At first glance, Natasha Ruiz might seem like a promising figure in Harris County politics.

In her first bid for elective office, the self-identified teacher pulled 21 percent of the vote in a four-way Democratic primary for a state House seat last week against incumbent Harold Dutton, Houston City Council Member Jerry Davis, and transportation logistics executive Richard Bonton. Dutton and Davis, the top two vote-getters, now proceed to a May runoff.

The problem is that Ruiz, or “Ruiz,” may not exist at all. She certainly had no campaign whatsoever — no volunteers, no website, no social media presence, no interviews with the press. Questions about her candidacy arose almost immediately after polls closed Super Tuesday, and have yet to be allayed.

The situation has also helped raise awareness about the risk of voting for a candidate based solely on his or her name. That works out well enough, sometimes. But it can also result in the elevation of suboptimal, non-serious or even — as may be the case here — fake candidates.

There are two types of “ghost” candidates, explains Brandon J. Rottinghaus, a political scientist at the University of Houston. The first are those whose names appear on the ballot even though they’ve dropped out of race, because they did so after filing for office but prior to Election Day. The second are tricksters, whose names serve as a decoy to draw voters away from other candidates in the race.

“Legally, as long as the individual meets the criteria to be on the ballot, they can haunt the ballot without actively doing anything to advance their electoral prospects,” Rottinghaus said this week.

That’s certainly what “Natasha Ruiz” did in this primary.

“The facts we have are that on December 9th, during the 30 day filing period to be placed on the Democratic Party primary ballot, a person claiming to be Natasha Ruiz came to the party office with the required elements to file: an application, identification, and filing fee,” the Harris County Democratic Party said in a statement days after the election.

“This Application was subsequently approved, and the name of this candidate appeared on the March 3rd Democratic Party primary ballot,” the statement continued.

The county Democratic party could have done a better job with the paperwork, if nothing else. In the commotion of the filing deadline, the party neglected to make a copy of the driver’s license presented, which has complicated efforts to track down the apparent mischief-maker.

Ruiz, or a person using that name, also filed paperwork with the Texas Ethics Commission, designating a campaign treasurer named Hector Riveria.

On Thursday, KTRK-TV was able to reach a woman at the phone number listed on the filing. She identified herself as Natasha Demming, and denied running for a seat in the Texas House or any other office, for that matter. She said that although she is registered to vote at her mother’s address in Houston, she lives in Colorado, and works as a truck driver.

Subsequent calls to her number, from the Houston Chronicle and other outlets, have gone unanswered. A phone number for Riveria has apparently been disconnected.

These developments have Dutton crying foul. In his view, he’s been forced into a runoff by a fake candidate, as opposed to one who was merely inert. He has hired a private investigator to look into Ruiz’s candidacy and has said he may contest the election results, depending on what the investigation yields.

“I’ve just raised more questions than I’ve gotten answers,” Dutton, 75, said Tuesday, after I contacted him for an update. “All we have are questions. We don’t necessarily have any answers at this point.”

Demming is a real person, he continued, but there are no public records that suggest she was ever legally named Ruiz, and he doubts she was acting on her own.

It’s hard not to sympathize with Dutton, who has represented House District 14 in northeast Harris County since 1984 and chairs the juvenile justice committee.

No one can say with absolute certainty that Dutton would have avoided a runoff and won the Democratic nomination outright had Ruiz’s name not been on the ballot. But that seems like a reasonable hypothesis. Dutton won 45 percent of the vote in the primary, compared to 26 percent for Davis, a council member since 2011.

And Dutton now faces the tricky prospect of turning out voters at a time when many voters have shifted attention to the November general election, and many Houstonians are hunkering down due to fears of the new coronavirus.

The result isn’t an ideal situation for Davis, either. The District B councilman has secured a spot in the runoff, but if he prevails, Dutton’s supporters may see him as the undeserving beneficiary of whatever shenanigans led to Ruiz’s appearance on the ballot.

The nature and purpose of those shenanigans remains unclear. No one is taking any credit for Ruiz’s surprisingly strong showing, but one possibility is that someone was seeking to draw Latino or female voters away from someone else. Both Dutton and Davis are African-American men, as is Bonton, who received 9 percent of the vote.

Democratic voters often look favorably on candidates who would improve representation in elected offices, according to political scientists. Five white male judges in Harris County were unseated by women of color in the Democratic primary this year, for example.

A similar phenomenon could be observed on the other side of the aisle. Railroad Commissioner Ryan Sitton was defeated in this year’s Republican primary by a virtual unknown, Jim Wright, who happens to share a name with the late former congressman and Speaker of the House from Fort Worth.

And the Austin-based provocateur Rob Morrow won 40 percent of the vote in his bid to be the Republican nominee for a seat on the State Board of Education, which he is seeking in part because he thinks Texas schoolchildren should be taught the false claim that Lyndon Johnson murdered John F. Kennedy.

Such electoral mishaps will presumably become more common, as the Texas electorate slowly awakens to the fact that we regularly have competitive elections in this state.

erica.grieder@chron.com