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McALLEN — Filomena Leo began to weep this week as she reminisced about her late husband William “Billy” Leo and how he would encourage their neighbors to vote.

Billy Leo, who died in 2018, was at one point mayor of La Joya, a Rio Grande Valley city of about 4,600 people, and Hidalgo County clerk — among several other public roles he held in South Texas.

As a politician and civic leader, he also was influential in popularizing the focus on absentee voter turnout in local races here.

To help increase voter turnout starting in the mid-1980s, he hired campaign workers to engage elderly residents and help them vote by mail. Such campaign workers came to be known locally as “politiqueras,” though Leo moved away from the term when it became associated with unscrupulous strategies such as paying for votes, his wife said.

“He did not like that at all,” Leo said. “He was very clear with those that helped him get the vote out — yes, he would pay them for their day, but never, never to offer voters pay for their casting a vote.”

The mobilization of campaign workers to assist elderly and disabled voters has been criticized locally and throughout the state in recent years, becoming the target of crackdowns by state lawmakers who have enacted tighter restrictions on voting by mail.

[Texas Latino leaders label voter fraud investigation “nonsense,” call for federal, state reviews]

Inspired in large part by the unverified claims of voter fraud by former President Donald Trump and his allies following the 2020 election, the Texas legislature enacted one of the largest rewrites of election laws.

Known as Senate Bill 1, it barred local election officials from sending unsolicited applications to request a mail-in ballot, even to people who automatically qualify to vote by mail. The law also established new rules for assisting voters with mail-in ballots, requiring the assisting person to fill out paperwork disclosing their relationship to the voter.

Last week, Texas authorities searched the homes of at least six Latinos as part of an ongoing “election integrity investigation” launched by Attorney General Ken Paxton.

In their search, authorities seized cellphones amid allegations that a longtime Frio County political operator had illegally harvested votes for multiple local races in recent years, according to court records obtained by The Texas Tribune. Vote harvesting is the act of collecting completed mail-in ballots from a wide swath of people.

Among the targets of the search were Cecilia Castellano, a Democratic candidate for the Texas House, and Manuel Medina, a former chair of the Bexar County Democratic Party and chief of staff to state Rep. Liz Campos, D-San Antonio. They and the campaign workers whose homes were raided deny any wrongdoing.

News of the raids went viral, especially after one of the nation’s leading Latino advocacy organizations accused Paxton of intimidating voters in an attempt to sway an upcoming state House race for Republicans.

Allegations of voter harvesting conducted by politiqueras often surface after elections in the Valley which has seen its fair number of heated election contests.

In 2018, the city of Mission, which abuts McAllen to the west, was embroiled in a legal dispute over the results of an election, a dispute that pitted former Mayor Norberto “Beto” Salinas against then-Mayor Armando “Doc” O'Caña.

Salinas accused O'Caña's campaign of bribery, illegal voting, and tampering with mail-in ballots during a runoff election that had unseated Salinas after 20 years as mayor.

After nearly two weeks of testimony, the judge presiding over the trial ruled the election invalid. However, a re-do election was never held because the 13th Court of Appeals reversed the decision, allowing O'Caña to remain mayor.

Rick Salinas, a Mission attorney who represented Beto Salinas, his father, in the election contest, blames ballot harvesting for what he views as the decay of the local political scene.

“A large number of the people that are holding public office right now, they are the product of these politiqueras and this underground movement that has existed for a long time,” Salinas said.

Gilberto Hinojosa, the Texas Democratic Party chair who represented O'Caña in the 2018 election contest, argues there was no evidence of ballot harvesting in the O’Caña case.

Salinas and Hinojosa are again locked in a dispute centered around another court trial related to the issue of assisting voters at polling sites.

Hinojosa said he believes vote harvesting has occurred in the Valley and in other parts of Texas. However, he said, Republicans only investigate alleged election fraud in Latino and Democratic strongholds like the Rio Grande Valley.

“What Paxton has done is misuse his office to intimidate normally Democratic voters from participating in the process,” Hinojosa said.

The difference between helping elderly voters in a systematic way to drive turnout and breaking the law can be a thin line, especially as the law has changed in recent years, election observers say. What may be illegal now might have just been normal practice a few years ago, said Alvaro Corral, a political scientist at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.

“I think it's a shift in perception,” he said. “This can't be disentangled from the broader post-2020 crackdown on, just generally, access to the ballot in Texas.”

And the attorney general’s investigation, he added, could have a chilling effect on voter engagement efforts in Latino communities.

“My sense,” Corral said, “is that election officials are increasingly hesitant to just provide basic language assistance for folks post SB 1 in Texas.”

Reporting in the Rio Grande Valley is supported in part by the Methodist Healthcare Ministries of South Texas, Inc.

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This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2024/08/28/ken-paxton-south-texas-vote-harvesting-investigation-politiqueras-hist/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.