Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit on Wednesday to stop a program that would send mass voter registration applications to residents.
Paxton sued the Bexar County Commissioners Court after it voted in favor of the program on Tuesday, according to a press release from his office. The Republican prosecutor argues that the registration applications would be sent to residents en masse regardless of whether they requested such forms — or even if they are eligible to vote, such as noncitizens or illegal migrants.
The program would hire a third-party vendor to print and distribute voter registration forms to unregistered residents in the county, according to Paxton’s office. The state’s top prosecutor argues that dissemination of these forms to unverified individuals could prompt ineligible residents, like noncitizens or felons, to attempt to register to vote.
Paxton additionally argued in his lawsuit that Texas counties have no statutory authority to print and distribute state voter registration applications, meaning the program is inherently unlawful.
The Texas attorney general previously sent a letter to the Bexar County Commissioners Court, threatening them with a lawsuit should they vote in favor of the mass voter registration mailings.
“Despite being warned against adopting this blatantly illegal program that would spend taxpayer dollars to mail registration applications to potentially ineligible voters, Bexar County has irresponsibly chosen to violate the law,” Paxton said in a statement.
“This program is completely unlawful and potentially invites election fraud,” he continued. “It is a crime to register to vote if you are ineligible,” he continued.
The lawsuit follows growing efforts by Republicans across the country to ensure noncitizens are not voting in U.S. elections. GOP leaders in Alabama, Virginia, Texas and Ohio have recently identified more than 17,000 noncitizens on their voter rolls, with reported evidence that some of them already voted in the past.
America First Legal — a conservative organization run by former Trump administration advisor Stephen Miller — sued all 15 counties in Arizona on Wednesday for allegedly failing to follow their legal obligation to purge voter rolls of noncitizens, following through on demand letters the organization sent to each county earlier this year.
More than 7 million foreign nationals have unlawfully crossed the U.S.-Mexico border since the beginning of the Biden administration, according to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data. The White House has also allowed hundreds of thousands of other noncitizens to enter the country via the CBP One app and the CHNV program, a controversial mass parole program that was paused last month over evidence of widespread fraud.
Paxton pointed to the massive influx of noncitizens and the potential for their unlawful voter participation when he first sent a demand letter to Bexar County.
“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 stated 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.”
The Bexar County Commissioners Court did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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