I mean, Theranos would have delivered a greater return on investment than this.
Best mugshot ever
Texas Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton has been one of former President Donald Trump’s most reliable allies in spreading the myth of widespread voter fraud, particularly in the 2020 election, and frequently boasts that few states are as vigilant.
His office’s election integrity unit added two lawyers to the team in the last year, bringing it up to six staffers total, and worked more than 20,000 hours between October 2020 and September 2021. Its budget, meanwhile, ratcheted up from $1.9 million to $2.2 million during that time.
Yet records from the office show that the unit closed just three cases this year, down from 17 last year, and opened seven new ones. That includes the newly created unit focused on the 2021 local elections, which has yet to file a single case.
“This is an exorbitant amount of money that has resulted in no benefit for the average Texan,” said Austin Evers, executive director of American Oversight, a left-leaning nonprofit government watchdog that regularly files public information requests and files suits to force compliance with those requests. The organization shared some records it obtained from the Texas Attorney General’s Office with Hearst Newspapers for this report; others were obtained independently by Hearst Newspapers.
Evers added: “Taxpayers are funding a political stunt meant to fuel the false claim of a stolen election and justify voting restrictions.”
[…]
Richard L. Hasen, an election law professor at the University of California at Irvine, said there’s a more likely explanation, noting that Paxton, who is running for re-election, has “every incentive,” politically speaking, to vigorously go after voter fraud, as it’s an issue that energizes his party’s base.
“He’s finding very little of it despite spending a lot of money and using a lot of resources looking for it,” Hasen said. “The reason is not that such fraud is too hard to find. Those that commit voter fraud tend not to be brain surgeons. The reason he’s not finding a lot of it is because voter fraud is rare.”
Multiple academic studies and journalistic reviews have uncovered no evidence of widespread voter fraud, nor did a wide-ranging investigation of election fraud in 2020 conducted by the U.S. Justice Department.
There’s more, and the story does a good job of highlighting how Paxton takes the ridiculously small numbers involved in his crusade and exaggerates them to make them sound slightly less small, so read the rest. Just understand that facts have nothing to do with any of this, and won’t do anything to deter Paxton and his raving band of saboteurs. The argument here is exactly the same as the ones that Republicans have been using for at least the last 20 years for spending on “border security”: If they catch more cases of “vote fraud” it means that what they’re doing is working and so they need to get more money for it. If they catch fewer cases, it means that they’re falling behind and need to get more money to keep up. There are no circumstances under which spending less on this useless and harmful exercise makes sense.
One more thing:
While it’s true that the office has more cases pending this year over last year, 44 up from 38, that’s not because of a surge in new prosecutions. It’s because the vast majority of cases that were pending around this time last year are still making their way through the court system.
Among the cases pending include that of Hervis Rogers, a Black man from Houston who was charged this year with illegally voting while on parole, after he had made national headlines for waiting six hours to vote in the 2020 primary election.
A new ruling from the state’s highest criminal court Wednesday may afford legal relief to Rogers and potentially others, after it found that Paxton’s office does not have the constitutional right to prosecute voter fraud without the consent of local prosecutors.
Yes, given that recent ruling, one has to wonder how much of this activity is even legal at this point. I would suggest that attorneys for every one of the defendants in Paxton’s crosshairs, as well as all of those that have been convicted or pled guilty to something, start filing briefs to have cases and convictions tossed. Let’s expose this for the mockery it is.