Paxton’s voter fraud power was limited, but still costing millions

AUSTIN – Since a 2021 court ruling limited Attorney General Ken Paxton’s ability to prosecute voter fraud, his office’s work combating those crimes has slowed to a crawl, according to the Houston Chronicle. Yet even as Paxton’s election fraud unit has seen its caseload dwindle and most of its lawyers disperse, it has continued to spend millions, records obtained by Hearst Newspapers show. Last fiscal year, the unit prosecuted just four cases and spent most of its $2.3 million budget. This year, which ends Aug. 31, it has closed just two cases and is on track to spend $1 million. Democrats and voting rights advocates questioned why the attorney general appears to be budgeting more money for the unit when it’s doing less work and when many agencies in Texas could use his office’s support.

Paxton’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment. To be sure, the office also seems to be working on cases that are still at the investigation level; those can take a long time and do not always end in a prosecution. Even before the December 2021 ruling, the unit didn’t produce a high number of prosecutions, and most cases were resolved with pretrial diversion, which provides an alternative to prosecution, or deferred adjudication, a form of probation. In 2021, for example, the office’s lawyers spent tens of thousands of hours working cases but closed just three. Paxton has made reversing the ruling a top priority, and he launched a successful effort this spring to support primary challengers to three of the Republican judges on the state’s highest criminal appeals court who co-signed the opinion and were up for reelection. The ruling prevents Paxton’s office from filing cases on its own, but it can still assist local officials on cases if they ask for help or take over cases when local officials recuse themselves. Jonathan Diaz, director for voting advocacy and partnerships at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan voting rights group, said the amount of money dedicated to the voter fraud unit, especially one that is now only doing this work in a supportive role, seems like “overkill.”