Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has opened an investigation into claims of nonprofit organizations registering noncitizens to vote in the state.
“Texans are deeply troubled by the possibility that organizations purporting to assist with voter registration are illegally registering noncitizens to vote in our elections,” Paxton said in a press release on Wednesday. “If eligible citizens can legally register to vote when conducting their business at a DPS office, why would they need a second opportunity to register with a booth outside?”
The announcement follows a report of a “massive line of immigrants” being registered to vote outside a “DMV” office in Weatherford by Fox News personality Maria Bartiromo, who posted the claim on X on Sunday morning and later repeated it on television.
The AG’s press release does not mention Bartiromo’s post.
The source for Bartiromo’s report appears to be the wife of a friend of a friend.
The Star-Telegram followed up on the claim on Monday, visiting the Driver License office in Weatherford — which is run by the Department of Public Safety, not Motor Vehicles — and observed no such registration activities taking place.
A Fox News spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A DPS spokesperson told the Star-Telegram that the story was not true and that the assumption that nonwhite people waiting in line to get driver licenses was “kind of racist.”
He confirmed that a group was registering people to vote outside a DPS office in Lake Worth the previous week, but not at the other sites mentioned in Bartiromo’s post.
The spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the AG’s investigation.
Brady Gray, Republican party chair in Parker County, said in a post on X Monday evening that the party had “spent the last 24 hours investigating the claims” and could not verify them.
But on Wednesday Gray said in a post on X that people trying to apply his statement to Texas as a whole were “zealots.”
He told the Star-Telegram that his party’s investigation only applied to Parker County and that the Texas AG’s Office has far more resources than his organization.
“To make a leap from that to suggest that that somehow refutes any claims anywhere in the state is a pretty ridiculous and frankly irresponsible thing for anybody to do,” he said.
Gray said he believes Paxton had more to go on when opening the investigation than a friend’s friend’s wife’s story.
“I have no information on that, but I would not assume out of the gate that the only thing the Attorney General has is a claim from a Fox News host,” he said.
Paxton’s office “has already confirmed that various nonprofit organizations” have been engaging in this activity, the press release states.
The AG’s office did not immediately respond to an inquiry into which organizations it had identified and how many such cases had been confirmed.
Paxton’s comment that a voter registration tent outside a DPS office would be unnecessary is not entirely accurate, according to Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of Common Cause Texas, which works to expand voting rights in the state.
“DPS is not a well-oiled machine known for doing their job really, really well in Texas,” he said, adding that one of those things is asking people if they want to register to vote.
“The idea that organizations doing voter registration outside DPS are doing something wrong is just faulty on its face,” Gutierrez said. “They’re just registering people to vote where they think people are who may not be registered.”
What safeguards are in place?
A person from an organization registering people to vote would be a volunteer deputy registrar who is not allowed to “determine if the applicant is actually qualified to register to vote,” according to the Texas Secretary of State’s website.
The Star-Telegram contacted the Secretary of State to ask about the feasibility of noncitizens registering to vote in Texas.
A spokesperson directed the paper to an Aug. 12 press release in which Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson said, “The State of Texas uses safeguards and checks against noncitizen voting, which is illegal under state law.”
A bill that Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law last year makes noncitizen voting a second-degree felony, and another he signed in 2021 “created additional election integrity measures including ongoing citizenship checks of Texas voter rolls and ID requirements for mail-in ballots.”
The SOS regularly checks voter registration lists with DPS information on noncitizens and also compares them to lists of people who have been barred from jury duty for lack of citizenship, according to the press release, which is titled, “Texas Leads the Way Against Noncitizen Voting.”
Texans can challenge a person’s voter registration based on citizenship, leading to a hearing and cancellation of the registration if the person is not a citizen. And another law Abbott signed in 2021 allows the SOS to withhold funds from counties that do not remove noncitizens from its voting rolls..
Texans must also present a valid ID at a polling station in order to vote on election day, according to another SOS website.
Tarrant County formed an Election Integrity Task Force in February 2023. The unit comprised of sheriff’s office investigators and district attorney prosecutors has investigated 12 cases since then. It has prosecuted zero.
