Harris County Elections Department is being accused of targeting liberal-leaning demographics in recent early voting reminder ads.
The department’s ads on Facebook and Instagram are specifically targeting a nonwhite, Spanish-speaking audience through Meta’s “detailed targeting” function.
Capital Research Center investigative researcher Parker Thayer called attention to the issue in a post to X on Monday, stating that Harris County spent $43,000 on the ads, with many using filters “clearly intended to discriminate on the basis of race.”
“This is an official government office. Race shouldn’t even be a consideration for them, and DEFINITELY not for their ‘remember to vote’ ads,” Thayer wrote. “This seems like a clear attempt to try and boost turnout among the demographics most favorable to Talarico.”
Thayer goes on to clarify that the “include” filter used on Meta ads means that the ads will be “shown at a much higher rate to Facebook and Instagram users whose likes, views, shares, and account history indicate an interest in those topics.”
The ads target keywords such as “Africa,” “Latin Music,” “India,” and “Asia,” and list several countries from Central and South America, and South and East Asia. Spanish is the only language chosen under the “Language” tab, which allows advertisers to “target ads to speakers of certain languages.”
“The biggest issue is that they’re using taxpayer dollars,” Advancing Integrity President Christine Welborn told Texas Scorecard. “Essentially, this is a government entity engaging in election engineering. They should target everyone or no-one.”
According to a recent report from Pew Research, asian, black, and Hispanic demographics consistently affiliate with the Democrat Party over the Republican Party, while white demographics consistently prefer the Republican Party.
“It’s sad to see government election offices betraying the trust of citizens by going out of their way to play games with reminders to vote,” Thayer told Texas Scorecard. “The county could easily have just used geographical filters to target the ads at the whole county, which they did, but then they took it a step further and decided that they needed to play partisan demographic games in a hotly contested election year.”
“The people of Harris County deserve better,” Thayer added.
The Harris County Elections Department has not responded to a request for comment on why it chose to target the ads.
