Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit Friday to stop a county from using taxpayer dollars to pay a voter registration firm aligned with progressives to identify unregistered voters.
Travis County is allegedly illegally paying taxpayer dollars to Civic Government Solutions (CGS), a voter registration firm, to create a list of unregistered voters for the county, according to the lawsuit. Travis County, home of Austin, Texas, is solidly blue, and CGS CEO Jeremy Smith has made statements in the past that encourage people to vote for progressive candidates.
“Travis County has blatantly violated Texas law by paying partisan actors to conduct unlawful identification efforts to track down people who are not registered to vote,” Paxton said in a press release. “Programs like this invite fraud and reduce public trust in our elections. We will stop them and any other county considering such programs.”
Attorney General Ken Paxton Sues Travis County Over Illegal Use of Taxpayer Funds to Hire Partisan Organization to Identify Potentially Unregistered Voters: https://t.co/vi4WHU7xQG
— Texas Attorney General (@TXAG) September 6, 2024
The Travis County Commissioners Court approved the use of the firm on Aug. 27, with the contract extending to 2025, according to county documents. CGS has sent over 10 million mailers since 2018 and has registered 2 million voters, according to the lawsuit.
Smith is also the CEO of Civitech, which describes itself as a “progressive data startup,” according to Axios. Civitech is listed as a registered contractor of CGS, with their goal being to “drive support for progressive causes and candidates” and to register “likely Democratic voters across the nation could be the key to securing Democratic victory in 2024,” according to the lawsuit.
“Not investing now means not only will we lose some 2022 elections, but we will lose some 2024 elections and some 2026 elections because we haven’t converted people now to become habitual voters. It has downstream impacts,” Smith said on The Great Battlefield Podcast in 2022. “It’s pernicious in multiple ways, because the system we rely on does not show unregistered people, so the majority of our political efforts are accidentally leaving them out.”
Paxton filed a lawsuit on Wednesday against Bexar County for allegedly sending out massive amounts of registration applications regardless of whether they were requested via a third-party vendor. Paxton warned that the program would potentially allow illegal immigrants to vote and “invites election fraud.”
“It is unlawful and reckless for counties to use taxpayer dollars to indiscriminately send voter registration forms with no consideration of the recipients’ eligibility and without any statutory authority to do so,” Paxton warned Bexar County in a Monday press release. “These counties’ attempts to do so after the Biden-Harris Administration has allowed millions of illegal aliens to enter the country are especially troubling.”
Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced Tuesday that the state found and purged more than 6,500 noncitizens from state voter rolls, with 1.1 million total names removed from the rolls, including dead people, those who have moved out of Texas and people on the suspense list.
Tracy Davis, vice president of marketing at CGS, told the Daily Caller News Foundation that they trust the county to reject an “ineligible person” if they attempt to use one of their forms to register. Davis said their process was no different from a traditional voter registration drive, and their mailing process simply streamlines the process.
“As a nonpartisan organization, our focus is solely on identifying and assisting unregistered individuals,” Davis told the DCNF. “We do not use demographic, political, or any other criteria; we simply segment records based on county and registration status.”
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