Texas AG Can’t Probe ‘Voter Fraud,’ Judge Says

Part of the state law Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton invoked to defend raids on Democrats and activists in the state is unconstitutional, a federal judge has ruled.

The legal provision struck down Saturday by U.S. District Judge Xavier Rodriguez is contained in S.B. 1, a controversial and sprawling Texas Senate omnibus bill first enacted in 2021. Among a variety of the bill’s features, it imposed restrictions and criminal penalties for canvassing methods used commonly by outreach groups and volunteers alike trying to assist voters with the completion or submission of their ballots, including absentee or mail-in ballots.

Paxton did not immediately return a request for comment on Monday.

When Texas enacted S.B. 1, the state deemed that “vote harvesting” methods would be considered a third-degree felony going forward and that convicted violators could face up to 10 years in prison and be forced to pay a fine of up to $10,000.

The notion of “vote harvesting,” however, was ill-defined in the legislation.

Paxton and Republicans in Texas championed the canvassing restrictions as a tool to fight voter fraud. In recent weeks, Texas law enforcement has raided the homes of a Democratic candidate for the Texas state house, a local mayor and Latino voting rights activists.

But Rodriguez said the canvassing language was confusing and overly vague, and that enforcement of the provision could infringe on the First Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment rights of people and entities who — long before S.B. 1 was ever enacted — engaged in common practices like hosting in-person candidate forums, giving voting machine demonstrations or providing language assistance to voters on how to complete ballots.

The judge noted, for example, that it was commonplace for bilingual volunteers to knock on doors in Texas and find that the person at home may need help translating something.

Canvassers for groups such as plaintiff OCA-Houston, for example, a network representing Asian American and Pacific Islanders in Texas, may also provide prospective voters with things like Gatorade or water if they are out in the elements.

This, according to Paxton, is an illicit “benefit.”

S.B. 1 as a whole was challenged in court for the first time in September 2021 when voting rights group La Union del Pueblo Entero brought a lawsuit on behalf of numerous voting and civil rights groups, Texas election officials and individual voters.

The group’s lawsuit was consolidated with a series of other similarly situated claims, including those from the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund. A bench trial was held over several weeks and ended in October 2023. The court weighed allegations that S.B. 1 chilled the plaintiff’s rights and imposed hurdles on groups that have already experienced disproportionate discrimination in Texas.

Notably, S.B. 1 banned 24-hour drive-thru voting in Texas, something made popular after the COVID-19 pandemic. S.B. 1 also made it a crime for poll workers to “take any action” that may make a poll watcher’s observation “not reasonably effective,” one of the plaintiff’s attorneys, Leah Tulin, said during closing arguments, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

During the state’s last election, this factor alone, Tulin said, led several county election officials in Texas to report that they “witnessed poll watchers behave in ways that made both election workers and voters feel uncomfortable, harassed, and intimidated.”

Even poll watchers who acted in good faith now feel intimidated by the threat of criminal liability for merely doing their jobs, Tulin argued.

Rodriguez’s order only addresses the canvassing restrictions. The decision means that Paxton is now stopped from conducting probes into alleged “vote harvesting.”

“The County DAs are permanently enjoined from deputizing the Attorney General, appointing him pro tem, or seeking his appointment pro tem from or by a district judge to prosecute alleged violations of TEC § 276.015 that occur within their jurisdictions,” the 78-page order states.

As HuffPost previously reported, an 87-year-old volunteer for the League of United Latin American Citizens said she was questioned for hours by armed police officers gripping riot shields. She wasn’t the only one. Dozens of volunteers were confronted by authorities, and some said they had guns pointed in their faces and their phones seized. Two of the volunteers allegedly targeted by Paxton’s investigators for so-called “vote harvesting” were a 73-year-old and 80-year-old LULAC member. A Texas state director for LULAC said the raids were an “intimidation tactic” used on Texas’s Latino community.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Texas celebrated Rodriguez’s ruling, saying on X, formerly Twitter, that it was a “win for voting rights in the state and the organizations that help keep elections accessible.”