Texas AG Paxton sues Democratic county that defied him on voter registration plan

AUSTIN, Texas — Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) is suing the Democratic stronghold of Bexar County over a plan to send unsolicited voter registration forms to eligible, but unregistered, voters.

Bexar County, the state’s fourth most populous county and home to San Antonio, voted for Joe Biden in 2020 by a margin of 18 points — more than three times the spread by which the entire state voted for Trump.

In a warning on Monday night, Paxton sought to cast the county’s voter registration plan as a means of registering noncitizens to vote — something that the right wing of the state and national GOP insist is part of a plan by Democrats to steal the election. 

County leadership defied Paxton on Tuesday when the board of commissioners voted 3 to 1 to mail out the registration forms, The Texas Tribune reported.

In a suit filed on Wednesday morning in Bexar County District Court, Paxton is demanding that state judges block the registration drive.

“Despite being warned against adopting this blatantly illegal program that would spend taxpayer dollars to mail registration applications to potentially ineligible voters, Bexar County has irresponsibly chosen to violate the law,” Paxton said in a statement on Wednesday.

Paxton argued on Monday and in his filing on Wednesday that this effort was illegal — a conclusion based on his successful challenge of a Harris County vote-by-mail effort in 2020 which he has credited with winning the state for Trump.

But the two situations are “very different,” Larry Robertson of the Bexar County District Attorney’s Office told the Tribune — Texas law places strict limits on who can vote by mail, while voter registration is widely available.

At Tuesday’s meeting, the private-sector contractor whose company won the contract to send out the registration forms told commissioners that the returned forms are checked against state data from the Department of Public Safety and federal Social Security Administration records — two steps which he said would keep noncitizens from being registered.

The rate of noncitizen voting is effectively zero, a May report by the libertarian Cato Institute found. But that hasn’t stopped Texas state Republicans from making it a focus of the 2024 campaign.

Just in the past three weeks, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) connected a routine purge of voter rolls to an what he says is a threat of noncitizen voting, while Paxton sent agents to search the homes of Democratic activists and a candidate in South Texas.

Paxton also last month announced investigations into allegations of mass registration of noncitizens, following an unsubstantiated friend-of-a-friend story posted on the social media site X by Fox’s Maria Bartiromo.