In 2021, a court ruled that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office has limited ability to prosecute voter fraud.
Since then, his office’s work combating those crimes has slowed to a crawl. But according to the Houston Chronicle, the taxpayer money spent on these efforts remains significant. In fact, last fiscal year, the voter fraud unit prosecuted just four cases but spent most of its $2.3 million budget along the way.
Taylor Goldenstein, a state politics reporter for the Chronicle, said it is also possible there are ongoing investigations that haven’t turned into cases yet or won’t turn into cases.
“So it’s not to say that there’s no work,” she said. “But the ruling that you were just talking about basically said that AG Ken Paxton can really only take up these cases if a local district attorney asks for his help or if they recuse themselves and essentially need someone to stand in for them.”
The four cases prosecuted last fiscal year were related to each other, Goldenstein said, involving an alleged voter fraud ring where four Latina women from Tarrant County were accused of being paid to forge mail ballot applications and mark the ballots of elderly voters during the 2016 election.
“The AG’s office said that those people did not know or did not consent to their ballots being marked. The lawyer for their attorneys, however, said that the women were just doing normal campaign activities and it was being painted as fraud, and he saw it as kind of an attempt to suppress the Latino vote,” she said. “That case, actually, the AG’s office moved to dismiss it and before it ever went to trial.”
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Goldenstein said there are some ways the Legislature could influence how the Attorney General’s Office spends its money, if lawmakers wanted to do so.
“The Legislature can essentially do whatever it wants, obviously within certain parameters. But they will sometimes put checks on agencies such as asking for a report,” she said. “For example, they’ve asked that of the AG’s office before, for all their outside counsel spending or all of their public information. They’ll ask for reports on larger topics. So it’s possible that if they wanted to, they could ask for a report on, you know, what kind of productivity the office is seeing or something along those lines.”
Goldenstein said the Legislature did allocate the funding the Attorney General’s Office earmarks toward broader categories of work – but beyond that it’s up to the agency to make more specific decisions.
“Each agency will send in their request and they’ll break down what they want to use their funding for. The Legislature will give broadly to categories such as legal services, say, but the agency, once they get that big pot of money, essentially gets to divvy it up how they want,” she said. “So with this voter fraud unit, that $2 million budget is really not a Legislature decision. That was the AG’s office saying this is what we think we need for this.”
Goldenstein said there is no evidence that there was improper use of funds within the voter fraud unit. However, the high budget did raise the question of whether that funding will go down at any point since the scope of the office is limited in this regard.
“Obviously there’s a bigger political issue going on in the background, which is that AG Ken Paxton has been pushing since the opinion to try to get it reversed. He basically primaried three of the judges on the highest criminal appeals court who made that ruling to try to install candidates who he thinks will help him with reversing the decision. And he was successful in that effort,” she said. “I’m speculating here, but it could be that the office wants to keep the funding where it is because it’s hoping, you know, eventually they get that power back.”
