone, so a member who sat only in earlier sessions, who arrived at a special election and was never named in full on a later first day, or who served under another name would not be found this way.

If this candidate is one of those, there may be a cannabis voting record this site is missing.

⚠️Whether this candidate has a campaign site of their own is an open question here, and not a negative answer. This guide has not found one. It no longer claims to have looked in a way that could settle it, because the method this card used to cite was put to a case it was known to have passed and came back just as empty there. So if this candidate publishes a platform of their own, this guide may simply not have reached it, and the absence of a cannabis position below is weaker evidence than it looks.

This card has been corrected. What earlier versions of it said, and what was wrong with them, is published in the corrections log.

No score: this candidate has no recorded vote or bill authorship on a cannabis measure. Silence is not a position, so nothing is inferred from it.

Campaign sites and voter guides checked for Mark Ash

Pages read in full:

  • onyourballot.vote411.org/m/race-detail.do?id=6438465 — sections on the page: Qualifications; Ethics; Equity; Precedent; F Philosophy — the question set the local League of Women Voters chapter wrote for this race, read in full by us on 2026-10-06. Not one of its questions asks about cannabis, hemp or drug policy. The candidate answered, in free text of their own, and no answer of theirs contains, on a word boundary, cannabis, marijuana, marihuana, hemp, hemp-derived, THC, thc-a, CBD, delta-8, delta-9, cannabinoid, dispensary, decriminalisation, psilocybin, Compassionate Use, consumable hemp, SB 3, Senate Bill 3, HB 1325 or HB 46.
  • votetheperson.org/candidates/mark-ash — sections on the page: Candidate; Your match; Record; Sources — the whole of the independent candidate tracker Vote the Person's page for this candidate, read in full by us on 2026-10-06. The page states the office or district we have on file, so the identification is confirmed, and it cites 6 source(s) of its own. It publishes no marijuana or cannabis position for this candidate, and no cannabis or hemp word appears anywhere on the page. ⚠️That is a second organisation reporting an empty search, not a statement by the candidate.
  • lp.org/candidate/mark-ash — sections on the page: a party biography
  • lp.org/libertarian-mark-ash-will-challenge-michelle-slaughter-texas-court-criminal-appeals — sections on the page: a party announcement quoting him on civil liberties, jury nullification and body cameras

See the whole Judge, Court of Criminal Appeals, Place 3 race, including every opponent →

Who is paying for this campaign

Campaign finance — Texas Ethics Commission

We could not match a Commission filer number to this name. The Commission’s list of candidates who have appointed a campaign treasurer carried no single row matching both the surname and the given name on the ballot for this seat, so none was guessed at. Mark Ash may have filed under a different form of their name.

Why there are no figures and no industry breakdown here. Texas does not require a candidate to report a contributor’s employer or occupation — the Commission’s own 2026 guide asks for the amount, the contributor’s name and address, and the date, and that is all. So there is nothing in these filings to group into industries, and we have built no such grouping rather than imply one. Separately, the Commission’s bulk filing archive tells automated readers to stay out of it, and we honour that, so we have read no individual Texas contribution record. Treat the itemised question as unchecked by us, not as checked and found empty.

Search campaign filings at the Texas Ethics Commission (ethics.state.tx.us) → — choose Transaction Type “Contributions” and search by name.

Any grouping of contributors into an industry is weedvoter’s own classification, applied to employer and committee names exactly as filed. The Commission publishes employers and committees; it never publishes industries. OpenSecrets discontinued its public interface in April 2025, so nothing here is an OpenSecrets classification.

Money received is not a position. Everything on this card is money that changed hands. It is not evidence that any contribution influenced any decision, nothing on it is placed beside a roll call, and we make no claim about anyone’s motive. For what Mark Ash has actually done about cannabis, read the record above on this page — the roll calls, the bills that carry their name, and the date of each one, every entry linked to the document it came from. That is the part of this page built to be judged, and it is the part the score is calculated from. No contribution on this card moves that score by a cent.