At the heart of Texas politics is a wheel of futility. In odd-numbered years, the Legislature meets. It works hard at looking busy. It solves the crises of the day, meeting the clamor of the right-wing activists who hold power in the state through their domination of the Republican primary. Bad thought is removed from schools, elections are saved from fraud, the border secured, property taxes fixed, lesbians and transgender people marginalized. The laws are brought back in line with God’s will.
But then something strange happens. In even-numbered years, the crises reappear. The state is on the verge of catastrophe, and only the Republican Party can avert it. The youths are once again being led astray. Voter fraud rears its ugly head. The border spins out of control. The gays are out there, homosexualizing. Property taxes continue to oppress those who own lots of property. With a decisive mandate, the GOP will fix the problems. This is the loop that results in the state drifting endlessly rightward—with once-fringe ideas becoming mainstream.
This way of governing Texas is of little benefit to most of its citizens, but for the party it’s useful. The sleight of hand here is necessary because the GOP has been in total control of the state for more than two decades. Whatever is wrong with state government—and there’s a lot—is squarely one party’s fault. Republicans need to be continually creating and escalating crises on issues they prefer to fight on—while obfuscating issues that would be impossible to fix without offending the folks who finance their campaigns. (The pro-family, pro-adoption GOP has never been particularly interested in fixing the state’s death-trap foster care system, which would require a lot of hard work and a lot of money. But they’re all in on sanitizing school libraries.)
Anyway, it’s that time of year again: It’s election security season. On Tuesday, the Bexar County Commissioners Court approved a plan to mail voter-registration forms to county residents, in what they argued was a cheap, innovative, and nonpartisan way to boost civic participation in November’s election. On Wednesday morning, Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a suit in state district court to stop them from doing so. It’s the latest escalation in a month of increasingly aggressive efforts to crack down on the specter of “voter fraud,” which we were told was solved during the last session of the Legislature, and the session before that, and the session before that . . .
Election fraud happens, of course. But the available evidence clearly shows that it’s pretty rare, and far too marginal to affect election outcomes. For the last two decades, the attorney general’s office under Paxton and his predecessor, Greg Abbott, has tried hard to investigate and prosecute election crimes, while the Legislature has steadily given it more tools to do so. For the most part, the attorneys general have uncovered what amount to petty crimes. Texas Republicans could rightly brag that they have successfully secured elections in the state. But they don’t. Instead, they stir a frenzy every election year, claiming that control of the state is about to be stolen by a shadowy cabal.
The frenzy has been growing fast in the last three weeks. The first salvo came when Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo tweeted, on August 18, that “a friend” in Weatherford, the seat of Parker County, west of Fort Worth, had spotted a line of “immigrants”—brown folks who were speaking Spanish among themselves—obtaining driver’s licenses at the local Department of Public Safety office, before being registered to vote. One wonders how this unnamed “friend” knew the immigration status of those in line—did she ask them? This is a common kind of complaint one sees in the rumor mill of right-wing social media. It amounts to “I saw some brown people.”
But the report went viral. The chair of the Parker County GOP issued a statement debunking the story. “There has been no large submission of registrants consistent with the claim,” he wrote. “The DPS office has confirmed that there have been no tents or tables and no one registering voters on their premises.” Bartiromo was not a particularly credible source on this issue: She had, years earlier, repeated false claims on air that Dominion Voting Systems rigged the 2020 election—information she received from a woman who self-identified as a time-traveler able to communicate with the wind. This misinformation, along with similar fabrications from her colleagues, prompted Dominion to sue Fox News for defamation—a suit that yielded a $787 million settlement. Bartiromo does not appear to have learned anything from the incident.
Paxton’s office quickly announced it would be opening an investigation into claims that “organizations operating in Texas may be unlawfully registering noncitizens to vote.” It appeared to use the frenzy Bartiromo caused to extend the story and raise alarm, though Paxton’s statement provided no evidence of the alleged misdeeds.
The frenzy built. The week after Bartiromo’s tweet, Paxton’s office launched raids in Atascosa, Bexar, and Frio counties, targeting what it alleged was a ballot-harvesting operation. The raids targeted the campaign of Cecilia Castellano, a Democratic state House candidate running in a district that Republicans hope to win in November. Authorities seized Castellano’s phone and also tossed the homes of five other members of her campaign. Castellano denies that she has done anything wrong, and no charges have yet been filed.
The context of these raids make it especially important for Paxton’s office to provide clarity that it has so far declined to deliver. The warrant his office obtained alleges that a Democratic politico improperly handled mail-in ballots in a way that benefited Castellano’s campaign during the primary election earlier this year. But the raids targeted members of the campaign itself, along with the candidate. Paxton’s office says the investigation has been ongoing for two years. But Paxton’s office has chosen to take action at a perfect moment to disrupt the Democrat’s campaign in the home stretch of a race that Republicans badly want to win. The League of United Latin American Citizens requested that the U.S. Department of Justice, led by the mousy Merrick Garland, investigate Paxton’s actions. But even if that happens, or if Paxton’s case falls apart—if he even brings a case—it will likely be long after the election takes place.
Paxton’s action against the Bexar County Commissioners Court is of a piece with these other actions, but is likely more consequential. Bexar commissioners sought to send registration forms to those they judged to be eligible voters. Harris County sought to do the same. If they do, it is likely other Texas counties will follow. Paxton’s legal challenge, whether he succeeds or fails, hopes to discourage others from following Bexar’s path.
He argues that the county doesn’t have the explicit authority to send such forms under state law. But the implicit critique is that Bexar will send voter-registration forms to residents who aren’t eligible—and that they’ll somehow end up on the voter roll. Democrats maintain, of course, that the real problem is that state Republicans don’t want more voter participation—especially in a county such as Bexar, which went for Joe Biden by eighteen points in 2020.
The problem with the idea that the Bexar program will allow undocumented immigrants to vote is that Bexar County does not add anyone to the voter roll unilaterally. It relies on the state to determine eligibility. The Texas secretary of state’s office receives voter registration forms and checks them against federal and state data. If the Legislature has made the secretary of state’s office robust in its powers, there should be no real danger in making voter registration forms widely available. In a sense, then, the drive to shut down Bexar’s registration efforts is the state arguing that it isn’t competent enough to prevent harm. There’s the wheel of futility again.
When Republican-elected officials start talking about voter fraud, there’s a tendency among Democrats to think it’s purely cynical—that it’s a disguised effort to crack down on efforts to register Democratic voters without a conviction that fraud is occurring. They think it’s projection—that Paxton is warning against election rigging in order to accomplish what amounts to election rigging. (Additionally, Paxton may be auditioning to be U.S. attorney general in a second Donald Trump term; crusading on this issue now is surely helpful to his relations with the big man.)
There are some compelling arguments in favor of this proposition. The state has an ugly history of cracking down on voter-registration drives, disrupting them without filing charges. One of the worst examples of this came during Abbott’s tenure as AG, when the state smashed a voter engagement effort in Harris County, stole the computers and records of the organizers, and forced them to pause their work for the duration of the election—and then never charged them with any crime. It’s hard to interpret this sordid history as anything other than voter intimidation.
But the truth is a bit stranger. Many right-wingers really do seem to believe that the state is rife with voter fraud. (Perhaps they choose to believe it—it’s a useful belief.) The Associated Press has published damning, extensive investigations into the culture of Paxton’s office. It reported widespread dysfunction and an inability to perform basic tasks. Slam-dunk criminal cases went awry because of staffing shortages, and defendants walked—including those who were alleged to be child sex traffickers. Few lawyers wanted to work for Paxton; many of those who did thought him corrupt and lazy.
But one of Paxton’s few real passions shone through. Amid all the mess, he found time to stage a showing to his senior staff of 2000 Mules, the massively discredited “documentary” from Dinesh D’Souza, who was convicted of campaign finance fraud and pardoned by Trump, which tried to make the case that the 2020 election was stolen. The documentary was coproduced by Texas activist Catherine Englebrecht, of the troubled right-wing activist group True the Vote. The film was short-lived; it was pulled from distribution after one of its subjects sued the producers of the movie for defamation. But it told Paxton what he wanted to hear, and what he wanted his staff to hear.
It’s perhaps best understood as a psychological balm. Paxton came within 3.6 points of losing his office in 2018, while Ted Cruz came within 2.6 points of losing his seat. Surely, such an outcome could be the result only of massive voter fraud. All around the state, Republicans are unnerved by long-term trends that show the state drifting away from them. They could take this as a prompt to go after voters in the middle once again: It is more comforting, on some level, to think that it is the result of illegitimate processes.
The irony is that this delusion is matched by a lesser one on the Democratic side, that what they call “voter intimidation” is the reason they can’t win elections. Voter suppression is bad regardless of whether it affects election outcomes—we should all hope for high voter participation in elections. But it isn’t the determining factor in Texas. Democrats have preferred to think that Texas is “not a red state, but a nonvoting state.” That is also not true. In the 2020 election Texas boasted 66 percent voter participation, a historically shocking figure. But the state Republican Party did very well. It doesn’t need to fear greater voter participation overall, as many low-propensity voters lean Republican. It need only fear greater participation in diverse counties such as Bexar and Harris.
An even greater irony, one that’s obvious whenever Paxton starts to call out alleged wrongdoers, is that he is a wrongdoer himself. The drip-drop of stories about Paxton’s crusade to save Texas democracy comes alongside a drip-drop of stories that seem to hint that a federal ethics probe of Paxton might not be dead—or that hint at the extensive and topsy-turvy moral universe of Paxtonland.
My favorite: In July, the Department of Justice charged Houston resident Anosh Ahmed, the former chief financial officer of a hospital, with embezzling $15 million. There’s no reason to believe the Ahmed indictment is specifically connected to a DOJ inquiry into Paxton. But Ahmed gave $165,000 to Paxton, the only politician he made a donation to. There are as many flimflam men in Paxton’s orbit at any one time as Jupiter has moons, and you have to wonder, once again: What are they getting for their investments in him?
