An effort to reinstate the Texas attorney general’s power to prosecute election crimes is officially dead for the legislative session after House and Senate negotiators failed to reach a compromise before the Saturday night deadline.
House Bill 5138, which sought to reestablish the attorney general’s authority to pursue election-related offenses, stalled in a conference committee after the two chambers approved substantially different versions of the proposal.
The House version would have only allowed the attorney general to act if a local district attorney failed to bring charges within six months of receiving a case.
The Senate version—passed in a 19-12 vote—would have given the attorney general concurrent jurisdiction to prosecute alleged violations immediately, restoring the powers stripped away by a controversial opinion by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in 2021.
Attorney General Ken Paxton had publicly urged lawmakers to accept the Senate’s changes, warning that the current system allows voter fraud to go unchecked in jurisdictions where liberal prosecutors refuse to act.
“If the Attorney General can’t prosecute voter fraud, and local DAs won’t, then the system is broken,” Paxton said last week.
But House leadership refused to concur and instead appointed a conference committee that included HB 5138 author Matt Shaheen along with a mix of Republicans and Democrats—some of whom were viewed as unlikely to support a more aggressive restoration of Paxton’s authority.
Sources familiar with the negotiations told Texas Scorecard the sticking point came down to the six-month delay in the House version, which the Senate and Paxton’s office viewed as an unacceptable barrier to enforcing election laws.
With the conference committee failing to reach an agreement by the Saturday night deadline, the measure is now dead for the session, which ends Monday.
The failure to pass HB 5138 represents a blow to one of the Republican Party of Texas’ top legislative priorities: restoring prosecutorial authority over election crimes to the state’s top law enforcement office.
“The Legislature failed to pass a critical bill to secure our elections despite the leadership of Senator Bryan Hughes who passed strong legislation out of the senate,” Paxton told Texas Scorecard. “However, it is important to remember that the reason the legislature was debating this issue in the first place was because activist judges on the Court of Criminal Appeals overturned 70 years of precedent to limit prosecution of election fraud. It is now up to the people of Texas to correct this dangerous error.
While Paxton’s office maintains an election integrity unit that can pursue civil actions and can still assist in prosecutions at the request of local DAs, his authority remains limited without legislative action.
Unless Gov. Greg Abbott calls a special session and revives the effort, the issue will now have to wait until the Legislature reconvenes in 2027.
No ads. No paywalls. No government grants. No corporate masters.
Just real news for real Texans.
Support Texas Scorecard to keep it that way!
