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
Posts
