{"id":34272,"date":"2024-11-03T10:27:00","date_gmt":"2024-11-03T16:27:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/?p=34272"},"modified":"2024-11-03T21:35:29","modified_gmt":"2024-11-04T03:35:29","slug":"texas-gop-amplifies-voter-fraud-claims-amid-tight-senate-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/?p=34272","title":{"rendered":"Texas GOP amplifies voter fraud claims amid tight Senate race"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Texas Republicans are making a preemptive push to paint the 2024 election as illegitimate and rife with fraud, a move that comes as Sen. Ted Cruz\u2002<\/u><\/a>(R) fights for his political life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That rhetorical and legal campaign \u2014 which has seen longtime GOP claims of illegal voting by Democrats blossom into allegations of a massive conspiracy \u2014 comes amid efforts by the Democratic Party to make inroads in the increasingly purple state<\/u><\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And they build on a decades-long campaign by the state GOP to respond to Texas\u2019s changing demographics to raise barriers to voting by Democrats.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those claims come as part of \u201ca national Republican commitment to establishing the idea of election fraud,\u201d Cal Jillson, a professor of political science at Dallas\u2019s Southern Methodist University, told The Hill.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Allegations of cheating, Jillson said, are being made not just on behalf of former President Trump, whose supporters are already preparing lawsuits to overturn his possible defeat, but also to allow legal challenges of \u201cany other very close elections that might take place.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And they come as Cruz finds himself locked in a competitive reelection battle with Democratic rival Rep. Colin Allred. Though The Hill\/Decision Desk HQ\u2019s forecast gives the Republican a 75 percent chance of winning, multiple polls in recent weeks have shown a tightening race.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jillson said that \u201cif Allred should catch him on Election Day, [Republicans] want to establish the idea that election fraud is a real, legitimate concern.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These claims have emanated from the top of the ticket and have gone well beyond Texas. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trump has for more than a decade<\/u><\/a> claimed that his losses were the result of widespread voter fraud<\/u><\/a> by immigrants lacking permanent legal status. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trump as recently as Thursday was alleging widespread \u201ccheating\u201d<\/u><\/a> in Pennsylvania and described\u2002voting Machines<\/u><\/a> as that \u201cbeautiful, often corrupt, machine.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And in a Thursday appearance on The Hill\u2019s \u201cRising,\u201d Trump press secretary Karoline Leavitt conflated the long lines at polling stations<\/u><\/a> in the hotly contested Philadelphia exurb \u2014 the subject of a successful campaign lawsuit to keep polls open late \u2014 with \u201cillegal voter suppression.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Texas and its statewide elected officials have been particularly ardent advocates<\/u><\/a> of the false idea of widespread illegal voting<\/u><\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cruz has repeatedly\u2002accused<\/u><\/a> Vice President Harris, Trump\u2019s opponent, of wanting \u201cmore illegal aliens to invade America because she views every single illegal alien as a future Democrat voter.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

During his debate last month, Cruz accused Harris and Allred, without evidence, of an alleged plot by Democrats to import foreign voters and ensure that \u201cevery statewide elected official in Texas would be defeated in the next election.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Other statewide elected officials claim, despite evidence to the contrary, that such widespread and coordinated illegal voting is already here. In August, Gov. Greg Abbott\u2002<\/u><\/a>(R) purged more than a million voters<\/u><\/a> from Texas rolls, while claiming that his office had found thousands of undocumented immigrant voters<\/u><\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIllegal voting in Texas will NEVER be tolerated,\u201d Abbott wrote\u2002on social platform X<\/u><\/a> at the time, adding that his office would refer alleged illegal voters to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton\u2002<\/u><\/a>(R) for prosecution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Investigations by The Texas Tribune and ProPublica have found these numbers to be inflated<\/u><\/a>, if not invented. On Tuesday, ProPublica published a\u2002profile<\/u><\/a> of a Trump voter, Mary Howard-Elley, who was incorrectly marked as a noncitizen after she \u201casked to be exempted from jury duty because of guardianship duties for three of her grandchildren.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In an interview with the news outlet, Howard-Elley expressed disbelief that this could happen to someone with the \u201cwhitest name you could have.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWho is allowing people to do this to United States citizens?\u201d she asked. \u201cI understand we have a problem with immigration, but come on now.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The most ardent warrior on the voter fraud front has been Paxton, who has repeatedly and without evidence alleged\u2002that Democrats are conspiring<\/u><\/a> with Mexican drug cartels to illegally import voters. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In August, Paxton announced an investigation into voter registration organizations that he says were \u201cillegally registering noncitizens to vote in our election\u201d \u2014 a claim that appears to be based<\/u><\/a> on a debunked\u2002friend-of-a-friend<\/u><\/a> story posted\u2002by Fox News<\/u><\/a> host Maria Bartiromo. In the story, Bartiromo\u2019s source appears to assume, without further investigation, that a line of Latinos waiting to register were \u201cimmigrants.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Around the same time, Paxton\u2019s officers executed search warrants<\/u><\/a> against Democratic organizers and a candidate in a key South Texas race and sued the state\u2019s biggest urban counties<\/u><\/a> over their voter registration drives<\/u><\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Paxton also sued Democratic small-dollar fundraiser ActBlue<\/u><\/a> over allegedly letting \u201dbad actors \u2026 illegally interfere in American elections\u201d; went after the federal government<\/u><\/a> for not creating a new process to verify that voters on Texas rolls are in fact citizens; and filed amicus briefs<\/u><\/a> in support of a recent, successful challenge by Virginia\u2019s Republican government to purge about 1,600 voters from state rolls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While reporting by The Associated Press shows many of these voters were citizens who, like Howard-Elley, the Trump voter in Texas, were removed in error<\/u><\/a>, Paxton on Wednesday characterized the Biden-Harris position as an attempt to \u201cforce [Virginia] to put noncitizens back on the voter rolls while the Election is already under way.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is, Jillson noted, an immediate practical benefit to Republicans, should they lose, in creating a widespread atmosphere of suspicion around election results: It will make those results easier to challenge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Paxton, like\u2002Cruz<\/u><\/a>, was an early and ardent supporter of the lie<\/u><\/a> that Trump won the 2020 election \u2014 claims that the attorney general took to the Supreme Court, and for which the State Bar of Texas is seeking to censure him<\/u><\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That comes amid a streamlined GOP operation ready to prove fraud, Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice, told\u2002the AP earlier this month<\/u><\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIn 2020, the election deniers were improvisational,\u201d Waldman said. \u201cNow that same election denialist impulse is far more organized, far more strategic and far better funded.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For both sides, that funding, too, is in part based on claims and counterclaims of fraud, election law professor Derek Muller of University of Notre Dame told the AP.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Both parties, Mueller said, \u201care fundraising on how they\u2019re able to protect democracy, how they\u2019re able to preserve the integrity of the election.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But recent history and current rhetoric offers one clear difference between the parties. Should Trump lose in 2024, Jillson said, almost five years of evidence suggests that Republican elected officials in Congress and across the states will \u201cgenerally back him up on his claims of a stolen election.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is newer, he said, is that those claims are now being made around \u201cother elected officials \u2014 even in races where they\u2019re very, very likely to win.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But in Texas, a state that did not allow its Black residents to vote until 1965, Jillson noted that these claims are part of a much older lineage. From the days when conservative Democrats ruled the state, he said, \u201cthe idea of controlling the unpredictable and untrustworthy masses has been an important part of Texas policy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cTexas conservatives have always been nervous about voters they do not know and trust to behave properly,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But GOP allegations of fraud have steadily picked up steam since 2000, the year then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush (R) won the presidency after the Supreme Court stopped the Florida recount in that year\u2019s disputed election.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the decades that followed, Texas Republicans used allegations of widespread voter fraud \u2014 first by Black voters, then by Latinos \u2014 to justify increasingly strict limits on the voting process, which have helped make Texas the hardest state to vote in<\/u><\/a> nationwide. (That distinction has helped place Texas among the three bottom states for voter registration<\/u><\/a>.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Republicans passed a series of restrictive voter ID laws<\/u><\/a> in the 2010s that a federal judge repeatedly found\u2002to be \u201cintentionally discriminatory,\u201d<\/u><\/a> though Paxton eventually won a case defending a softened version<\/u><\/a> of those laws \u2014 one that allows voters to submit photo IDs preferred by Republicans, like hunting and gun licenses, but not student IDs, whose holders skew Democrat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And in 2021, in tandem with their widespread claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election, Texas Republicans passed Senate Bill 1, a law that included provisions making it far harder for elderly, disabled or non-English-speaking voters to get help with their ballots.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That legislation \u201creally slammed the door shut\u201d on community outreach toward \u201celderly Latino voters who needed help either seeing the ballot, reading it or understanding the ballot,\u201d Nina Perales, vice president of litigation for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perales argued that in addition to blocking actual votes, laws like SB1 serve to keep less confident voters home. And in late September, after a challenge from MALDEF, federal Judge Xavier Rodriguez agreed, knocking down the bill\u2019s criminal provisions<\/u><\/a> \u2014 but only after the election on Nov. 5.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perales said that such restrictions are part of a Republican campaign to slow the erosion of their power amid a changing electorate. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Such election-season challenges to measures like voter ID, Republican strategist Brendan Steinhauser countered, hurt Democrats by adding fuel to GOP claims that the party isn\u2019t concerned about what its spokespeople now call \u201celection integrity.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At its core, Steinhauser said, Republicans claiming fraud are \u201cmostly due to the fact that their guy didn\u2019t win.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those claims, however, are becoming self-sustaining in a way that is in danger of outrunning their practical utility for Republicans, Joshua Blank of the Texas Politics Project (TPP) at The University of Texas at Austin told The Hill. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A September TPP\u2002poll<\/u><\/a> found that, after two decades of what the TPP team called \u201ccall and response\u201d on voter fraud by Republican elected officials, only 7 percent of party members were \u201cvery confident\u201d in the 2024 election results, and two-thirds believed that voting restrictions needed to be tighter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is \u201calmost nothing that Republicans in the state could do at this point to convince their own voters that the system isn\u2019t rigged \u2014 even though Republicans have had control of the system for the better part of the last few decades and have won all the elections.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That rhetoric has helped back a wave of legal challenges by the Texas GOP that lay the groundwork for attempts to overturn the 2024 election, experts told The Hill.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are darker currents too. On conservative social media, Steinhauser said, claims of widespread voter fraud are being used to justify once-fringe claims<\/u><\/a> that liberals engaged in a \u201cgreat replacement\u201d<\/u><\/a> to get rid of white voters and put minorities in their places.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those who believe the presidential election was stolen and \u201cthe other side is basically pulled off a coup of sorts,\u201d Steinhauser told The Hill, \u201cthen it\u2019s going to motivate you to do, motivate a small number of people to do terrible things.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

thehill<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Texas Republicans are making a preemptive push to paint the 2024 election as illegitimate and rife with fraud, a move that comes as Sen. Ted Cruz\u2002(R) fights for his political life. That rhetorical and legal campaign \u2014 which has seen longtime GOP claims of illegal voting by Democrats blossom into allegations of a massive conspiracy \u2014 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":34274,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[31061,1613,1752,2066,1298,2722],"class_list":["post-34272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","tag-contest","tag-election","tag-fraud","tag-senate","tag-texas","tag-voter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34272"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34272\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34275,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34272\/revisions\/34275"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/34274"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}