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Bexar County officials moved forward Tuesday with a plan to mail county residents voter registration forms, defying Attorney General Ken Paxton’s threat to use “all available legal means” to quash the effort.

Paxton followed through Wednesday morning, filing a lawsuit in a state district court in Bexar County that seeks an emergency order to block the program. The lawsuit contends that counties lack the authority to send out unsolicited registration applications, while also arguing that Bexar County officials erred by awarding the contract without going through a competitive bidding process.

The legal clash escalates a brewing fight between Texas Republicans and some of the state’s largest counties over initiatives to proactively send registration applications to people who are eligible but unregistered to vote. Harris County leaders are weighing a similar plan, and Paxton warned the two counties against such efforts Monday evening, claiming they would run afoul of state law and risk adding noncitizens to the voter rolls.

Rebuffing those claims, Bexar County Commissioners Court voted 3-1 to approve a $393,000 outreach contract with Civic Government Solutions following three hours of fervent discussion at Tuesday’s court meeting. Local GOP activists spent more than an hour blasting the deal as an illegal waste of taxpayer money and insisting it would be used to disproportionately register Democrats, citing past comments from the firm’s leaders indicating support for Democratic candidates.

Democratic commissioners, backed by a county legal official, said Paxton’s legal threats were misleading and unfounded. And the firm’s chief executive said the outreach efforts would be strictly nonpartisan — a requirement of the contract, he said — and pose little risk of registering noncitizens.

“I have a personal view on who I would like to win the federal election. That is not to say that the contracts that we undertake with governments are in any way partisan,” said Jeremy Smith, CEO of Civic Government Solutions.

He noted the company uses a mix of public records and county data to identify people who could have recently moved and are unregistered, with a contractual obligation to contact “every eligible person who arises in any of those datasets.”

The court’s approval of the outreach contract came less than 24 hours after Paxton sent a letter to Bexar County commissioners warning the deal was illegal because the county “can take no action without a grant of legal authority,” and Texas law does not explicitly allow counties to mail out unsolicited registration forms.

Paxton cited his office’s successful effort in 2020 to block Harris County from sending unsolicited applications for mail-in ballots to every registered voter in that county.

“Because the same can be said for mass mailings of voter registration applications, I am confident the courts will agree with me that your proposal exceeds your authority,” Paxton wrote in his letters to Bexar and Harris counties.

Paxton’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Larry Roberson, chief of the civil division at the Bexar County District Attorney’s Office, said the 2020 and 2024 cases involve “two very different circumstances.” He noted that voter registration applications are widely available in post offices and other public locations, while state law more clearly restricts who can send out applications to vote by mail.

Paxton’s legal threat was the latest in a series of recent moves by Texas Republican leaders who say they are trying to protect the security of the state’s election systems and voter rolls ahead of the highly charged November election. A group of Democratic state lawmakers asked the Justice Department last week to investigate the recent spate of election-related actions, saying they were “sowing fear and will suppress voting” among communities of color. On Wednesday, five Democrats from Texas' congressional delegation joined the chorus of calls for federal action — among them U.S. Rep. Sylvia Garcia of Houston, who argued for "a swift and thorough investigation."

Gov. Greg Abbott announced last week that Texas officials had removed roughly 1 million people from its voter rolls since 2021 — though election experts noted such maintenance is a routine part of complying with state and federal law, and they warned Abbott’s framing could be used to undermine trust in elections.

Abbott’s office said the names scrapped from the voter rolls included more than 6,500 noncitizens who shouldn’t have been registered, and about 1,930 of those had a voting history. Voter watchdog and voting rights groups have questioned the figure, noting that Texas has wrongly flagged people as noncitizens before.

In his letters to Bexar and Harris counties, Paxton said the outreach proposals were “particularly troubling this election cycle” because of the sharp uptick in people illegally crossing the border during the presidency of Democrat Joe Biden, whose policies Paxton said have “saddled Texas” with “ballooning noncitizen populations.”

Paxton has routinely accused Democrats, without evidence, of adopting more permissive immigration policies in a bid to win elections by harnessing noncitizen votes — an argument he reprised last month, falsely telling conservative talk show host Glenn Beck that Democrats’ plan was to “tell the cartels, ‘Get people here as fast as possible, as many as possible.’”

Paxton’s office has also recently conducted a series of raids as part of an investigation into alleged vote harvesting in Frio, Atascosa and Bexar counties, a move the League of United Latin American Citizens cast as an effort to “suppress the Latino vote through intimidation.” Paxton has also probed what appear to be unsubstantiated claims that migrants were registering to vote outside a state drivers license facility west of Fort Worth.

At Tuesday’s Bexar County court meeting, Smith pointed to the checks in place that prevent noncitizens from registering to vote.

When voter registrars receive applications, they send them to the Texas Secretary of State’s Office, where they are checked for eligibility against Department of Public Safety and Social Security Administration data. In addition, local voter registrars work with their county district attorney’s office to check citizenship status using responses from jury summons questionnaires.

When Harris County considered hiring Smith’s company for voter registration outreach last week, state Sen. Paul Bettencourt, R-Houston, argued the move would “result in very high probability of registering non-citizens to vote.” He told the Tribune that was based in part on his experience overseeing the voter rolls as Harris County’s tax assessor-collector, when he found 35 noncitizens who in 2004 had tried to register to vote or were already on the voter rolls.

Though some critics of the Bexar County contract Tuesday echoed Paxton’s argument that the contract would violate state law, much of the opposition centered on allegations that the outreach would end up benefiting Democrats. Biden beat Republican Donald Trump by more than 18 points in Bexar County in 2020. Still, Trump carried the state with 52.1% of the vote compared to Biden’s 46.5%.

“Even if the process was designed to be nonpartisan … when you are operating in the most Democrat[-leaning] counties, then you're going to have a partisan impact,” said Commissioner Grant Moody, the court’s lone Republican.

Democratic Commissioner Rebeca Clay-Flores cast the torrent of GOP criticism as a “dog and pony show” that she said was based on false rhetoric aimed at making people “intimidated to vote.” She also dismissed concerns about noncitizens registering to vote.

“I am continuously talking to migrants, and none of them are trying to figure out how to vote illegally,” she said. “They are concerned with getting food, and clothes on their backs.”

The contract passed on a 3-1 vote, with Moody casting the dissenting vote. Democratic Commissioner Tommy Calvert abstained, while the other three Democrats — County Judge Peter Sakai, Commissioner Justin Rodriguez and Clay-Flores — voted in favor.

Disclosure: Texas Secretary of State has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2024/09/03/texas-voter-registration-applications-ken-paxton-bexar-county/.

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