Texas AG Ken Paxton Sues County Over Its Efforts to Register More Voters

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) is suing one county in the state, and has threatened to sue another, over efforts to send out voter registration materials to residents in their jurisdictions.

Bexar and Harris counties, both Democratic Party strongholds in the state, had expressed interest in sending registration documents to all of their residents, regardless of whether or not they requested them. Paxton warned lawmakers in both counties that he would litigate the matter if they moved forward, dubiously claiming that the action would violate the Election Code because counties don’t have the explicit authority to send out such materials if they haven’t been specifically requested by individual residents. (Notably, the Election Code doesn’t explicitly prohibit such an action, either.)

Paxton also suggested that the blanket sending of registration materials to county residents would somehow facilitate voter fraud, specifically by encouraging noncitizen residents to vote. Said Paxton in a statement:

At best, this proposal is ill-advised because it potentially confuses residents of Bexar County about whether they are eligible to vote. At worst, it may induce the commission of a crime by encouraging individuals who are ineligible to vote to provide false information on the form. Either way, it is illegal.

Paxton’s arguments don’t hold much weight — for starters, registration documents are accessible to anyone who wants them, including noncitizens, through either a request to a municipal government’s office or through downloading them online and submitting them by mail. Indeed, the process for determining whether a person attempting to register to vote in the state is doing so improperly is not in the request phase, nor in the sending of documents to persons wishing to register, but in the submission phase, when a state-sanctioned voter registrar verifies a person’s information to determine whether they’re qualified to vote. The mass sending of voter registration documents would not interfere with the process of validating them, at which point, if a person tried to register who shouldn’t, it would be caught either way.

The form that would be sent out warns those who are ineligible to become voters that they would be committing a crime if they sent the document back in an attempt to vote in future elections.

In response to Paxton’s warning, Harris County opted to table the measure calling for the sending of registrations to residents in the county. On Tuesday, Bexar County officials voted in favor of their measure, prompting Paxton to file a lawsuit against that county on Wednesday morning.

In his statement announcing the lawsuit, Paxton said the program was “blatantly illegal,” despite no state statute saying so, and claimed Bexar County had acted “irresponsibly” in passing the measure — even though studies have shown that the amount of noncitizen voting in the state is effectively zero.

Bexar County Commissioner Rebeca Clay-Flores said that encouraging people to vote was at the heart of the county’s decision.

“The word ‘integrity’ was used in a statement by the attorney general regarding our voter rolls and [to] ensure only eligible voters can vote,” Clay-Flores said, referring to Paxton’s initial threat of litigation. “And that’s exactly what we are trying to pass…so we can encourage and make sure Americans exercise their right to vote.”

Texas does have a voter registration problem — not in the sense that fraud is being perpetrated on a mass scale, but rather that more than a third of the state who is eligible to vote isn’t registered to do so. According to statistics compiled by the Kaiser Family Foundation, only 65.2 percent of Texans who were able to register to vote did so in 2022, placing the state as 10th worst in the entire U.S. in terms of voter registration rates.

Long viewed as a Republican stronghold, Texas has seen small but noticeable shifts in its voting patterns over the past few election cycles. In the 2012 presidential election, for example, Republican Mitt Romney outperformed then-Democratic incumbent President Barack Obama by 15.8 points. In the 2020 presidential race, however, Democrat Joe Biden was only defeated by Republican Donald Trump by 5.6 points.