The Harris County Clerk’s Office will stop using race-based targeting for election reminder ads under a settlement resolving a lawsuit brought by the Texas attorney general’s office.
The announcement comes after an investigative researcher accused the Harris County Elections Department of spending thousands of dollars on voting ads using filters “clearly intended to discriminate on the basis of race” in a “clear attempt to try and boost turnout among the demographics most favorable to Talarico.”
In a post to X last week, Capital Research Center investigative researcher Parker Thayer drew attention to the Harris County ads that used Meta’s “detailed targeting” feature to increase the likelihood that certain Facebook and Instagram users would see the ads. Keywords like “Afrobeat,” “China,” and “Guatemala” were used in the targeting.
Thayer claimed that the Harris County Elections Department was using keywords that targeted non-white demographics in order to preferentially remind individuals that were more likely to vote for Democrat candidates in the election.
The OAG announced the subsequent lawsuit against the Harris County Clerk’s Office on Thursday, noting that the clerk’s office “exceeded its authority … by classifying based upon race when advertising to provide Harris County voters with election information.”
“[Harris County Clerk’s Office] engaged in racially discriminatory advertising in an effort to increase voter turnout among particular races and ethnicities, but not others,” the OAG added.
Attorney General Ken Paxton recused himself from the lawsuit due to his current campaign as the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate.
“Under the secured agreement, the Harris County Clerk’s Office has agreed to remove the advertisements that used racially discriminatory targeting settings and refrain from reactivating those settings during the applicable election period,” the OAG stated in its Friday announcement of the legal victory.
In a recent news conference, Harris County Attorney Abbie Kamin called the lawsuit “an absolute circus and a distraction from the work that matters.”
“We continue to maintain that what Harris County did was legal. At the same time, we don’t want political distractions right now,” Kamin stated, noting that the ads accounted for less than 5 percent of the county’s total voter engagement budget.
According to reports, Harris County has seen a record amount of voter turnout with around 862,000 tallied votes as of Thursday morning.
