It seems that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton will do anything to prevent Texas from flipping for Kamala Harris—including preventing eligible citizens from registering to vote.*
Paxton threatened legal action against Bexar and Harris counties if they proceed with sending out mail-in voter registration forms, which the counties have proposed doing via third-party vendors. Paxton argues that it could encourage noncitizens to register to vote.
Of course, Bexar and Harris aren’t like other counties in Texas. They’re urban and populous, and have a majority or even plurality of Latino voters, according to The Hill. And in 2020 both counties overwhelmingly voted for Joe Biden.
Paxton’s office announced Wednesday that he’d filed a lawsuit against Bexar County Commissioner Court after it approved a proposal that funds the production and mailing of voter registration forms “to unregistered voters in location(s) based on targeting agreed to by the county,” according to KENS-5. Paxton claimed the program was unlawful because it “could induce ineligible people—such as felons and noncitizens—to commit a crime by attempting to register to vote.”
Earlier this week, Paxton had sent a letter to Bexar and Harris county commissioners warning them off of proceeding with any such programs. The threats were nearly identical.
“At best, this proposal is ill-advised because it potentially confuses residents of Harris County about whether they are eligible to vote. At worst, it may induce the commission of a crime by encouraging individuals who are ineligible to vote to provide false information on the form,” Paxton wrote in the letter to Harris County. “Either way, it is illegal, and if you move forward with this proposal, I will use all available legal means to stop you.”
Specifically, Paxton argued that the state had no right to distribute registration forms unsolicited, and pointed to a similar lawsuit he’d filed against Harris County in 2020 when it had tried to push a similar proposal. Paxton previously gushed to Steve Bannon that had he not blocked more than two million ballot applications from being distributed by the state, Texas might have become a battleground state and Donald Trump “would’ve lost the election.”
In reality, there is little to no evidence to demonstrate that noncitizen voting is a significant problem in the United States. In 2016, noncitizen votes accounted for just 0.0001 percent of the votes cast, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Still, it’s a nonissue that Republicans such as House Speaker Mike Johnson, and of course Trump, have continued to tout baselessly throughout the election cycle.
Paxton’s offensive goes even further, to conflate unregistered, but eligible, voters with noncitizens.
His newest action is part of his larger campaign to actively disenfranchise Latino voters in Texas who might support Harris.
Last month, Paxton’s office announced raids and undercover actions against organizations in Texas it accuses of illegally registering noncitizens to vote. In practice, though, the raids have taken place against members of the League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC, the oldest Latino civil rights organization in the U.S., as well as several prominent Democrats in south Texas.
The raids took place shortly after LULAC had endorsed Harris, the organization’s first presidential endorsement in its nearly 100-year history.
* This story originally misstated Paxton’s office.
