Texas AG Sues Second County Over Plan To Hire Vendor for Voter Outreach
State Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) is suing a second Texas county to prevent officials from using a third-party vendor to help with its voter registration efforts.
The lawsuit filed Thursday against Travis County’s tax assessor and county commissioners asks a state judge to block the county’s plan to hire Civic Government Solutions (CGS) to identify eligible voters who aren’t registered. The commissioners approved the plan unanimously last month.
The suit argues the plan “will create confusion, facilitate fraud, undermine confidence in elections,” and that the county doesn’t have the legal authority to use taxpayer money to fund the effort. A copy of the county’s agenda shows the plan will cost roughly $3,563 for every 10,000 names of eligible residents.
In a statement to Democracy Docket, a spokesperson for Travis County, which includes the city of Austin, said it’s “disappointing that any statewide elected official would prefer to sow distrust and discourage participation in the electoral process.”
“Travis County is committed to encouraging voter participation and we are proud of our outreach efforts that achieve higher voter registration numbers,” spokesman Hector Nieto said.
Read more about the case here.
Original post, Sept. 4, 2024:
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) is suing one of the state’s most populous counties to block its plan to mail out over 200,000 voter registration forms to residents who are eligible to vote but aren’t registered.
The Bexar County Commissioners Court voted Tuesday to hire a third-party vendor for $392,700 to print and send out 210,000 applications “in hopes of getting 75,000 new registrants,” according to Paxton’s lawsuit, which cites the court’s meeting agenda. The case was filed in state district court.
The Texas Tribune reports the forms will be sent to people who are eligible to vote but aren’t registered.
The company hired by the council, Civic Government Solutions (CGS), has sent “more than 10 million mailers since 2018 and has registered approximately 2 million people since 2018,” the complaint says.
According to the lawsuit, Elections Administrator Jacquelyn Callanen “objected to the measure. Her concerns included the potential for the mass mailing of voter registration applications to worsen the backlog that already exists in the Bexar County Elections Department,” the complaint said.
When reached for comment, a spokesperson for the county pointed to comments from Callanen and other commissioners at Tuesday’s meeting, where Callanen expressed some reservations about the plan.
“There’s already organizations out there that are registering people to vote,” Callanen said Tuesday. She explained that when her office processes voter registration forms, they’re required to send the information to the secretary of state’s office. “They are the ones that check that data,” she said — including verifying citizenship.
Before commissioners approved the plan, local Republican activists at the meeting slammed the deal with CGS as a waste of money and said it would ultimately help Democrats, according to the Tribune.
Paxton’s lawsuit also indicates some residents at the meeting took issue with CGS CEO Jeremy Smith’s past comments, claiming in the complaint that “several citizens expressed concerns over Smith’s prior public comments made on a podcast about his interest in getting people to vote for progressive candidates.”
Paxton says in the lawsuit the state’s Election Code “does not empower the voter registrar or any other county official to arrange for the mass mailing of voter registration forms unsolicited.”
Paxton had earlier sent a letter to the commissioners court threatening to sue if they moved forward with the voter registration plan. “Now that the commissioners have approved the illegal program, Attorney General Paxton filed a lawsuit asking for an injunction to prevent the program from taking effect,” Paxton’s release said.
The attorney general, who’s under scrutiny for his “election integrity investigation” that appears to be specifically targeting Latinos, sent a similar warning to officials in Harris County, Texas’s largest county that includes Houston.
Paxton threatened legal action over the county’s proposed plan “to spend hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to mail unsolicited voter registration applications to an untold number of Harris County residents regardless of whether those residents have requested such an application or are even eligible to vote,” according to Paxton’s letter.