Travis County Sues Texas AG For Thwarting Voter Registration Efforts
Officials in Travis County, Texas filed a federal lawsuit on Tuesday against Attorney General Ken Paxton (R), alleging his office violated the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) in its attempt to block the county’s voter registration efforts.
The lawsuit escalates a legal battle between county and state officials — after Paxton previously filed suit in a state court to stop the county’s voter registration outreach efforts — as the Oct. 7 deadline for Texas residents to register to vote approaches quickly. Paxton’s Sept. 5 lawsuit alleged that Travis County officials violated state law by hiring a third-party vendor to mail voter registration forms to unregistered voters who are eligible to vote.
“The State seeks emergency injunctive relief against the Defendants to prevent them from giving a partisan organization thousands of taxpayer dollars to identify the names and addresses of potentially unregistered voters without statutory authority,” Paxton’s lawsuit reads. “Defendants’ actions will create confusion, facilitate fraud, undermine confidence in elections, and are illegal ultra vires acts because they exceed statutory authority.”
But the latest lawsuit, filed by Travis County attorney Delia Garza (D), accuses the state’s Republican attorney general of violating the NVRA in his actions to block the county’s voter registration efforts. “Attorney General Ken Paxton does not want at least some eligible Texans to register to vote. To facilitate that goal, he has engaged in a campaign, using the power of his office to act on behalf of the State, to selectively sue, threaten, and harass county officials — including Plaintiffs — as well as nonprofit organizations across Texas, seeking to prevent them from facilitating voter registration and participation,” the lawsuit reads. “Likewise, he has engaged in a public campaign to dissuade eligible Texans into not registering to vote.”
“What reality are we living in here when our own attorney general has sued one of its own local governments to attempt to stop them from registering eligible voters?” Garza said in a press conference on Tuesday.
Travis County, which includes Austin, isn’t the only county in Texas that Paxton’s office has tried to stop efforts to register eligible voters. Earlier this month, his office sued Bexar County officials to stop them from mailing voter registration forms to eligible voters — but a state judge dismissed the lawsuit on Monday, saying the issue was moot since the registration forms were already mailed out. Paxton appealed the decision.