Attorney General Ken Paxton has filed emergency motions against Travis and Bexar counties to supplement his lawsuits against their “unlawful” voter registration programs.
These motions resulted from an unsolicited voter registration form sent on September 18 to Louise O’Connor, maternal grandmother of former state representative and current Deputy Commissioner of Agriculture Terry Keel. His parents received the mailer for Ms. O’Connor, who is buried in Austin as she died in 1980.
“These counties have already sought to avoid judicial review of their blatantly illegal election programs. Now, one of these programs sent a voter registration application to a resident who has been deceased for more than forty years,” said Paxton.
Travis County officials recently countersued Paxton and Secretary of State Jane Nelson, claiming Paxton’s initial lawsuit against Travis violated the National Voter Registration Act.
Earlier, Bexar County Judge Antonia Arteaga rendered Paxton’s motion to stop third-party vendor Civic Government Solutions (CGS) from sending the voter registrations moot. CGS had already completed its purchase award “to print and mail State Voter Registration Forms, with postage-paid return envelopes, to unregistered voters in locations based on targeting agreed to by the County.”
Paxton later appealed for a temporary restraining order and injunction.
Texas Scorecard has since obtained several voter registration forms sent to long-registered Bexar County citizens from “Election Mail Service” (EMS).
Despite a return envelope to the Bexar County Elections Administrator, the registration form directly connects EMS to CGS: “Please contact us with any questions: support@civicgs.com”
In 2020, ProPublica called EMS “a project of a Texas public benefit corporation called Civitech.”
Civitech’s partisan blog discusses “targeting” eligible but unregistered voters to help Democrats in the General Election.
Yet EMS’ materials were so erroneous that Alabama’s former Secretary of State John Merrill warned citizens against using its voter registration forms.
Merrill wrote its “mailing appears to be based off an outdated voter list. Voters who are already registered are receiving this letter, as are individuals who have passed away and were already removed from our rolls.”
A week later, Ohio and North Carolina officials released warnings about parent company Civitech mailing unsolicited prefilled registration forms.
Civitech Founder and Executive Director Jeremy Smith told the Bexar County’s Commissioners Court that CGS has a “firewall” completely separating Civitech, keeping it “non-partisan”.
Smith claimed “There is no chance of a duplicate upfront because we run it against a weekly update of the voter file, and on whatever day it’s going to go out, it’ll be with the election administrator’s offices’ imprimatur of ‘This is correct.’ These people are not currently registered.”
Earlier in that hearing, Bexar Elections Administrator Jaquelyn Callanen warned against third-party voter registration organizations like CGS, even bringing evidence of dead and long-registered voters receiving voter applications. The court voted 3-1-1 to fund CGS anyway.
“These programs undermine election integrity and unequivocally must be stopped while litigation continues,” Paxton’s announcement concluded.
Voters who suspect an election violation may contact illegalvoting@oag.texas.gov.
