Off the Kuff

“Silly season” doesn’t begin to cover this stuff.

Item 1: Paxton sides with Texas GOP, against secretary of state in lawsuit seeking to close primaries

Still the only voter ID anyone should need

Last month, the Republican Party of Texas sued over a state law that allows anyone to vote in any primary election, regardless of party affiliation.

On Thursday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton responded, not to defend the state law, but to side with the GOP in asking a federal judge to strike down parts of the election code that allow for open primaries.

“The unconstitutional law stopping the [Republican Party of Texas] from closing its primaries is completely indefensible and a slap in the face to the Republican Party and voters,” Paxton said.

This is the latest in a string of cases where Paxton, as the state’s top lawyer, has not only declined to defend a state law, but actively campaigned for the courts to strike it down.

Earlier this summer, the Department of Justice sued Texas over a law providing in-state tuition for undocumented college students. Paxton agreed to a consent decree striking down the law just six hours after the suit was filed.

Paxton indicated in a press release that he hoped to see a similarly swift resolution in this case, discouraging the Secretary of State’s office from “fighting this lawsuit with expensive out-of-state lawyers.”

Typically, the attorney general’s office defends state laws when they are challenged. But investigations from The Texas Tribune and ProPublica have identified at least 75 times when his office declined to defend state agencies in court; in other cases, Paxton’s office has hired expensive private lawyers to take on Big Tech companies and other high-profile litigation.

Paxton’s office gave Secretary of State Jane Nelson less than an hour’s notice that they would be siding against her agency in the lawsuit, a lawyer for Nelson said in a brief filed Thursday afternoon. She intends to oppose the motion, the brief said.

The GOP argued in its original lawsuit that the state’s open primary system, in which people can vote in either primary, regardless of party affiliation, is a violation of their rights under the First Amendment. They want a closed primary, where voters must register with a party before gaining access to the first, and in many cases, most important, round of voting.

The suit alleges that crossover voting, where people affiliated with one party vote in the other primary, leads to the selection of more moderate candidates and gives non-party members unfair influence.

“In Texas, Republicans, and only Republicans, should select Republican nominees,” Republican Party of Texas Chair Abraham George said in a brief statement posted on social media.

[…]

Texas has more than 18 million registered voters, all of whom would have to re-register with a party affiliation. The state would have to redesign its forms and software to allow for party affiliation.

“Re-registering the entire state’s universe of voters would be impossible in a five-month to six months,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston. “There’s no way to get around that.”

See here for the background. Insisting on being allowed to do the impossible is pretty much baked into the modern Republican Party. Good on Jane Nelson for standing up for her office. I wish her luck. The hand-picked judge for this case is our old buddy Matthew Kacsmaryk, so expect the usual level of deferential treatment.

Item 2: How the Texas GOP’s bid to block lawmakers from the ballot defies a century of court precedent

The year was 1930, and Texas Democrats had a problem.

State Sen. Thomas B. Love had declared his intention to run for governor as a Democrat, just months after he campaigned for Republican presidential nominee Herbert Hoover. For this unacceptable breach of party loyalty, the State Democratic Executive Committee wanted him off the primary ballot.

But they could do no such thing, the Texas Supreme Court said, ruling that Texas’ election laws “jealously guard the voters’ power” by compelling state political parties to place otherwise qualified candidates on the ballot, regardless of their adherence to party rules or loyalty tests. The state’s high court has repeatedly upheld this ruling, remarking in 1958 with some frustration that “no other holding would comport with sound public policy.”

But 95 years after Democrats were forced to keep Love on the ballot, Republicans are on the brink of testing the issue once more.

The State Republican Executive Committee is meeting Saturday to decide whether to censure lawmakers they consider insufficiently loyal, over infractions that include voting for an establishment-aligned speaker candidate over a rival backed by the House’s rightmost faction. Under party rules passed last year, these censures could bar candidates from the Republican primary ballot for two years.

As private ideological groups that run state-sanctioned primaries, political parties occupy a liminal space in our democracy. Courts have struggled to balance their free speech rights with their role as government actors, allowing parties to remove candidates from the ballot in some states while striking down such efforts in others.

But in Texas, the courts have been consistent: Party leadership cannot enforce its own purity tests to remove candidates from the primary ballot. The state party’s willingness to consider testing this precedent has frustrated even some staunch Republicans.

“We’re the party of less government and local control,” Smith County GOP chair David Stein said. “I don’t want 64 members of the SREC deciding who gets elected out of Smith County, Texas. That’s up to our voters, and I feel very strongly about that.”

[…]

Most cases where parties have been allowed to remove someone from the ballot involve candidates who are plainly antithetical to the party’s values, like [David] Duke, or a member of the opposing party seeking an electoral advantage, Kang said. In Texas, the lawmakers facing censure are longtime Republican elected officials, including current and former speakers of the House, who represent one of the party’s major factions.

“This is a much tougher case, when it’s someone in the mainstream of the party, and what party leadership is trying to do is enforce some sort of orthodoxy or party-line position that isn’t necessarily the consensus view within the party,” Kang said.

Some county GOP parties have condemned this effort as undemocratic, noting that it’s exactly the type of party-level control that voter-led primaries intended to get rid of.

“Such a concentration of authority in a small, centralized body resembles not the open democracy envisioned by our Founders, but instead echoes the undemocratic practices of the old Soviet Politburo, where a handful of elites determined who could or could not stand for election,” Burrows’ hometown Lubbock County GOP wrote on Facebook.

GOP megadonor Alex Fairly has vowed to tap into his $20 million political action committee to challenge any potential removals. The effort is “not only unlawful, it’s disastrous for the Republican Party of Texas,” he said in a statement.

A group of seven House Republicans facing potential censure, led by Burrows, sent party leadership a letter Wednesday asking them to reconsider.

“It sends a message that loyalty to the grassroots and to the national conservative agenda is subordinate to the whims of the local or state party insiders rather than Republican primary voters,” they wrote. “Candidate choice in Republican primaries must rest with the people, not party bosses.”

See here for more on Alex Fairly, the would-be billionaire overlord with some modicum of self-awareness. I say embrace the chaos, Republicans. Let their be a big ripping fight over who are the Real Republicans for everyone to see. If it gets a few people unaccountably mad at their colleagues, it’s all to the good.

Item 3: Dallas County GOP’s push to hand-count 2026 ballots could upend voting for Democrats

Republicans in Dallas County, one of Texas’ largest voting jurisdictions, say they want to count ballots in their coming March primary by hand, if they can afford to, a change that could delay the reporting of election results and have far-reaching consequences for all of the county’s 1.5 million voters.

The decision could force Dallas Democrats, as well as Republicans, to return to casting ballots at their assigned local precincts, rather than countywide vote centers, which would require finding scores of additional polling locations and hundreds more workers. It could also vastly increase the cost of holding both primaries, an increase that the parties would have to be prepared to cover on their own.

Cost is one reason why Dallas County Republicans decided in 2023 against hand-counting ballots. At the time, Jennifer Stoddard Hajdu, then the county GOP chair, estimated the party would need more than $1 million to hand-count the more than 70,000 ballots cast in the 2024 primary.

Two years later, Hajdu is still skeptical. “I just think there are so many parts to this that it’s going to be very difficult to get it done,” she said.

But Allen West, a former Florida congressman and Army veteran who is the new chairman of the Dallas County Republican Party, said that the size of the challenge shouldn’t deter the party. He said that party members distrust electronic voting equipment, and that the county’s problems with some of its electronic pollbooks last year contributed to the renewed push to hand-count ballots.

The Dallas County Republican Party’s executive committee voted in September to hand-count primary ballots, and set a goal to raise $500,000 to get it done, West said.

“Let’s not forget this is the way it used to be done,” West said, referring to hand-counts and precinct-based voting. In the Army, he said, “we don’t take that excuse of anything being too hard.”

Calls for hand-counting ballots have grown in recent years amid skepticism and misinformation campaigns about machines used for voting and tabulating ballots. But experts agree and studies show the method is time-consuming, costly, less accurate, and less secure than using machines.

In Gillespie County, in the Hill Country about 80 miles west of Austin, Republicans spent months training hundreds of workers to hand-count ballots in 2024. Republicans also designed ballots that couldn’t be tabulated by machines, and paid the printing costs.

On Election Day that year, 350 workers spent nearly 24 hours counting more than 8,000 ballots. In 12 out of 13 precincts, the party found errors in their tallies. And since state law does not require a post-election audit of ballots that are counted by hand, those results have yet to be checked for accuracy.

Even so, Gillespie County Republicans are planning to hand-count their primary ballots in 2026.

In Austin, Travis County Republicans hand-counted 2,000 mail-in ballots in 2024, which was a fraction of the total ballots cast. The group reported discrepancies in its own count that had to be corrected. Officials there told Votebeat that they have yet to decide if they’ll do so again in 2026.

In Williamson County, north of Austin, Republicans considered hand-counting for the 2026 primary, but have now decided against it. The county is home to about 450,000 registered voters.

“Once the logistics started to get fleshed out a little bit more, that’s when reality hit,” said Michelle Evans, the Williamson County Republican Party chair. Evans said requirements in state law mean it’s difficult to do a hand-count “without an extreme amount of manpower and a budget that we may not be able to fulfill.”

See here for more on the Gillespie County experience. Trying to argue facts with Allen West is like trying to explain linear algebra to a cat, so I’m not going to bother. I will just say that the position of the Dallas County Democratic Party should be that they do not support anything that would prevent them from doing countywide voting centers. I wish them, and all the poor souls in the Dallas County Elections office, all the best.

UPDATE: The censure effort was much ado about not much.

The Texas GOP has voted to censure five of its own in the Texas House yet stopped short of banning them from the 2026 primary ballot, rejecting an untested provision that some House members say would have violated their constitutional right to appear on the ballot.

The State Republican Executive Committee, the party’s governing board, met in the state Capitol on Saturday to consider whether to reprimand 10 Republican House members for being insufficiently conservative. In the end, the board rejected half of the censures and dismissed attempts to bar them from the March primary, a deescalation of intraparty tension that reached a fever pitch at the start of this year.

Whatever. Please keep the discord going, you guys. Fight more among yourselves, it’s good for the rest of us.