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VOTER SUPPRESSION

Texas Is Flagging Some Registered Voters as ‘Non-Citizens’ — and Refusing to Explain Why: ACLU Lawsuit

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On Tuesday, the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas announced that they are filing suit against the Texas Secretary of State for wrongly flagging registered voters as possible “non-citizens” — without disclosing what criteria they are actually using to make this assessment.

The lawsuit, which is also joined by the Campaign Legal Center and the Mexican-American Legal Defense Fund, names Secretary of State John Scott, and seeks injunctive relief for Texas voters.

This lawsuit comes after a December report by the Texas Tribune, outlining the state’s previous disastrous efforts to hunt for non-citizens on the voter rolls.

“The state flagged nearly 100,000 voters for citizenship checks and set them up for possible criminal investigation based on flawed data that didn’t account for immigrants who gained citizenship,” wrote Alexa Ura. “After it became clear it was jeopardizing legitimate voter registrations, it was pulled into three federal lawsuits challenging its process. Former Secretary of State David Whitley lost his job amid the fallout. And the court battle ultimately forced the state to abandon the effort and rethink its approach to ensure naturalized citizens weren’t targeted.”

The secretary of state’s office is insisting that the new audit of the voter rolls is complying with a 2019 settlement that limited the number of voters they can investigate — but according to that report, problems have persisted.

“Scores of citizens are still being marked for review — and possible removal from the rolls,” noted the report. “Registrars in some of the state’s largest counties have found that a sizable number of voters labeled possible noncitizens actually filled out their voter registration cards at their naturalization ceremonies. In at least a few cases, the state flagged voters who were born in the U.S.”

This comes amid other renewed GOP efforts to restrict the voting process in Texas. Lawmakers passed a broad package of cutbacks to voting access in 2021 making it far harder to cast an absentee ballot, and Republicans are attempting to recruit thousands of volunteers to police Black and Hispanic polling places.

 

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CORRUPTION

Texas AG Ken Paxton Threatens Democrat-Leaning Counties Not To Mail Out Voter Registration Forms

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4 months ago

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September 3, 2024

By

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton threatened to sue two large, Democratic-leaning counties should they proceed with their plan to mail voter registration forms to eligible voters who are currently unregistered.

Bexar and Harris counties have proposed using third-party vendors to mail the forms. Though the plan is to only send them to people who are eligible to be registered, Paxton said that the forms could fall in the hands of those who are ineligible to vote, which would “encourage” them to register illegally, according to KSAT-TV.

“At worst, it may induce the commission of a crime by encourage individuals who are ineligible to vote to provide false information on the form,” Paxton said, according to KENS-TV. “Either way, it is illegal, and if you move forward with this proposal, I will use all available legal means to stop you.”

READ MORE: Angela Paxton Voted Against Being Barred From Voting in Husband’s Impeachment Trial

Bexar and Harris counties both have high Latino populations, with nearly 20% of all Texan Latinos living in Harris County, according to The Hill. Paxton has faced accusations of specifically trying to suppress the Latino vote. Following raids on the homes of Latino voting activists, the League of United Latin American Citizens called for an inquiry into alleged civil rights violations, according to USA Today.

At least six LULAC volunteers had their homes raided by police, and had voter registration materials seized, along with phones, computers and other electronic devices, USA Today reported. Paxton said the search warrants were “part of an ongoing election integrity investigation” into “allegations of election fraud and vote harvesting that occurred during the 2022 elections.”

LULAC says one of the people raided was Lidia Martinez, an 87-year-old member of the organization. On August 20, her home was raided, and she was interrogated for hours, according to LULAC.

There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2022 elections in Texas or elsewhere in the United States. Paxton’s most recent probe, despite the raids, has led to no charges thus far, according to the Texas Tribune.

Paxton has been conducting similar raids and probes into election fraud as far back as 2018, the Washington Post reports.

“The goal isn’t to get a conviction,” said Chad Dunn, legal director of the UCLA Voting Rights Project, who has defended Texans against election-fraud claims, told the Post. “It’s to set up a climate of fear around voting. He uses these witch hunts to gain attention and money.”

Last year, Paxton was impeached by the state House on 20 separate articles of impeachment. The Texas Senate, which skews Republican 19 to 12, voted to acquit him. The impeachment charges mostly centered around allegations Paxton used his position to help a campaign donor under investigation by the FBI for fraud.

 

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VOTER SUPPRESSION

Texas Attorney General Admits Trump Would Have Lost the State in 2020 if He Hadn’t Blocked Mail-In Voting

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4 years ago

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June 5, 2021

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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton told Steve Bannon that Donald Trump would have lost the Lone Star State in the 2020 presidential election if Texans had been allowed to vote by mail.

“Yeah, I think it’s certainly critical to my state and that’s why we fought off these twelve lawsuits,” Paxton said. “We had them in Houston, we had them in San Antonio, we had them in Austin — we had them in the counties where you have the most liberal judges. And it was a concerted effort, nationally, with lots of money going into it.”

“And just knowing that we had twelve lawsuits that we had to win. And if we had lost one of them, if we’d lost Harris County — Trump won by 620,000 votes in Texas. Harris County mail-in ballots that they wanted to send out were 2.5 million, those were all illegal and we were able to stop every one of them,” he explained.

“Had we not done that, we would have been in the very same situation — we would’ve been on election day, I was watching on election night and I knew, when I saw what was happening in these other states, that that would’ve been Texas. We would’ve been in the same boat. We would’ve been one of those battleground states that they were counting votes in Harris County for three days and Donald Trump would’ve lost the election,” Paxton said.

Image via Ken Paxton/Facebook
 

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VOTER SUPPRESSION

‘Haven’t Seen This in Any Other Country’: Video of Huge Line of Georgia Voters Waiting to Cast Ballots Goes Viral

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4 years ago

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October 12, 2020

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The start of early voting in Georgia came Monday morning, and just like in 2018, when Republican Brian Kemp was Secretary of State and in charge of managing elections, the lines are long again.

Secretary Kemp is now Governor Kemp, having won the election over Stacey Abrams amid what many believe was massive voter suppression, which appears to be back today.

Atlanta Journal Constitution reporter Tyler Estep posted this 70-second video to Twitter, which shows a huge line to get in to a Gwinnett County polling station in Suwanee, Georgia, where the population is under 21,000. He says some voters have been in line for four hours already and have yet to cast a ballot.

The video, which has gone viral, is 70-seconds long. Assuming the car was traveling at 20 miles-per-hour, the line is almost a half-mile long.

The video has already been seen over 300,000 times in well under two hours.

“Talked to several voters who had been there since 7,” Estep also tweeted, “and were still waiting as 11 am approached. They were told check-in was being ‘glitchy.’ Gwinnett [County spokesperson] said there was ‘intermittent issue with network access … that slowed processing down.'”

Here’s what some are saying:

Deputy editor and Pentagon Correspondent at Defense News:

CNN’s Jim Sciutto:

Political scientist:

Staff writer at The Atlantic:

KQED Producer/Reporter:

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