Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sues Bexar County over voter registration outreach efforts

AUSTIN, (THE TEXAS TRIBUNE) Bexar County officials moved forward Tuesday with a plan to mail voter registration forms to county residents, defying Attorney General Ken Paxton’s threat to use “all legal means available” to stifle the effort.

Paxton followed up Wednesday morning by filing a complaint in state district court in Bexar County seeking an emergency injunction to block the program. The complaint argues that counties do not have the authority to send out unsolicited applications, while also arguing that Bexar County officials erred in awarding the contract without going through a competitive bidding process.

The legal dispute intensifies a brewing fight between Texas Republicans and some of the state’s largest counties over efforts to proactively send voter registration applications to eligible but unregistered voters. Harris County leaders are considering a similar plan, and Paxton warned both counties against such efforts Monday night, saying they would run afoul of state law and risk adding noncitizens to the voter rolls.

Rejecting those allegations, the Bexar County Court voted 3-1 to approve a $393,000 outreach contract with Civic Government Solutions after three hours of heated discussion at Tuesday’s court meeting. Local GOP activists spent more than an hour criticizing the deal as an illegal waste of taxpayer money and insisting it would be used to disproportionately enroll Democrats, citing past comments from company executives indicating support for Democratic candidates.

Democratic commissioners, backed by a county legal official, said Paxton’s legal threats were misleading and baseless. And the company’s chief executive said the outreach efforts would be strictly nonpartisan — a requirement of the contract, he said — and would pose little risk of registering noncitizens.

“I have a personal opinion about who I would like to see win the federal election. That doesn’t mean the contracts we enter into with governments are partisan,” said Jeremy Smith, CEO of Civic Government Solutions.

He noted that the company uses a mix of public records and county data to identify people who may have recently moved and are not registered, with a contractual obligation to contact “every eligible person who appears in any of these data sets.”

The court’s approval of the outreach contract came less than 24 hours after Paxton sent a letter to Bexar County commissioners warning that the deal was illegal because the county “cannot take any action without the grant of legal authority,” and Texas law does not explicitly allow counties to mail unsolicited registration forms.

Paxton cited his office’s successful effort in 2020 to stop Harris County from sending unsolicited absentee ballot applications to every registered voter in that county.

“Given that the same can be said for mass mailings of voter registration applications, I am confident that the courts will agree with me that your proposal exceeds your authority,” Paxton wrote in his letters to Bexar and Harris counties.

Paxton’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Larry Roberson, head of the civil division of the Bexar County District Attorney’s Office, said the 2020 and 2024 cases involve “two very different circumstances.” He noted that voter registration applications are widely available at post offices and other public locations, while state law more clearly restricts who can submit absentee ballot applications.

Paxton’s threat is the latest in a series of recent moves by Texas Republican leaders, who say they are trying to protect the security of the state’s election systems and voter rolls ahead of the highly charged November elections. A group of Democratic state lawmakers last week called on the Justice Department to investigate the recent wave of election-related actions, saying they “sow fear and will suppress voting” among communities of color. On Wednesday, five Democrats in Texas’ congressional delegation joined the chorus of calls for federal action — among them, U.S. Rep. Sylvia Garcia of Houston, who called for “a swift and thorough investigation.”

Gov. Greg Abbott announced last week that Texas officials have removed about 1 million people from its voter rolls since 2021 — though election experts have noted that such retention is a routine part of complying with state and federal laws, and they have warned that Abbott’s framing could be used to undermine confidence in elections.

Abbott’s office said the names removed from voter rolls included more than 6,500 noncitizens who should not have been registered, and about 1,930 of them had a voting history. Voter watchdogs and voting rights groups have questioned that figure, pointing out that Texas has a history of wrongly flagging people as noncitizens.

In his letters to Bexar and Harris counties, Paxton said the outreach proposals were “particularly troubling during this election cycle” because of the sharp increase in people crossing the border illegally during the presidency of Democrat Joe Biden, whose policies Paxton said have “burdened Texas” with “a burgeoning noncitizen population.”

Paxton has regularly accused Democrats, without evidence, of adopting more permissive immigration policies in an effort to win elections by exploiting the votes of noncitizens — an argument he repeated last month, falsely telling conservative talk show host Glenn Beck that the Democrats’ plan was to “tell the cartels, ‘Get people here as fast as you can, as many as you can.’”

Paxton’s office also recently conducted a series of raids as part of an investigation into allegations of vote harvesting in Frio, Atascosa and Bexar counties, an action the League of United Latin American Citizens called an attempt to “suppress the Latino vote through intimidation.” Paxton also investigated what appear to be unfounded allegations that migrants were registering to vote outside a state driver’s license center west of Fort Worth.

At Tuesday’s Bexar County Court meeting, Smith highlighted the controls in place that prevent non-citizens from registering to vote.

When voter registrars receive applications, they send them to the Texas Secretary of State’s Office, where their eligibility is verified against data from the Department of Public Safety and the Social Security Administration. Additionally, local voter registrars work with their county district attorney’s office to verify citizenship status using responses to jury summons questionnaires.

When Harris County considered hiring Smith’s firm last week to conduct voter registration outreach, Sen. Paul Bettencourt, R-Houston, argued that the move “would result in a very high probability of registering noncitizens to vote.” He told the Tribune that was based in part on his experience overseeing voter rolls as Harris County’s tax assessor-collector, when he found 35 noncitizens who in 2004 had tried to register to vote or were already registered.

Although some critics of the Bexar County contract echoed Paxton’s argument Tuesday that the contract would violate state law, much of the opposition focused on allegations that the outreach would ultimately benefit Democrats. Biden beat Republican Donald Trump by more than 18 points in Bexar County in 2020. Still, Trump won the state with 52.1% of the vote to Biden’s 46.5%.

“Even though the process was designed to be nonpartisan … when you operate in the most Democratic (Democratic-leaning) counties, then you will have a partisan impact,” said Commissioner Grant Moody, the court’s lone Republican.

Democratic Commissioner Rebeca Clay-Flores called the barrage of GOP criticism a “circus act” that she said was based on false rhetoric aimed at “intimidating people into voting.” She also dismissed concerns about noncitizens registering to vote.

“I talk to migrants all the time, and none of them are concerned about how to vote illegally,” she said. “They are concerned about feeding themselves and clothing themselves.”

The contract passed 3-1, with Moody casting a dissenting vote. Democratic Commissioner Tommy Calvert abstained, while the three other Democrats — County Judge Peter Sakai, Commissioner Justin Rodriguez and Clay-Flores — voted in favor.

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This article was originally published by The Texas Tribune and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.