Paxton sues Bexar County after warning about election fraud

After Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton warned Bexar County officials not to potentially engage in election fraud, they went forward with their voter registration plan utilizing what some called a far-left group and Paxton sued.

At a Bexar County Commissioners Court meeting on Tuesday, commissioners voted 3-1 to approve a plan to spend $392,000 to hire a company to print and distribute voter registration forms to unregistered county residents.

Paxton sent a letter to county officials Monday night warning them not to take the action or his office would sue. “It is unlawful and reckless for counties to use taxpayer dollars to indiscriminately send voter registration forms with no consideration of the recipients’ eligibility and without any statutory authority to do so,” he said.

Distributing voter registration forms to unverified recipients “could induce ineligible people – such as felons and noncitizens – to commit a crime by attempting to register to vote,” he warned, also saying that doing so violates state law. “Texas counties have no statutory authority to print and mail state voter registration forms, making the proposal fundamentally illegal.”

He said their plan “is illegal, and if you move forward with this proposal, I will use all available legal means to stop you.”

They moved forward with it, even after numerous residents expressed alarm and publicly opposed it. They also moved forward with it after Bexar County Election Administrator Jacquelyn Callanen said there were already 900 organizations in the county registering people to vote more than once, with numerous duplicates.

So many residents were being registered to vote that her office had to hire temporary workers to process the increased volume. They still have a 3,000 to 4,000 backlog of registration cards to process, she said. The cards keep coming in.

She also expressed alarm about pre-filled voter registration forms being sent to residents. One brought her a form with her sister’s name on it. “Her sister passed away ten years ago. This woman came in and literally threw this at us,” Callanen said, adding that constituents are “very angry.”

Another resident received a pre-filled voter registration form stating she wasn’t registered to vote but she has been voting for 26 years, Callenen said. There are so many of them, she said, she needs help to process all of the information and report it to the Secretary of State’s Office.

She also explained that her office processes the information on the card they receive and send it to the SOS, which then verifies the data. This includes checking Social Security numbers, driver’s licenses, citizenship and other information. Once the SOS confirms a voter’s registration, it sends back a unique voter ID number to her office.

“Every day we get back information on voter registration,” she said. “There’s a deceased person registered to vote, birthday doesn’t match, TEL doesn’t match, SSN doesn’t match, it’s a noncitizen. We get back a list of names … and we cancel them if we have to.

“What we’re seeing are tons of duplicates coming in,” she said, referring to numerous organizations registering the same person to vote more than once.

“As of today, we have 1,270,000 registered voters in Bexar County,” she said. She also expressed concerns about the county’s responsibility to “protect the voter.”

Resident after resident spoke against the plan. One, Melinda Roberts, told the court, “you are hiring a far-left organization to register Democrats to vote,” noting that the owner of the company “runs partisan organizations and his targeted eligible voters are Democrats. His companies are tech based, and he's on the record stating their political. They are progressive political entities. His companies and connections all lead to partisan politics.”

Another, Carol Andrews, said they were “spending an outrageous amount of taxpayer money and misappropriating funds to a highly partisan group. There are no safeguards built in … to prevent non-citizens and illegal aliens, which we know have come across the border, from receiving voter applications. This undermines the election process, and it gives citizens a lack of confidence in the fairness of the Democratic system.”

Another, Rachel Trevino said, “we have heard multiple speak about triplicates and voter registrations being sent out about dead voters. … It's really troubling to see that even knowing that Ken Paxton has addressed this, here we are still trying to vote on something ... that's taking money from the cookie jar of taxpayers to use for what your agenda is.” She also pointed out that four on the court are Democrats and only one is a Republican.

Paxton’s lawsuit names the county judge, four commissioners and the election’s administrator as defendants. It asks the court to halt the plan from going into effect and seeks emergency injunctive relief “to prevent them from giving a partisan organization, and violation of state and local procurement procedures, hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to mail unsolicited voter registration applications to an untold number of Bexar County residents, regardless of whether those residents requested such an application or are even eligible to vote.

“Defendant’s actions will create confusion, facilitate fraud, undermine confidence in elections, and are illegal ultra virus acts because they exceed statutory authority.”

“Despite being warned against adopting this blatantly illegal program,” Paxton said, “Bexar County has irresponsibly chosen to violate the law,” adding that he plans to stop them.