Texas AG Sues County Over Plan to Mail Out 200K Voter Registration Forms
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s (R) lawsuit against one of Texas’ most populous counties seeks to stop its plan to send over 200,000 voter forms to eligible voters who are not registered.
According to Paxton’s suit, citing the agenda of Tuesday’s court meeting, the Bexar County Commissioners Court decided to pay $392,700 for a third party vendor to print and mail out 210,000 registration forms “in hope of getting 75,000 more new registrants.” The case was filed at state district court.
According to The Texas Tribune, the forms will go to those who are registered but not eligible to vote.
In the complaint, it is stated that the company Civic Government Solutions (CGS) hired by the council has “sent more than 10,000,000 mailers since 2018, and registered approximately 2,000,000 people since 2018.”
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The lawsuit states that Elections Administrator Jacquelyn Calanen “opposed the measure.” The complaint stated that her concerns included the possibility of the mass mailings of voter registration forms to worsen the already existing backlog in the Bexar County Elections Department.
A spokesperson for the county, when contacted for comment, pointed out that Callanen, along with other commissioners, had expressed reservations at the meeting on Tuesday.
Callanen stated on Tuesday that “there are already organizations that register people to vote.” She explained that her office is required to forward the information from the voter registration forms to the Secretary of State’s Office when processing them. She said that the secretary of state’s office is responsible for verifying that all data, including citizenship, has been checked.
The Tribune reported that before commissioners approved the proposal, local Republican activists at a meeting called the CGS deal a waste and claimed it would help Democrats in the end.
Paxton’s suit also shows that some residents who attended the meeting were upset by CGS CEO Jeremy Smith’s previous comments. The complaint states “several citizen expressed concern over Smith’s public comments on a podcast regarding his interest in encouraging people to vote progressive candidates.”
Paxton claims in the lawsuit that the state’s Election Code does not “authorize the voter registrar, or any other official of the county to arrange for mass mailings of voter registration form without solicitation.”
Paxton had sent an earlier letter to the Commissioners Court threatening to sue them if they went ahead with the voter registration program. Paxton said that now that commissioners had approved the illegal program he filed a lawsuit to stop it from going into effect.
The Attorney General, who is under fire for his “election-integrity investigation” which appears to target Latinos specifically, sent a warning similar to that to officials in Harris County. Harris County is the largest county in Texas, and includes Houston.
Paxton, in a letter to the county, threatened to take legal action for its plan to “spend hundreds of thousands taxpayer dollars on mailing unsolicited voter applications to untold numbers of Harris County residents regardless if those residents requested such a form or were even eligible to vote.”
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