Attorney General Ken Paxton's office is taking legal action against certain Texas counties over what his office has characterized as "unlawful voter registration programs," which purportedly resulted in voter registration forms being mailed to ineligible voters, including, in one instance, a resident deceased for over four decades. Travis County is accused of using a third-party service with alleged partisan affiliations to send out these registrations.
Problems with the registration efforts came to light after documents were obtained by Paxton's office. They revealed that on September 18, a Travis County registration initiative, presumably powered by information from Civic Government Solutions, had sent an unsolicited voter registration form to someone who passed away, back in 1980. In these documents, the county appears to encourage recipients of the registration form to submit it, without properly verifying their eligibility status or even if the recipients were still living, according to the Texas Attorney General's website.
In what Paxton has framed as a bid to secure election integrity, supplemental motions have been filed targeting these practices in Travis and Bexar counties specifically. These legal moves come in addition to ongoing litigation against these local governments for their contracts with the company Civic Government Solutions, which Paxton's office insists is partnered with partisan interests.
"These counties have already sought to avoid judicial review of their blatantly illegal election programs. Now, one of these programs sent a voter registration application to a resident who has been deceased for more than forty years," Paxton said on the Texas Attorney General's website. "These programs undermine election integrity and unequivocally must be stopped while litigation continues," his statement, echoing concerns of unlawful practices in the electoral process.
