Texas AG Paxton targets voter registration in states' biggest Latino counties

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton threatened two of the state's most populous — and Democratic-leaning — urban counties with lawsuits over their plans to register voters by mail.

Paxton wrote letters to Harris and Bexar counties Monday, claiming that their mailing of voter registration forms would either “confuse” noncitizens about their eligibility to vote, or “induce” them to fraudulently register.

“Either way, it is illegal, and if you move forward with this proposal, I will use all available legal means to stop you,” Paxton wrote.

The attorney general pointed to his 2020 suit against the county for a similar effort to send out vote-by-mail applications to all registered voters in the county — a move which he credited the following year with Trump’s victory in Texas, which was the GOP’s narrowest in a generation.

Paxton’s letters targeted proposals by both counties to mail voter registration forms to eligible — but unregistered — voters, which he conflated in his letters with noncitizens. 

“I urge you to abandon this course of action,” Paxton wrote to the Harris County commissioners. “If you do not, I will see you in court.”

The correspondence comes in the wake of repeated Republican moves against election registration and get-out-the-vote efforts in Texas’ Democratic-leaning urban counties — a campaign that comes amid a tightening 2024 race and a broad trend of Democratic gains in the state.

Polling last week found that both Rep. Colin Allred (D) — who is challenging Sen. Ted Cruz (R) — and Vice President Harris (D) trailed their Republican opponents by 9 points, according to The Hill/Decision Desk HQ. 

But other late-August polls have found that Harris was within 3 to 5 points of the former president, and Texas elections have been narrowing for decades. 

In 2020, Trump took Texas with a 5.6 percent spread — the closest since former Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.) took the state by 5 in his losing bid to unseat former President Clinton.

That's a significant decrease from 2016, when Trump won the Lone Star State by 9 percent, and a collapse in the party's lead from former President George W. Bush, when the Texas-raised president won with an excess of 20 percent.

The two counties Paxton targeted are either plurality or majority Latino — nearly a fifth of all Texas Latinos live in Harris alone — and both went to President Biden in 2020 by wide margins.

In 2020, Biden won Harris County, the state's most populous, by 14 percent, or more than twice the statewide spread between the candidates. That year, the Democratic challenger’s lead in Bexar was even more striking when the president won by 18 percent, or more than three times Trump’s statewide margin of victory.

That trend has also corresponded with a rhetorical and legal GOP campaign against noncitizen voting — an alleged threat that Paxton argued Monday had made the two counties' voter registration efforts “particularly troubling this election cycle.” 

Noncitizen voting is a phenomenon whose frequency is effectively zero, the libertarian Cato Institute found.

To understand why, the Brennan Center for Justice posed a thought experiment: Imagine the case of an undocumented migrant in the U.S. — living in fear that notice from the government will get them deported, and potentially cause them to leave behind their family.

“Would you risk everything — your freedom, your life in the United States, your ability to be near your family — just to cast a single ballot?”

Many Republicans' answer to this question appears to be “yes, they would.” 

Leading Republicans over the past month, from Paxton and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to the head of the Republican National Committee (RNC) and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), have linked to the largely illusory threat of undocumented immigrant voting.

Start with Texas. Over the last two weeks, Paxton’s office searched the homes and offices of Democratic campaigners — and one candidate — in South Texas, while the office of the attorney general has announced investigations into alleged attempts by civil society groups to register noncitizens in North Texas to vote — claims that county-level Republican officials have debunked.

Abbott, meanwhile, has sought to link routine maintenance of the state voter rolls to a campaign against supposedly widespread illegal voting by noncitizens, and Johnson is under pressure from the national GOP’s right flank to shut down the government if Congress won’t pass a bill requiring proof of citizenship to vote.

On the national level, RNC leadership has echoed those claims and linked them to the group’s own lawsuits that seek to purge voter rolls in battleground states.

And as The Hill reported, Johnson is considering a similar one. He has called voting by noncitizens — “the most imminent threat facing the country, is the integrity of this election cycle.” 

The White House, in turn, has charged that this was voter suppression under the guise of election integrity.

“This bill would do nothing to safeguard our elections,” the Biden-Harris administration wrote in a statement. “But it would make it much harder for all eligible Americans to register to vote and increase the risk that eligible voters are purged from voter rolls.”

The administration noted that “it is already illegal for noncitizens to vote in Federal elections — it is a Federal crime punishable by prison and fines.”

Paxton has repeatedly, and without evidence, claimed that national Democrats are engaged in a grand conspiracy to steal elections by moving millions of noncitizens into the country.

“This was the plan, tell the cartels, ‘Get people here as fast as possible, as many as possible, we’re not going to make them hide anymore — we’ll get them placed in the right states,’” Paxton told conservative talk show host Glenn Beck last month. “They want to fix the election so that we have a one-party country that we can’t fix.”

Paxton’s legal challenge against Harris and Bexar is in many ways a reprise of the 2020 election.

In that case, Paxton noted in his letters to the two counties, the Texas Supreme Court found that while such mailings weren’t explicitly prohibited, they also weren’t explicitly permitted, and that in cases of reasonable doubt over a given right, the court should default to assuming that counties don’t have them.

Paxton wrote to the Harris County Commissioner’s Court Monday night, referring to the 2020 case, “I sued you and won" — though that case was about vote-by-mail, not registration, Paxton argued in his letter that the two were analogous, and that “I am confident the courts will agree with me.”

In both letters, Paxton also accused county officials of facilitating illegal voting by noncitizens or those disenfranchised after being convicted of felonies.

“As you are aware, the Biden-Harris administration’s open border policies have saddled Texas —and the entire country — with a wave of illegal immigration that has resulted in ballooning noncitizen populations across our State," he said.

The attorney general added that these registration methods “indiscriminately inviting county residents to register to vote regardless of their eligibility.”

In addition to the broader challenges to voters, Paxton’s letters come amid a more specific conflict over who controls voting in Harris County, the home of Houston — a Democratic stronghold where the state is sending election monitors to oversee the 2024 vote.

Last year, the Texas state legislature passed a law that shuttered the county's new unified election administrator’s office, opened in 2020, and once again divided election responsibilities, with the vote itself run by the county clerk while registration is controlled by the tax-assessor-collector, The Houston Chronicle reported.

“It’s unclear how outreach to unregistered voters would result in adding noncitizens to the voter rolls,” the Chronicle noted. But last week, state Sen. Paul Bettencourt (R) accused Harris County leaders of facilitating voter registration, and therefore voting, by noncitizens.

Asked for proof of widespread voter fraud by The Texas Tribune, Bettencourt pointed to his own two-decade tenure as a tax assessor-collector in the county. Between 1998 and 2008, he said, he found 35 noncitizens who had tried or succeeded to get onto the voter roles, or less than two cases per year.

Due to Bettencourt’s challenge, Harris County’s commissioners had already postponed their voter registration rollout before Paxton’s letter arrived.