Under the guise of “election integrity,” Texas Republican leadership has systematically attacked voting access and turnout in the state.
It bears repeating: there was no widespread voter fraud in the 2020 Presidential Election that gave Joe Biden the victory. No evidence of systemic election tampering has ever stood up to official scrutiny. The oft-repeated conspiracy theory of thousands or even millions of votes cast by undocumented immigrants or other non-citizens remains a racist fantasy. Four years after Donald Trump lost the election, the biggest name to be indicted for election interference is Trump himself.
This has not stopped Texas Republicans from using the specter of election fraud to launch attacks on voting itself. The chief of these remains Attorney General Ken Paxton. When Trump began claiming foul play, Paxton was one of the first politicians to rush to his aid. Since then, he has launched many “voter integrity” actions, including a new one last August.
That one opened a tip line for Texans to report suspected voter fraud. It also implied that his concern was entirely because of undocumented immigrants, offering no evidence that any had actually voted or were planning to. The logical result of this action is that many people who see Latino voters speaking Spanish at polls are likely to have their ballots flagged regardless of citizenship.
Paxton has been busy. The San Antonio Current did a thorough analysis in his various legal maneuvering to get voting places and activism shut down under the banner of protecting elections. For instance, Paxton sued Bexar County for hiring an outside contract to send voter registration cards via the mail. Meanwhile, he’s been harassing various Get Out the Vote organizations, including an octogenarian. Once again, he claims it is because undocumented immigrants are voting.
His actions create an atmosphere of terror. Activists and voter rights organizations may curtail activities, fearing official retribution. Unregistered voters, particularly those who fit the profile of the election-stealing illegal immigrant Paxton works so hard to keep in the public eye, might sit elections out to avoid drawing unwanted attention.
The reason behind this is something Paxton talked about in 2021. During an appearance on Steve Bannon’s podcast, he claimed that if he hadn’t worked to curtail mail-in voting during the COVID pandemic, Trump would have lost Texas. Paxton knows that the state’s population is growing more diverse and Democratic, and holding onto power will depend on fewer of those people voting.
Meanwhile, Tarrant County Judge Tim O’Hare proposed eliminating ballot locations on college campuses earlier this month. His official reasoning was that the campus locations were poorly attended and students could easily vote elsewhere to save the county money. Previously, Tarrant County Republicans argued that easy access to voting on college campuses endangered Republican control of the state.
In 2021, Governor Greg Abbott promoted and signed a bill that stripped away many of the voter access progress Harris County had made in the pandemic. This included 24-hour-voting and drive-up voting. Once again, he cited unproven election fraud. The end result was Texas’s largest county and bluest city losing access to more polling places after Trump carried Texas by around 5.58 percentage points, the lowest score for a Republican in two generations.
At every turn, Texas Republicans see voting access work and try to impede it, all to protect the state from an election fraud they cannot substantiate.
