Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton fired a letter to federal officials on Monday with a demand for information that he says he needs in a push to remove immigrants who aren't U.S. citizens from the voter rolls in the Lone Star State before the general election on November 5.
Paxton told Ur M. Jaddou, the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, that Texas Secretary State Jane Nelson had furnished a list of 454,289 registered voters whose citizenship has never been verified as required by law.
Paxton asked Nelson on September 18 to seek the data that he's demanding now. The state lawyer included a proposed letter from the Texas elections chief to Jaddou to make a case for the information in question.
"Although federal and state law prohibits non-citizens from voting, federal law paradoxically creates opportunities for non-citizens to illegally register to vote while prohibiting States from requiring voters to have proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections—a common sense measure to identify illegal registration," the Texas AG said in the three-page communique to the country's top immigration official. .
"Under any circumstances, this federal prohibition against citizenship verification makes little sense, but it is especially troubling given the current scale of the illegal immigration crisis," Paxton added. "For these reasons, Texans are increasingly concerned about the possibility of non-citizen voting, and I have a responsibility to uphold the integrity of our elections."
Paxton won a round in court on Friday when the U.S. Fifth Court of Appeals overturned a district judge's ruling that temporarily blocked his investigation into allegations of commercial vote harvesting in Texas. Paxton's battle for election security here prompted raids on Democratic activists homes in South Texas - a move that was portrayed as a fishing expedition for a publicity stunt.
Paxton said he's confident that most of the registered voters he's targeted are eligible. But he said that an agency audit discovered 1,300 who weren't qualified registered to vote in four counties that were randomly selected for the review. "That is 1,300 too many when so many of our federal, state, and local election are decided by a handful of votes," the attorney general said.
Paxton's push for federal assistance for a voter purge comes at the same time Donald Trump is accusing Kamala Harris and Democrats of attempts to steal the November election with infusions of "noncitizen" voters who are registered illegally in swing states.
Trump has offered no proof to support the conspiracy that MAGA loyalists are repeating without evidence. Trump employed the same basic strategy in the months leading up to the 2020 vote when he knew he was destined to lose. Paxton sought without success to overturn the 2020 election in the U.S. Supreme Court based on Trump's baseless claims.
Paxton may be more concerned about U.S. Senator Ted Cruz in a battle with Democrat Colin Allred that he is on Trump's plight at the ballot box here this fall. Trump has been leading by 6 points on average in polling on the presidential race in Texas in the past month. But Allred has pulled within the margin of error in a Senate race that polls show Cruz leading by 3 points on average in the same time span.
