Warrants cite gift bags in election fraud case
A San Antonio campaign employee accused of interfering as an elderly woman filled out her absentee ballot had rows of gift bags that matched the one she gave the woman, according to arrest warrants.
Raquel Rodriguez was arrested on Jan. 13 and charged with four felonies, including election fraud and illegal voting, by the state attorney general’s office. She was released the following day from the Kendall County Jail, northwest of San Antonio. Her bail totaled $60,000.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office began investigating Rodriguez after Project Veritas, a conservative activist group, released a heavily edited video that appears to show her helping an elderly woman fill out her ballot and discussing unlawful voter influence tactics.
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.
In October, Rodriguez, who also goes by the first name Rachel, posted on Facebook that Project Veritas 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, adding: “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.”
A sergeant with the attorney general’s office reviewed the raw Project Veritas footage and interviewed the undercover activists who recorded it, according to arrest warrants signed by Kendall
County District Judge Kirsten Cohoon.
Changing ballot
The warrants state that on Oct. 8, Rodriguez, who did political jobs for several candidates, agreed — in exchange for $500 — to take a person posing as a prospective client to watch how she obtains votes for her candidates.
According to the warrants, the video shows the pair visiting a home north of downtown San Antonio, where Rodriguez appears to help a 72-year-old woman change her ballot from U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, a Republican, to Democratic challenger MJ Hegar. The woman was one of a dozen people in the area Rodriguez said she assisted in voting, the warrants add.
Rodriguez brought the woman a gift bag containing a shawl that was adorned with a portrait of Mauro Garza, the Republican challenger to U.S. Congressman Joaquin Castro. Rodriguez said she worked for Garza and had rows of similar gift bags in her home office, the warrants state.
‘I could go to prison’
According to the documents, Rodriguez said, “I could go to prison for what I just did,” after leaving with the woman’s ballot and carrier envelope.
Investigators found the woman’s carrier envelope at the Bexar County Election’s Office in December. There was no oath of assistance or assistant’s name on the envelope as required by law, according to the warrants.
Attorneys for Rodriguez, including former Bexar County District Attorney Nicholas “Nico” Lahood, filed a writ of habeas corpus on Jan. 29 asking a judge to void the warrants and release Rodriguez from her bonds and pretrial release conditions.
The affidavits the attorney general’s office used to apply for the arrest warrants “contained false and misleading statements and failed to inform the Court of material facts,” Rodriguez’s attorneys wrote. A hearing on the writ is set for March 9.
Rodriguez has been charged with four counts: illegal voting, election fraud, unlawfully possessing an official ballot, and unlawfully assisting voter voting ballot by mail. Two of the charges were enhanced because the victim was over 65 years old.