Voter Fraud Investigation is a Fraud

As reported in the Houston Chronicle; Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s “office spent nearly twice as much time working on voter fraud cases this year as it did in 2018 — logging more than 22,000 staff hours — yet resolved just 16 prosecutions, half as many as two years ago.” That’s according to records obtained from the agency by nonprofit government watchdog American Oversight.

Everyone prosecuted were Harris County residents who supplied false addresses when they registered to vote. Not a single one served even a day in jail. There were over 11 million votes cast in the presidential election here in Texas so Paxton’s teams found that .00000145% of them were cast by voters registered at the wrong address. If shoplifting and speeding had rates that low we’d hardly ever assign officers to those crimes.

Paxton considers the voter fraud a top priority of his office. Between January and October of 2020 assigned eight additional law enforcement sergeants in addition to the nine already assigned to the election integrity unit and doubled the number of prosecutors to four. Given the pay rates of the attorneys and experienced investigators assigned a conservative estimate is that Paxton spent $750,000 to investigate and prosecute a bunch of nobodies for very minor violations of election law.  That’s like the city assigning a sizable fraction of police officers to catch people speeding less than 5 miles an hour over the posted limit. There is plenty of more important work to be done with that kind of expenditure of Texas taxpayer money.

Like the previous occupant of the White House, Paxton and Gov. Abbott continue to claim that organized voter fraud is rampant and even with massive expenditures of investigative resources they’re unable to provide any proof. Even if Paxton is honest and competent, and I’d argue he’s neither, numerous academic studies and journalistic reviews have also failed to find evidence of widespread voter fraud. Even a wide-ranging investigation of election fraud conducted by the U.S. Justice Department under former Attorney General William Barr in the 2020 elections found no evidence of such fraud. Prior to his resignation Barr publicly admitted that investigators had “not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”

So to be clear, even the Republican attorney general who protected the former president from the Mueller investigation couldn’t gin up a shred of evidence for the big lie his boss and nearly every Republican in office today, except Liz Cheney and a handful of others, continue to extol and use as the excuse for making it harder for people to register to vote and cast their ballot.

If there is no organized voter fraud and elections aren’t being won with fraudulent votes then why is Gov. Abbott so upset that SB7, the omnibus election bill, failed to pass last month? He’s so upset he has threatened to veto the budget line that pays the salaries for the thousand staffers who work full time for our senators and representatives. Making government employees suffer because you don’t like the outcome of the legislative process is a whole new level of childish temper tantrum.

The real reason that Republican leaders like the former president, Gov. Abbott, Paxton and others claim widespread voter fraud is that it provides a fig leaf for their efforts to prevent the voters most likely to vote for Democrats from voting. They know that their policies aren’t popular and that they can’t win when more people vote so their strategy is simply don’t let them vote.

Published in the Seguin Gazette June 9, 2021