Texas Voter-Fraud Claims Don't Have to Be True to Achieve Their Goal

Federal courts struck down Texas’s original voter-ID law that would have required certain forms of government-issued identification in order to vote, deeming it intentional discrimination against minorities. But GOP officials who lead the state argued that the passage and implementation of the law was necessary to prevent voter fraud, and last year Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton accepted the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision to uphold a slightly revised version of the law that would allow other forms of identity verification for people who can’t get the proper government-issued documentation.

Yet, Republicans still don’t think the regulation has done the job. Last week, Texas Secretary of State David Whitley’s office sent an advisory to counties involving a list of people who’d been purportedly identified as potential non-citizens with a matching voter registration record. Activists and media criticized the list as inaccurate and misleading—and as a potential prelude to a new round of voter suppression. But that didn’t stop GOP officials from using the list as definitive proof of rampant voter fraud, despite having no evidence that anyone had voted illegally. Their fervor seemed to add to the suspicion that there’s an endgame for the party well beyond “ballot security,” and to the fear that new forms of voter suppression are just on the horizon.

On January 25 Whitley sent out letters to counties with a list of 95,000 registered voters who were matched with names flagged by the Texas Department of Public Safety as being non-citizens. Whitley and his office did not provide much in the way of methodology in its 11-month-long review of public records, nor did they respond to requests for comment. But his spokesperson said in a statement Tuesday that the release was “part of the process of ensuring no eligible voters were impacted by any list maintenance activity.” Ostensibly, the letters were intended to begin a formal citizenship review process, which would verify any claims of fraudulent ballots and also purge nonrespondents from voter rolls.

But from the outset, there were other forces at work. The secretary of state’s office referred the members of the list to Attorney General Paxton, who sounded the alarm via Twitter. “VOTER FRAUD ALERT,” Paxton tweeted on January 25, “the [secretary of state] discovered approx 95,000 individuals identified by DPS as non-U.S. citizens have a matching voter registration record in TX, approx 58,000 of whom have voted in TX elections. Any illegal vote deprives Americans of their voice.” Said Paxton in a separate statement: “Every single instance of illegal voting threatens democracy in our state and deprives individual Texans of their voice.” Texas Governor Greg Abbott also tweeted about voter fraud that day, mentioning the case of Enrique Salazar Ortiz, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico in San Antonio who pleaded guilty to illegal voting in the 2016 election, and to identity theft in October 2018, and was apparently sentenced just the day before Whitley published his list.


https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/02/why-trump-talking-about-voter-fraud-texas/581881/