However, even if the courts or the U.S. Justice Department shut down the Republican attorney general’s efforts, some of the damage is already done, according to those same advocates.
Paxton’s current legal maneuvering is designed to scare progressive groups away from registering likely Democratic voters ahead of the November election, and it’s also likely to keep some of those same voters away from the polls.
“I’m not blaming the media here, but when people read about this or hear about what the attorney general is doing, they get concerned,” said Albert Kauffman, a professor at St. Mary’s Law School who specializes in voting rights. “They ask, ‘Well, could I get in trouble for voting?’ Or, ‘What if the state comes after me? What if they raid my house because I had 20 people over to talk to them about an election and gave out voter-registration materials?’ I think that it adds to an atmosphere of fear, and I think that’s a real negative about these lawsuits.”
In recent weeks, Paxton sued Bexar County to prevent it from hiring an outside contractor to mail voter-registration cards and postage-paid return envelopes to unregistered voters.
On Monday, a State District Judge Antonia Arteaga declined to grant the temporary injunction Paxton sought, explaining that Bexar County had already conducted the mailing, rendering the issue moot. The same day, Paxton's office filed a notice that it plans to appeal the decision.
What’s more, Paxton’s office approved raids on the homes of several South Texas Democratic activists, including that of an 87-year-old woman. Paxton said the raids were part of a two-year-old investigation into allegations of voter fraud.
Last month, Paxton also announced he’s investigating whether organizations are “unlawfully registering noncitizens to vote” after Fox News host Maria Bartiromo claimed without proof in a social media post that unnamed groups were registering “immigrants” to vote in North Texas.
In the wake of those actions, leading Hispanic civil-rights group the League of United Latin American Citizens and a group of Texas Democratic lawmakers asked the U.S. Justice Department to open an investigation.
And the nonprofit group Jolt, which focuses on boosting Latinos’ civic participation, last week filed a federal lawsuit against Paxton, arguing his investigation into noncitizen voting would cause irreparable harm to the group and its workers by publicly disclosing their information to the public.
“Even if the state loses this lawsuit [with Bexar County], and even if they are stopped from these raids on voter groups in Texas, the LULAC activists and everything, these things do indirectly intimidate people from voting,” added Kauffman, spent nearly 20 years as senior litigating attorney for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund in San Antonio.
Parroting MAGA claims
Paxton has been among the staunchest defenders of former President Donald Trump’s discredited claims that he lost the 2020 election due to widespread voter fraud. Indeed, the AG now faces a State Bar of Texas ethics complaint that accuses him of dishonest behavior when he filed a petition with the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Trump’s election defeats in four swing states.
Voting-rights advocates also maintain that Paxton’s spurious claims that noncitizens are casting ballots echo a common refrain from Trump’s MAGA playbook.
The former president has repeatedly claimed without supporting evidence that noncitizens are voting in huge numbers. Multiple large-scale studies show that’s not the case, and multiple state and federal safeguards prevent people who aren’t citizens from being able to register.
Confusion and intimidation
Spurious as such claims are, voting-rights experts said they’re part of a larger push by Republicans to throw likely Democratic voters from the rolls and create confusion that may keep people away from the ballot box.
In Alabama, for example, roughly 3,200 voters got letters from the state saying they’re suspected of being noncitizens and now must update their registrations to cast a ballot. The Alabama Secretary of State’s Office later clarified that people who got the notice still can vote if they bring their driver’s license or Social Security card, but National Public Radio reports that information wasn’t included in the original letter.
Closer to home, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, issued a press release saying that 6,500 “noncitizens” who shouldn’t have been registered were recently scrubbed from state voter rolls. A coalition of voting-rights groups asked Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson to clarify whether Abbott’s claim means Texas dropped voters from its rolls within the 90-day period before an election — something that may be a violation of federal law.
“MAGA Republicans are dangerously manufacturing the false issue of non-citizen voting,” Jonah Minkoff-Zern, co-director of Public Citizen’s Democracy Campaign, said during a recent press briefing on the November election. “This false narrative aims to place barriers on everyday Americans to express our freedom to vote and perpetuate the Big Lie 2.0 so they can again attempt to undermine the results of the 2024 election should they lose. Instead of taking these extraordinary efforts to scapegoat immigrants and prevent Americans from voting, perhaps they should put forward an agenda that addresses the needs of the American people.”
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