Legislator overstates voter fraud
In defending his controversial voting bill on CNN this week, Texas state Sen. Bryan Hughes claimed half a dozen times that the attorney general’s office had 400 open voter fraud cases.
“That’s the fact,” Hughes, R-mineola, said in an interview with CNN host Pamela Brown. “It’s documented. There’s no question about that.”
Yet that number is almost 10 times larger than the number of people with pending voter fraud charges in Texas, which is 43, according to data from the attorney general’s office. Only one of those pending cases stems from the 2020 election, in which more than 11 million Texans cast ballots.
Hughes, who is the author of the Senate Bill 7, which would ban drivethru and overnight voting among other provisions, said in an interview that he was referring to the office’s 386 ongoing investigations of voter fraud as of April 5.
Investigations, or unproven allegations that have not yet been taken to court, are different than filed criminal cases in which there has been some evidence of wrongdoing found.
There have been no arrests in any of those cases, and because of the way Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office defines them, it’s unclear how many people are under investigation or how many offenses each of them may have committed.
It’s also unclear how long those investigations have been ongoing. A spokeswoman for Paxton did not respond to a request for clarification.
Texas Republicans, including Paxton, were among former President Donald Trump’s staunchest supporters as he falsely claimed the 2020 election was stolen from him.
But even as Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick offered up a $1 million reward for evidence of voter fraud and Paxton doubled the resources for his election integrity unit in 2020, none have come up with evidence of widespread voter fraud in Texas or anywhere else.
That hasn’t stopped them from pushing legislation like SB 7 that will reduce early voting opportunities in the name of preventing fraud, as Democrats and voting rights groups rail against it as voter suppression.
As was reported in December, the attorney general’s office last year spent 22,000 hours — nearly double what it did in 2018 — working on voter fraud cases but only closed half as many: 16 cases in which Harris County residents who used a false address on their voter registration applications. Most of those cases date back to the 2018 election.
CNN anchor Pamela Brown on Sunday pushed Hughes to explain why those closed cases were cause for concern.
“To what end does a state that already has some of the strictest voting laws on the books put restrictions in place on voting in the name of voter fraud?” Brown asked.
“There are over 400 open cases of investigations of voter fraud by the Attorney General right now. Because of COVID-19 protocols, courts were not open last year,” Hughes said.
Brown asked again how 16 minor cases “justify taking away access to voting,” and five more times throughout their conversation, Hughes repeated that there were “400 open cases” without clarifying that he meant investigations.
It was not the first time a Texas official has cited wrong or imprecise statistics on the prevalence of fraud as the Legislature moves to adopt more voting restrictions.
In March, the American Civil Liberties Union pointed out a discrepancy in testimony provided by Josh Reno, deputy attorney general for criminal justice, who repeatedly and falsely told members of the House elections committee that the office had 500 voter fraud cases pending. The cases pending against 43 defendants involve about 500 counts, to which Reno may have been referring.
The attorney general’s office did not respond to a request for comment by Hearst Newspapers on why Reno used that number, even after he took time to explain to members the difference between counts and cases. Counts refer to each instance in which an individual is accused of breaking a law. A case against a single defendant can include many counts.
“Counts isn’t really a great metric for what is actually happening,” ACLU senior staff attorney Tommy Buser-clancy said at the time. “It’s possible for prosecutors to rack up the number of counts, saying that same action violated four different laws, five different laws, and thereby inflate the number of total offenses charged.”