Texas GOP amplifies voter fraud claims amid tight Senate race

Texas Republicans are making a preemptive push to paint the 2024 election as illegitimate and rife with fraud, a move that comes as Sen. Ted Cruz (R) fights for his political life.

That rhetorical and legal campaign — which has seen longtime GOP claims of illegal voting by Democrats blossom into allegations of a massive conspiracy — comes amid efforts by the Democratic Party to make inroads in the increasingly purple state.

And they build on a decades-long campaign by the state GOP to respond to Texas’s changing demographics to raise barriers to voting by Democrats.

Those claims come as part of “a national Republican commitment to establishing the idea of election fraud,” Cal Jillson, a professor of political science at Dallas’s Southern Methodist University, told The Hill.

Allegations of cheating, Jillson said, are being made not just on behalf of former President Trump, whose supporters are already preparing lawsuits to overturn his possible defeat, but also to allow legal challenges of “any other very close elections that might take place.”

And they come as Cruz finds himself locked in a competitive reelection battle with Democratic rival Rep. Colin Allred. Though The Hill/Decision Desk HQ’s forecast gives the Republican a 75 percent chance of winning, multiple polls in recent weeks have shown a tightening race.

Jillson said that “if Allred should catch him on Election Day, [Republicans] want to establish the idea that election fraud is a real, legitimate concern.”

These claims have emanated from the top of the ticket and have gone well beyond Texas. 

Trump has for more than a decade claimed that his losses were the result of widespread voter fraud by immigrants lacking permanent legal status. 

Trump as recently as Thursday was alleging widespread “cheating” in Pennsylvania and described voting Machines as that “beautiful, often corrupt, machine.” 

And in a Thursday appearance on The Hill’s "Rising," Trump press secretary Karoline Leavitt conflated the long lines at polling stations in the hotly contested Philadelphia exurb — the subject of a successful campaign lawsuit to keep polls open late — with “illegal voter suppression.”

But Texas and its statewide elected officials have been particularly ardent advocates of the false idea of widespread illegal voting. 

Cruz has repeatedly accused Vice President Harris, Trump’s opponent, of wanting “more illegal aliens to invade America because she views every single illegal alien as a future Democrat voter.” 

During his debate last month, Cruz accused Harris and Allred, without evidence, of an alleged plot by Democrats to import foreign voters and ensure that “every statewide elected official in Texas would be defeated in the next election.”

Other statewide elected officials claim, despite evidence to the contrary, that such widespread and coordinated illegal voting is already here. In August, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) purged more than a million voters from Texas rolls, while claiming that his office had found thousands of undocumented immigrant voters.

“Illegal voting in Texas will NEVER be tolerated,” Abbott wrote on social platform X at the time, adding that his office would refer alleged illegal voters to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) for prosecution.

Investigations by The Texas Tribune and ProPublica have found these numbers to be inflated, if not invented. On Tuesday, ProPublica published a profile of a Trump voter, Mary Howard-Elley, who was incorrectly marked as a noncitizen after she “asked to be exempted from jury duty because of guardianship duties for three of her grandchildren.”

In an interview with the news outlet, Howard-Elley expressed disbelief that this could happen to someone with the “whitest name you could have.”

“Who is allowing people to do this to United States citizens?” she asked. “I understand we have a problem with immigration, but come on now.”

The most ardent warrior on the voter fraud front has been Paxton, who has repeatedly and without evidence alleged that Democrats are conspiring with Mexican drug cartels to illegally import voters. 

In August, Paxton announced an investigation into voter registration organizations that he says were “illegally registering noncitizens to vote in our election” — a claim that appears to be based on a debunked friend-of-a-friend story posted by Fox News host Maria Bartiromo. In the story, Bartiromo’s source appears to assume, without further investigation, that a line of Latinos waiting to register were “immigrants.”

Around the same time, Paxton’s officers executed search warrants against Democratic organizers and a candidate in a key South Texas race and sued the state’s biggest urban counties over their voter registration drives. 

Paxton also sued Democratic small-dollar fundraiser ActBlue over allegedly letting ”bad actors … illegally interfere in American elections”; went after the federal government for not creating a new process to verify that voters on Texas rolls are in fact citizens; and filed amicus briefs in support of a recent, successful challenge by Virginia’s Republican government to purge about 1,600 voters from state rolls.

While reporting by The Associated Press shows many of these voters were citizens who, like Howard-Elley, the Trump voter in Texas, were removed in error, Paxton on Wednesday characterized the Biden-Harris position as an attempt to “force [Virginia] to put noncitizens back on the voter rolls while the Election is already under way.”

There is, Jillson noted, an immediate practical benefit to Republicans, should they lose, in creating a widespread atmosphere of suspicion around election results: It will make those results easier to challenge.

Paxton, like Cruz, was an early and ardent supporter of the lie that Trump won the 2020 election — claims that the attorney general took to the Supreme Court, and for which the State Bar of Texas is seeking to censure him. 

That comes amid a streamlined GOP operation ready to prove fraud, Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice, told the AP earlier this month.

“In 2020, the election deniers were improvisational,” Waldman said. “Now that same election denialist impulse is far more organized, far more strategic and far better funded.” 

For both sides, that funding, too, is in part based on claims and counterclaims of fraud, election law professor Derek Muller of University of Notre Dame told the AP.

Both parties, Mueller said, “are fundraising on how they’re able to protect democracy, how they’re able to preserve the integrity of the election.”

But recent history and current rhetoric offers one clear difference between the parties. Should Trump lose in 2024, Jillson said, almost five years of evidence suggests that Republican elected officials in Congress and across the states will “generally back him up on his claims of a stolen election.”

What is newer, he said, is that those claims are now being made around “other elected officials — even in races where they're very, very likely to win.”

But in Texas, a state that did not allow its Black residents to vote until 1965, Jillson noted that these claims are part of a much older lineage. From the days when conservative Democrats ruled the state, he said, “the idea of controlling the unpredictable and untrustworthy masses has been an important part of Texas policy.”

“Texas conservatives have always been nervous about voters they do not know and trust to behave properly,” he said.

But GOP allegations of fraud have steadily picked up steam since 2000, the year then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush (R) won the presidency after the Supreme Court stopped the Florida recount in that year's disputed election.

In the decades that followed, Texas Republicans used allegations of widespread voter fraud — first by Black voters, then by Latinos — to justify increasingly strict limits on the voting process, which have helped make Texas the hardest state to vote in nationwide. (That distinction has helped place Texas among the three bottom states for voter registration.) 

Republicans passed a series of restrictive voter ID laws in the 2010s that a federal judge repeatedly found to be “intentionally discriminatory,” though Paxton eventually won a case defending a softened version of those laws — one that allows voters to submit photo IDs preferred by Republicans, like hunting and gun licenses, but not student IDs, whose holders skew Democrat.

And in 2021, in tandem with their widespread claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election, Texas Republicans passed Senate Bill 1, a law that included provisions making it far harder for elderly, disabled or non-English-speaking voters to get help with their ballots.

That legislation “really slammed the door shut” on community outreach toward “elderly Latino voters who needed help either seeing the ballot, reading it or understanding the ballot,” Nina Perales, vice president of litigation for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF.)

Perales argued that in addition to blocking actual votes, laws like SB1 serve to keep less confident voters home. And in late September, after a challenge from MALDEF, federal Judge Xavier Rodriguez agreed, knocking down the bill’s criminal provisions — but only after the election on Nov. 5.

Perales said that such restrictions are part of a Republican campaign to slow the erosion of their power amid a changing electorate. 

Such election-season challenges to measures like voter ID, Republican strategist Brendan Steinhauser countered, hurt Democrats by adding fuel to GOP claims that the party isn’t concerned about what its spokespeople now call “election integrity.”

At its core, Steinhauser said, Republicans claiming fraud are “mostly due to the fact that their guy didn’t win.”

Those claims, however, are becoming self-sustaining in a way that is in danger of outrunning their practical utility for Republicans, Joshua Blank of the Texas Politics Project (TPP) at The University of Texas at Austin told The Hill. 

A September TPP poll found that, after two decades of what the TPP team called “call and response” on voter fraud by Republican elected officials, only 7 percent of party members were “very confident” in the 2024 election results, and two-thirds believed that voting restrictions needed to be tighter.

There is “almost nothing that Republicans in the state could do at this point to convince their own voters that the system isn't rigged — even though Republicans have had control of the system for the better part of the last few decades and have won all the elections."

That rhetoric has helped back a wave of legal challenges by the Texas GOP that lay the groundwork for attempts to overturn the 2024 election, experts told The Hill.

There are darker currents too. On conservative social media, Steinhauser said, claims of widespread voter fraud are being used to justify once-fringe claims that liberals engaged in a “great replacement” to get rid of white voters and put minorities in their places.

Those who believe the presidential election was stolen and "the other side is basically pulled off a coup of sorts,” Steinhauser told The Hill, “then it's going to motivate you to do, motivate a small number of people to do terrible things."