Video leads to charges of election tampering
SAN ANTONIO — 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 of
fice 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 leadup to the presidential election. In September, researchers at Stanford University found that a video the group released about Democratic U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar’s campaign was likely part of a coordinated disinformation effort.
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.
Allen Blakemore, speaking 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.
Attempts to reach Yanta and her attorney, Art Martinez de Vara, were unsuccessful Wednesday. A Campos spokeswoman said she would not be able to comment on the case.