SEATTLE - Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton continues to fight Texas' counties to block an effort to register more voters ahead of the November 5 elections.
This time around, Paxton is suing Travis County after authorities in the fifth-most populous county in Texas decided to hire Civic Government Solutions to contact non-registered residents and encourage them to register.
The lawsuits led by Paxton are part of a series of steps both the Attorney General and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott have taken in recent weeks to "safeguard Texans' sacred right to vote."
In August, Abbott announced that the state had removed roughly a million people from its voter rolls since he signed a legislative overhaul of election laws in 2021. Gov Abbott claimed that, out of the over one million peopled removed, 6,500 of them were potential noncitizens and approximately 1,930 of them had a voter history, according to the office of the Texas Governor.
Despite Paxton's pressure on Travis County, a spokesperson for the county said the commissioners that hired Civic Government Solutions stood by their decision.
"We remain steadfast in our responsibility to uphold the integrity of the voter registration process while ensuring that every eligible person has the opportunity to exercise their right to vote," said spokesperson Hector Nieto. "It is disappointing that any statewide elected official would prefer to sow distrust and discourage participation in the electoral process," he added.
In response, Paxton called the decision illegal and said the county "blatantly violated Texas law by paying partisan actors to conduct unlawful identification efforts to track down people who are not registered to vote." He also added that programs like this "invite fraud and reduce public trust in our elections."
As reported by The Latin Times earlier this week, Paxton filed two lawsuits against Harris and Bexar counties, two of the state's most populous and Latino-heavy counties, over their plans to register voters via mail.
In letters written on Sept. 2, Paxton claimed the counties' mailing of voter registration forms would either "confuse" noncitizens about their eligibility to vote or "induce" them to fraudulently register to cast a vote. The two counties targeted by Paxton are either plurality or majority Latino, with nearly a fifth of all Texas Latinos living in Harris County alone.
In both letters, the Texas Attorney General accused county officials of facilitating illegal voting by noncitizens or those disenfranchised after being convicted of felonies.
Paxton's recent moves reflects those of other Republican leaders over the past few months, who have warned Americans of the threat of undocumented immigrants being able to cast a vote ahead of the November 5 elections.
Despite these claims being regurgitated by Republicans all across the nation, studies have repeatedly found that a relatively small number of noncitizens make it onto voter rolls, and even a far smaller number cast ballots.
A recent analysis published by the Cato Institute found that the number of votes cast by noncitizens discovered through state audits in 2016 ranged from three in Nevada, out of over a million votes cast, to 41 in North Carolina, where nearly five million votes were cast.
Although there is no indication that noncitizens are voting in large numbers, the narrative seems to be making an impact. Late last month, Paxtonannounced an investigation into whether organizations were registering noncitizens to vote, authorizing state police to search the homes of activists involved in registering Latino voters.
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