Texas attorney general sues to stop mass voter registration mailings

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued Bexar County on Wednesday to stop officials’ plans to mass-mail voter registration forms to residents, saying they could end up in the hands of illegal immigrants and others ineligible to vote.

Mr. Paxton said state law doesn’t let counties print and mail their own state registration forms.

Bexar commissioners approved the mass-mailing plan on Tuesday, defying Mr. Paxton’s warning from earlier in the week.

“This program is completely unlawful and potentially invites election fraud. It is a crime to register to vote if you are ineligible,” Mr. Paxton said in announcing the lawsuit.

The county agreed to pay an outside contractor, Civic Government Solutions, $393,000 for the effort.

Bexar County Elections Administrator Jacque Callanen said she wasn’t involved in the commission’s decisions and is listed as the defendant because of her position as the administrator.

“The lawsuit contends that counties lack the authority to send out these unsolicited registration applications. And, that the competitive bidding process to hire this company was bypassed. I will go on record saying that I was not consulted in advance about hiring CGS,” she said in a statement.

Bexar, which includes San Antonio, is the fourth-largest county in Texas, with more than 2 million people.

Mr. Paxton this week also warned Harris County, the state’s largest jurisdiction with nearly 5 million residents, not to mass-mail voter registration forms. County commissioners were searching for ways to bolster registration and voter turnout but appear to have shelved those plans.

Texas’ deadline for registering to vote in November’s election is Oct. 7, and early voting begins Oct. 21.

Election Day is Nov. 5.

The Republican attorney general last month ordered raids on the homes of major Democratic and Hispanic activists as part of what he called an election integrity investigation.

Among those targeted were members of the League of United Latin American Citizens, the Tejano Democrats and a city mayor.

The LULAC has asked the federal Justice Department to probe Mr. Paxton’s actions, calling them “voter suppression and intimidation.”

Mr. Paxton said groups are setting up voter registration booths outside state driver’s license offices. But he said people are already offered the chance to register to vote inside the offices, so the “motives of the nonprofit groups” are suspect.

“The Biden-Harris administration has intentionally flooded our country with illegal aliens, and without proper safeguards, foreign nationals can illegally influence elections at the local, state and national level,” he said.

He said Texas law makes it a crime to assist someone who isn’t a citizen and Texas resident to vote.