A long Chron story that documents the bullshit.
The only criminal involved
The first of the big cases to fizzle was in Gregg County.
Prosecutors and local politicians announced an investigation soon after county commissioner candidate Shannon Brown won the March 2018 Precinct 4 primary by only five votes. But it wasn’t until six weeks before the 2020 general election that Paxton unveiled a 134-count indictment charging Brown, his wife and two election workers with illegally rounding up mail ballots.
“We have a county commissioner under indictment for mail ballot fraud,” Sen. Bryan] Hughes said last year at a signing ceremony for his elections bill in nearby Tyler. “Anybody who tells you there is no voter fraud in Texas is telling you a very big lie.”
Early this year, however, the case quietly and dramatically shriveled. Each defendant admitted to a single misdemeanor infraction. Brown, who apologized for one technical election code violation, stayed in office. (He lost re-election in this spring’s Democratic primary.)
Officials have repeatedly refused to explain how a 134-felony indictment deflated to a four-misdemeanor violation. District Attorney Tom Watson, who is leaving office at the end of the year, did not return calls.
Another signature case took a hit this summer when a Hidalgo County jury acquitted former Edinburg Mayor Richard Molina of 12 counts of election fraud.
Molina was arrested in 2019 for “orchestrating an organized illegal voting scheme,” according to an attorney general’s office news release. Prosecutors said he tried to persuade voters to change their addresses — in some cases to an apartment complex he owned — so they could vote for him.
Molina, who won the 2017 race by more than 1,200 votes, said the case was instigated by a political opponent. At his August trial, he said he had relied on published opinions from the Texas Secretary of State and attorney general to try to decipher a vague state law describing where a person could claim to live for voting purposes. He noted the Legislature changed the law in 2021 to include more precise language.
“Nobody tried to hide anything,” added his lawyer, Jaime Pena.
It is unclear how Molina’s verdict will affect the still-pending cases of his wife and more than a dozen residents alleged to have reported moving into Edinburg to vote for him.
There’s more, but you get the idea. One key point that the story makes is that Paxton will pile on the charges – for example, including an individual charge for each alleged illegal vote – even though there’s no legal advantage in doing so, as any punishment would be concurrent and not consecutive, meaning that 100 convictions would result in the same jail time as one conviction. But by doing so he can make the claim that there are “hundreds” of pending cases, even if the reality is a handful of defendants each with a bunch of charges for the same alleged offense. It’s the oldest play in the book, one he inherited from Greg Abbott back when it was Abbott’s job to pursue vindictive yet utterly baseless charges against people who for the most part did nothing criminal. The fear and the screaming headlines are the point.
To be fair, this sort of bullshit is happening in plenty of other places. It’s just that the primary effect is to ruin people’s lives and to scare others into not voting. We’re not dealing with rational actors here, but that doesn’t mean they can’t do real damage. And we’re in for another at least two years of it here.
Lies and the Lying Liars who tell them. May I introduce you to ken Paxton.
I never bought into the Russian collusion conspiracy.
Pingback: Texas blog roundup for the week of December 5 – Off the Kuff