Voting rights groups in Texas are warning of an impending showdown as Republicans in the state purge voters from rolls and execute search warrants upon voting rights groups in the name of election integrity.
Voting rights activists in Texas are accusing the state’s Republican leaders of limiting access to the ballot and cracking down on groups mobilizing and registering voters in the name of election integrity.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, authorized searches over the weekend on the homes of several members of one of the oldest Latino civil rights groups. And on Monday, Republican Gov. Gregg Abbott announced that 1 million people had been removed from the state’s voter rolls.
The officials say the moves were made to guard against the possibility of fraud at the polls, but activist groups insist they are the latest examples of a growing trend of voter suppression that’s been brewing in the state following President Joe Biden’s 2020 electoral victory.
And now with less than 70 days until the election, the groups are warning that voters will have an even harder time casting a ballot in November.
An ‘Unlawful’ Search Prompts Call for DOJ Intervention
Several members of the League of United Latin American Citizens were targeted in a series of searches ordered by Paxton on Aug. 20.
A copy of the warrant for the group that was left with a member ordered the seizure of all electronic devices, the opening of any business, election, or organization-related documents, and swabbing for DNA. The warrant said the purpose was to look for any evidence of violations of state election laws regarding vote harvesting and identity fraud.
Targeted were Lidia Martinez, an 87-year-old who has been a member of the organization for over 35 years and who has worked to expand voter registration for seniors and veterans in South Texas, and Manuel Medina, the head of Tejano Democrats and a LULAC member. Also targeted were a state House candidate and a local area mayor.
Paxton’s office said in a news release that the search warrants were issued based upon a referral by a local district attorney in 2022 and that a “subsequent two-year investigation provided sufficient evidence.”
But Domingo Garcia, president of the organization, says the incident has prompted his organization to call on the Justice Department to intervene and investigate Paxton’s office for violating the Voting Rights Act.
A letter from the group, first obtained by CBS News, sent to the federal agency accused Paxton’s office of carrying out illegal searches on the premise of voter fraud.
The search comes a week after Paxton’s office announced that it would be initiating undercover operations and an investigation following reports that several organizations in the state were registering people to vote who were not citizens – and, therefore, ineligible.
“Texans are deeply troubled by the possibility that organizations purporting to assist with voter registration are illegally registering noncitizens to vote in our elections,” Paxton said in a news release.
The operations were carried out by the Election Integrity Unit, created in the aftermath of former President Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss to investigate voter fraud despite assurances even from members of the Trump administration that the election was secure.
Eric Holguín, Texas state director for Unidos US, calls the searches a fear tactic targeting the Latino community.
“They only go after Latino communities on that and there haven’t been any significant arrests or numbers that this is happening,” he said.
SB 1 Rears it’s Head Amid Fierce Legal Battle
Abbott announced in a press release on Monday that over 1 million voters have been removed from the state’s voter rolls since 2021 when he signed into law Senate Bill 1 – a wide-ranging legislative package pushed by Abbott in the name of election integrity. Voters purged as part of the new law includes voters who have since moved out of the state, are deceased or are not citizens.
The release said that more than 6,500 people who are not citizens were removed, with an estimated 1,930 having a “voter history.”
Rachel Selzer, a senior case coordinator at Democracy Docket who covers Texas, says the removal of voters is very alarming so close to the election.
“While it is not uncommon for states to perform routine voter list maintenance – which entails removing deceased voters or individuals who have moved out of state – it is anomalous to see a state remove large numbers of voters within a fairly short period of just a few years.”
She adds that advocates are “rightfully concerned” about the legitimacy of the edits and the accuracy of the data they were based on.
Many groups quickly pointed out that Abbott’s honing in on voting by people who are not citizens is unsurprising. The concern that ineligible voters – particularly people in the country illegally – are casting ballots has resonated with the GOP base as part of a larger conspiracy theory that the Biden administration is encouraging massive unauthorized border crossings to fraudulently register new voters. Despite the claims, independent investigations and many voting rights experts have repeatedly debunked the claims of unlawful voting as a trumped-up nonissue.
The driving force behind this year’s purges is SB 1, a package of measures that mostly makes it harder to vote and oversee elections. Included in the bill, which is currently being challenged in federal court, is an audit every two years of elections from the secretary of state, the criminalization of ballot harvesting, and new rules for voting by mail.
However, the package has been deemed by many organizations as being restrictive and discriminatory toward Latino and Black voters and those with disabilities.
Like many of the more than 560 new voting laws that went into effect in the last four years, Texas’ controversial package was passed in 2020 in the aftermath of Trump’s loss. Seltzer says that Trump’s loss “most certainly” led to the state doubling down on its efforts to suppress the vote.
“Many prominent Texas Republicans – including Attorney General Ken Paxton, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, and others – peddled the ‘big lie’ and spread unfounded claims of voter fraud and a stolen election.”
She notes that the “big lie” – Trump’s insistence that the election was stolen from him – gave way to the controversial bill.
The State of Voting in Texas and Looking Ahead to November
For decades, voting and civil rights groups have been concerned about the state of voting in Texas. Before the bill’s passage, the state ranked last in the country for voter registration and access.
Selzer says that, like many Southern states, Texas has a “long and sordid history” of passing voter suppression laws that “disproportionately target minorities.”
Before a key Supreme Court ruling in 2013, Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 required Southern states with a history of racial discrimination to obtain “preclearance” from the Justice Department before making significant changes to laws involving voting access. The act was amended a decade later to include language discrimination, and Texas at that time became fully bound to its preclearance requirements.
“From 1975 to 2013, the state was under preclearance from the U.S. Department of Justice and received more Section 5 objections than any other state, many of which centered on its discriminatory redistricting plans and voting procedures.”
She says that as the state’s population grew larger and more diverse in the early 2000s, the state legislature responded with anti-voting legislation.
Add to that, the state’s demographics have been gradually shifting to the advantage of Democrats.
Holguín notes that major metropolitan areas like San Antonio, Austin, and Dallas are leaning heavily toward Democrats and that the suburbs around them are starting to turn purple or blue or have already turned for Democrats. The changing margin in part is why Biden lost the state in 2020 by only around 5%.
He says that, while the gap continues to shrink, state Republicans are taking steps to keep shaving the margins and help hold their numbers.
Now as both Paxton and Abbott pledge to continue with their probes and editing of voter logs, voting rights groups are warning it will be even harder to cast a ballot in November.
“These little tiny slivers of laws that people don’t think are consequential are having a big consequence on our community,” says Holguín.
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