So much effort, so little to show for it.
Best mugshot ever
The Texas Attorney General’s office this year almost doubled the amount of time it spent looking into and working on voter fraud cases in 2018 — more than 22,000 staff hours — yet resolved just 16 prosecutions, half as many as in 2018, records show.
All 16 cases involved Harris County residents who gave false addresses on their voter registration forms. None of them received any jail time.
Attorney General Ken Paxton, who has made the hunt for voter fraud a top priority of his office, between January and October gave the election integrity unit access to eight additional law enforcement sergeants on top of the nine already assigned to it, and doubled the number of prosecutors to four, according to records obtained from the agency by nonprofit government watchdog American Oversight and shared with Hearst Newspapers.
In its 15 years of its existence, the unit has prosecuted a few dozen cases in which offenders received jail time, none of them involving widespread fraud.
[…]
The low number of prosecutions resolved this year in contrast with the hours worked shines light on a core disagreement between Paxton and voting rights advocates: Is the low prosecution rate a cause or effect? Does it signify that few cases exist or that more resources are needed to find the cases presumed to be lurking undetected?
Paxton did not respond to a request for comment for this story, but in a taped interview with the conservative-leaning Texas Public Policy Foundation in September, he explained why he believes the number of cases does not represent the scope of the issue.
“It just takes a lot of effort to take it through the entire process. So you’re never going to see thousands of cases coming out of an office that has three prosecutors, and we probably have more than most states,” Paxton said. “It’s limited to what we can do, but we try to send the message with what we do and the fact that we’re investigating well over 100 cases right now, that we take this seriously, and we’re going to do our best. You may be the unfortunate one we catch.”
University of Texas election law professor Joseph Fishkin said there could be another explanation.
“This is not the only voter fraud effort to pour in a lot of resources and end up with a relatively small number of cases found,” Fishkin said, referring to the Trump Administration’s voting integrity commission, which disbanded in 2018 after finding no evidence of widespread voter fraud. “Finding very few defendants, even if they can charge some with multiple offenses, is consistent with the possibility that there just isn’t that much fraud to prosecute.”
It’s also possible that Paxton, like Greg Abbott before him, is just really incompetent at his job, which in this case would provide counter-evidence to the belief that it takes a crook to catch a crook.
Myrna Pérez, director of the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights and Elections Program, said investing in a program that has not uncovered widespread fraud speaks to Paxton’s priorities.
“How many resources are they going to spend to try to put political wins on the board?” Pérez said. “No one is saying that there’s never mistakes or that fraud never happens. People are saying it’s extraordinarily rare; study after study demonstrates that that’s the case.”
Pérez added that the attorney general’s office tends to try to make examples out of voters who made mistakes and isn’t finding the organized election fraud that Paxton claims to be guarding against.
For example, Crystal Mason is a 45-year-old Fort Worth woman who was sentenced to five years in prison for casting a provisional ballot in the 2016 presidential election — one that was never counted — while on supervised release for a federal conviction. She has said she did not know she was ineligible to vote. At the end of November, her lawyers filed a petition to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to review her case and acquit her of the illegal voting charge.
“Crystal Mason got more time than that ‘affluenza’ kid,” she said, referring to a Texas man who got no jail time after claiming in court that his wealthy upbringing clouded his sense of right and wrong during his trial for killing four people while driving drunk. “It’s really hard to say who you’re protecting people from.”
He’s trying to protect Republicans from the scourge of Democratic voting. That much is clear.
Look, in a sense this is all just hunting for Bigfoot. The fact that we’ve spent all this time and money trying to find Bigfoot without ever finding any evidence of Bigfoot doesn’t mean that Bigfoot doesn’t exist, it just means we’re not looking hard enough. Alternately, one can claim that all this time and money being spent on Bigfoot hunting is the only thing that’s keeping us safe from rampaging Bigfoot massacres, because if we weren’t out there so publicly hunting for Bigfoot, then Bigfoot would get all emboldened and run amok in the community. And we wouldn’t want to send the message that we’re soft on Bigfoot, now would we?
I remember Hillary Clinton chasing Bigfoot, in the form of blaming Bengazi on a YouTube video. Seems even more ridiculous now.
Of course this guy is creating a job for himself, that’s what lawyers do.
Thanks for tipping me to Max Brooks’ latest!
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