San Antonio Express-News

Video leads to election fraud arrest

- By Jeremy Blackman Staff writer Elizabeth Zavala contribute­d to this report.

A former San Antonio campaign worker was arrested Wednesday and charged with election tampering, the state attorney general’s office announced.

The allegation­s surfaced last fall after the conservati­ve activist group Project Veritas posted an edited video of the woman, Raquel Rodriguez, in which she appears to be helping an elderly person fill out a mail-in ballot form and discussing unlawful tactics, including assisting people at the polls.

The video included only snippets of what appear to be multiple conversati­ons, and it was not clear who Rodriguez believed she was speaking to or under what context.

Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, said in a statement that his office reviewed dozens of hours of unedited footage, and that Rodriguez says at one point that she knows her actions are illegal.

“This is a victory for election integrity and a strong signal that anyone who attempts to defraud the people of Texas, deprive them of their vote, or undermine the integrity of elections will be brought to justice,” Paxton said.

Rodriguez was charged with four counts, all felonies. She did not respond to a request for comment, and it was not immediatel­y clear whether she had an attorney.

In October, Rodriguez, who also goes by the first name Rachel, posted on Facebook that the group had approached her saying it represente­d an “anonymous candidate with money” looking for help in a future City Council race.

“I immediatel­y suspected something was wrong with this conversati­on,” she

said. “I chose to continue the conversati­on and ‘play along’ in order to discover the source and gather my own evidence that I could submit to legal authoritie­s.”

At the time of the video, she appeared to be working on behalf of a Republican congressio­nal candidate, and mentioned working for several other San Antonio area political figures, including former Republican state Sen. Pete Flores, newly elected state Rep. Elizabeth “Liz” Campos, a Democrat; and former state District Judge Renee Yanta, a

Republican. Flores and Campos listed payments to her in prior campaign expenditur­e reports.

Paxton routinely targets election fraud, an issue he and other conservati­ves contend is widespread, without evidence. His office spent nearly twice as much time working on voter fraud cases last as it did in 2018, yet resolved half as many prosecutio­ns, just 16.

Project Veritas, which is known for deceptive “sting” operations intended to expose supposed liberal bias and corruption, spent much of 2020 trying to delegitimi­ze mail-in balloting in the lead-up to the presidenti­al election.

In 2015, Republican state officials used a now-discredite­d Project Veritas video to drop Planned Parenthood from its Medicaid program, which serves low-income women. A conservati­ve appeals court upheald the decision last fall and it takes effect next month.

It was unclear what evidence the attorney general’s office reviewed in the case beyond the raw video footage. Nicole Garza, a Democrat elected to be judge of the 37th Civil District Court, was named in the video by Rodriguez as someone who had hired her, but Garza said state investigat­ors did not contact her about it.

A spokesman for Flores also said the former senator has not been contacted by the Attorney General’s Office.

Yanta sued Rodriguez days after the video was released, saying Rodriguez defamed her by claiming to the Veritas interviewe­r that she had Yanta and several other judges “in her pocket.” The suit is pending.

 ?? Courtesy photo ?? Raquel Rodriguez of San Antonio faces election fraud charges including unlawfully assisting people voting by mail and possessing an official 2020 ballot.
Courtesy photo Raquel Rodriguez of San Antonio faces election fraud charges including unlawfully assisting people voting by mail and possessing an official 2020 ballot.

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from United States