I’m sorry to make Ken Paxton the main character today, but he kind of is.
Still a crook any way you look
Bexar County is moving forward with plans to hire an outside company to find and register potential voters ahead of the 2024 presidential election — something Attorney General Ken Paxton has said he’ll sue the county to stop.
The move came after a roughly three-hour discussion in which nearly every elected Republican in Bexar County signed up to raise concern about the potential for the move to help Democrats more than Republicans.
Commissioners voted 3-2 in favor of the plan, with Commissioner Grant Moody (Pct. 3) casting the lone “no” vote and Commissioner Tommy Calvert (Pct. 4) abstaining amid concerns about the contract selection process.
Tuesday’s agreement calls for spending $393,000 to hire Civic Government Solutions LLC, which buys data from various sources to create a database of unregistered voters that wouldn’t normally appear in commercial voter files.
The company then mails out prefilled voter registration forms with prepaid return envelopes to those potential voters — the type of work normally done by political parties, campaigns and nonprofits.
But in the midst of various efforts by the state to purge potentially ineligible voters from its rolls, Bexar County is among a number of large urban counties exploring ways to take a bigger role in helping register new ones.
In a county with 1.27 million registered voters, CGS plans to make contact with 210,000 potential new voters ahead of the 2024 election, according to its contract with Bexar County.
In the coming years, it will also contact another 15,000 to 20,000 newly identified residents who’ve moved to the area.
After hearing from at least a dozen local Republicans, Commissioner Justin Rodriguez (Pct. 2), who brought the idea forward, said he didn’t invite a “bus full” of Democrats to make the case for hiring the company, because it would have injected partisanship into a nonpartisan issue.
“This is about democracy … we need for people to somehow have a better, easier way to access the elections department,” Rodriguez said.
Ahead of the meeting, Paxton said in a letter to Bexar County commissioners stating that counties don’t have the authority to print and mail state voter registration forms. If commissioners didn’t abandon the idea, he vowed, “I will see you in court.”
Larry Roberson, chief of the civil division of the Bexar County District Attorney’s office, dismissed the idea that the county was doing anything illegal.
“Paxton can sue, but I read through the letter,” Roberson said. “I found it to be misleading at best.”
I’m sure that’s true, but it doesn’t mean he’ll lose in court. If you put aside rampaging Republican paranoia about “non-citizens” registering to vote – as a reminder, voter registrations go through multiple verifications, including by the Secretary of State, before they are finalized – it’s hard to see what’s so objectionable about this. But being unobjectionable and being allowed in Ken Paxton’s Texas are two different things. The latter will be decided by the Supreme Court, and I know how I’d bet on that.
As noted elsewhere, Harris County is considering a similar idea; it’s not clear to me they’ll follow through, but there’s still time. This is where I say again that we need to restore and strengthen a federal Voting Rights Act, and we need to make sure it doesn’t get struck down by a corrupt federal judiciary. If we have the trifecta to make that happen in 2025, there better be no hesitation. Getting a better government in this state is next up. The Trib and the Current have more.
I wonder if the same argument that it could lead to a crime being committed be used for the sale of guns?
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