Activists Cry Foul As Texas Officials Say 95,000 Non-Citizens On Voter Rolls
Source: Talking Points Memo/The AP
By PAUL WEBER
January 26, 2019 9:43 am
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) Texas elections officials said Friday that they have identified roughly 95,000 non-U.S. citizens on voter rolls going back to 1996, raising alarms among voting rights activists who called the numbers suspect and feared new efforts to tighten access to the ballot box.
The state has been one of the nations biggest voting rights battlegrounds in recent years and drawn attention over severe punishments in voter fraud cases. In 2017, a Fort Worth jury sentenced a Mexican national who has lived in the U.S. since she was a baby to eight years in prison for illegal voting, after which she faces deportation.
Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton highlighted that case in a statement about the latest numbers released by state elections officials. Roughly 58,000 of the suspected non-citizens are believed to have voted in at least one Texas election, and Paxton said his office will spare no effort in assisting with these troubling cases.
Nearly 16 million people in Texas are registered to vote. Paxton said his office last year prosecuted 33 people for voter fraud, though it was not immediately clear how many of those cases involved non-citizens.
Read more: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/activists-cry-foul-texas-officials-95000-non-citizen-voter-rolls
Lonestarblue
(10,011 posts)And theyre probably too poor to fight the state. Republicans are worried because Beto got a lot of votes, and all the major cities except for Fort Worth have turned blue. This will be only the first effort to kick people off voter rolls before the 2020 election. I expect other voter suppression efforts to follow, along with making sure old voting machines are programmed correctly. In many counties, the machines mysteriously changed a vote for Beto to one for Cruz when voters chose the straight Democratic vote. The Beto-Cruz switch was the only vote changed. Officials called it voter error. Uh-huh. Theyve known about the problems with these machines and the capability for flipping votes for at least a decade.
Its ironic that the Ken Paxton was indicted for securities fraud three years or so ago. He has used high-powered lawyers and friendly Republican judges to delay and get some parts of the indictment changed. He still keeps being elected even though voters know he cheated clients.
dalton99a
(81,515 posts)not fooled
(5,801 posts)although the Texasistan puke criminal cabal is shielding him from justice:
[link:https://www.texasobserver.org/with-texas-court-ruling-ken-paxtons-felony-case-may-fizzle/|]
Then Team Paxton went to work. Paxton leveraged the support of his rich friends, donors and out-of-state benefactors, amassing a legal defense fund war chest to pay for his top-dollar defense team. But it was Jeffory Blackard, a Paxton acolyte and multimillionaire real estate developer, who pioneered the defang-the-prosecution strategy.
TexasBushwhacker
(20,202 posts)and that's a HUGE assumption, that's 58K out of 8.5 MILLION votes cast in Texas or less than 1% (.68% to be exact). I'm sure Paxton assumes all those illegal votes were cast for evil Democrats, but that would be a mistake. Hispanics supported GOP Governor Gregg Abbott 50/50. 33% of Hispanics in Texas STILL support Trump. So Paxton is going after 67% of .68% of votes cast or .46% of total votes cast AT MOST.
I encourage him to go after anyone who registers or votes illegally, but I sure as hell hope he isn't spending a lot of time and state resources on them.
NCjack
(10,279 posts)Paladin
(28,264 posts)chowder66
(9,073 posts)McCamy Taylor
(19,240 posts)not_the_one
(2,227 posts)I bet the republicans know how to manipulate voter rolls and add whatever/whomever they need, to further the conspiracy...
Bengus81
(6,931 posts)So after 4-5 years of his racist chest pounding he found eight or nine people. All WHITE,mainly mistakenly voting twice when moving to Kansas after voting in another State.
Yep...there's your 10,000 brownies swinging Kansas elections.
noneof_theabove
(410 posts)Paxton also believes that snorting Unicorn horn powder will get you 25% longer 100% bigger girth.
Doremus
(7,261 posts)And, once there, how do they STAY there?
Americans are so easy going. Let's take a page out of the French book of kick ass first and ask questions later lol
old guy
(3,283 posts)Repub diversion to get the tRump wall fiasco off peoples minds. I doubt it will be successful.
allgood33
(1,584 posts)but we only look for brown undocumented immigrants when there a many others out there who seldom get challenged for ID for anything.
Gothmog
(145,321 posts)The Texas GOP is trying to justify some voter purges https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/texas-secretary-of-state-questions-citizenship-of-95000-registered-voters/ar-BBSKH7x?fbclid=IwAR2WBZ_e7FstfaVYxnjTybriiy2CMV87aj8uf1rmVsJ_ovSvQdFfurdFCrA
Because we have consistently seen Texas politicians conjure the specter of voter fraud as pretext to suppress legitimate votes, we are naturally skeptical, Representative Rafael Anchia, a Democrat in the Texas House of Representatives, said in a statement.
Kristen Clarke, the president of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, also cautioned that the states findings, and the speed with which the attorney general raised the specter of prosecution, could foreshadow an attempt at voter suppression.
Texas has a rich history of undertaking action to make it harder for people to vote, she said. Whenever youre invoking the threat of criminal prosecution, the chilling effect becomes almost unavoidable.
Gothmog
(145,321 posts)Link to tweet
?s=20
diva77
(7,643 posts)Gothmog
(145,321 posts)cstanleytech
(26,293 posts)for doing this for what is clearly political reasons rather than to actually stop any supposed voting fraud going on which is clearly as mythical as a unicorn.
Gothmog
(145,321 posts)It is long and I need to read it but the state Democratic Party is serious about this
Gothmog
(145,321 posts)Gothmog
(145,321 posts)Link to tweet
?s=20