Voting rights
In March 2017, Paxton told The Washington Times that he was convinced that voter fraud exists in Texas, and claimed that local election officials in Texas were not on the lookout for fraud. According to a July 11, 2021, article in The New York Times, even though voter fraud is "very rare in the United States"—most cases are minor errors on the part of a voter—Paxton "made it a mission" as attorney general to file voter-fraud charge. According to a July 9, 2021, article in The Guardian, "[F]ew prosecutors have pursued election-related crimes more than Paxton."
By February 2017—as part of his "crusade" against voter fraud—Paxton sought to investigate 2016 Texas voting records—such as access to individual voting history and application materials for voter registrations—to uncover potential voter fraud, for example, voting by non-citizens or in the name of the deceased. In February 2017, officials in Bexar County said there have been no major cases of voter fraud in San Antonio. The Associated Press reported that hundreds of people were allowed to bypass the state's voter ID laws and improperly cast ballots by submitting an affidavit instead of presenting a photo ID, even though they possessed a valid ID. The top election official in Bexar County estimates that 'a large chunk' of the nearly six hundred affidavits submitted should have been declined, and the voter should have been required to cast a provisional ballot. Of the roughly 13,500 affidavits from the largest Texas counties that AP analyzed, they found at least 500 instances of improper voting. However, Fort Bend County's top elections official said that these cases are not voter fraud, noting that only those who were registered to vote qualified for an affidavit, and that "poll workers were trained to 'err on the side of letting people use the affidavit instead of denying them the chance to vote.'" According to a May 2, 2017 ProPublica article, there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud in Texas. In 2017, the Texas Tribune reported that experts had said there was no reliable evidence of widespread voter fraud in the United States, and a Texas study of elections over a decade determined that there were about three cases of fraud for every one million votes in the state.
In 2017, the San Antonio Express-News criticized the state's voter identification law, which Paxton seeks to have reinstated after it was struck down by United States District Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos, who found the measure to be a violation of the Voting Rights Act, and found that it was passed with the intent to discriminate against Black and Hispanic voters. Paxton's office appealed the decision. Appeals continue in the case. By May 2017, the Office of the Attorney General's "efforts to enact and enforce the strictest voter ID law in the nation were so plagued by delays, revisions, court interventions and inadequate education that the casting of ballots in the 2016 election was inevitably troubled".
Of the voter fraud cases that Paxton's office chose to pursue, 72% were people of color. Among them was Hervis Rogers, a Black man working two jobs who had been waiting six hours in a line at Houston's Texas Southern University in Harris County, Texas, to vote in the March 2020 Democratic presidential primary election, and had been praised for his tenacity in exercising his right to vote. In Texas, it is a second-degree felony for a person on parole or probation to knowingly vote. Rogers had served a nine-year prison sentence for a burglary conviction in 1995; he was released on parole in 2004, and his parole ended in June 2020. In July 2021, Paxton ordered Rogers' arrest. Rogers said he was not aware that he had been ineligible to vote. Bail for Rogers was set at $100,000, which he could not afford. Hervis was not charged in Harris County (which is majority-minority), but rather was charged in the adjacent Montgomery County, where only 4% of the population is Black. The Bail Project, a non-profit, ultimately posted bail for Rogers, and he was defended in the case by the ACLU of Texas. The charges against Rogers were dismissed in 2022, after the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that Paxton had no authority to unilaterally charge Texans with election crimes.
The Rogers case was not the first time that Paxton had indulged in "forum shopping". He tried to get a Harris County elections official indicted and tried for alleged interference with a poll watcher, attempting to obtain that indictment in Montgomery County.
Few Texans charged by Paxton's office served time for voter fraud. An analysis by KXAN found that 24 of 138 people convicted of voter fraud in Texas between 2004 and September 2020 spent time in jail. Paxton acknowledged that a few defendants served prison time but defended his approach as a way to "send a message". Paxton's office spent almost double the time working on voter fraud cases in 2021 as it did in 2018. It recorded spending over 22,000 staff hours on the task, but resolved only 16 prosecutions, half as many as two years prior. All of the cases were in Harris County, lodged against voters who had provided inaccurate addresses on their voter registration forms. None of those defendants were sentenced to jail time. The costs of the 230 ongoing investigations and 360 prosecutions were formidable: The chief of election fraud is paid about $140,000, a second attorney received $97,000. Two other attorneys were each being paid about $85,000.
Paxton's voter fraud investigation unit had a budget of $1.9 million to $2.2 million in 2021. By the end of the year, the office had closed only three cases of fraud.
In May 2020, Paxton opposed an expansion of absentee voting to voters who lack immunity to COVID-19. A state district judge ruled that such voters could apply for absentee ballots under a statutory provision that accommodates disabled individuals. After the ruling, Paxton publicly contradicted the district judge and subsequently persuaded the Texas Supreme Court to address the issue of eligibility in a separate case he filed directly in that court, while putting the appeal of the district court case on hold.
During the 2020 election season, which occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, Paxton sued Harris County Clerk Chris Hollins, seeking to block him from sending applications for absentee ballots to the county's 2.4 million registered voters accompanied by instructions regarding eligibility as clarified by the Texas Supreme Court. Paxton lost in the trial court and in the intermediate court of appeals, but the Texas Supreme Court reversed and directed the trial court to enter an injunction against Hollins. The mail-vote promotion was part and parcel of Harris County's package of innovative measures to reduce the COVID-19 infection risk of in-person voting while maximizing opportunities for all voters to participate under pandemic conditions. The Republican Party of Texas opposed the expansion of voting by mail and other accommodations, and filed its own legal actions seeking to stop Hollins through the court system.
Paxton's office spent more than 22,000 hours looking for voter fraud after the 2020 election, finding only 16 cases of false addresses on registration forms out of nearly 17 million registered voters.
On December 8, 2020, Paxton sued the states of Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, where certified results showed President-elect Joe Biden the victor over President Donald Trump, alleging a variety of unconstitutional actions in their presidential balloting, arguments that had already been rejected in other courts. In Texas v. Pennsylvania, Paxton asked the United States Supreme Court to invalidate the states' sixty-two electoral votes, allowing Trump to be declared the winner of a second presidential term. Because the suit was cast as a dispute between states, the Supreme Court had original jurisdiction, although it often declines to hear such suits. There is no evidence of widespread illegal voting in the election. Paxton's lawsuit included claims that had been tried unsuccessfully in other courts and shown to be false. Officials from the four states described Paxton's lawsuit as recycling false and disproven claims of irregularity. Trump and seventeen Republican state attorneys general filed motions to support the case, the merits of which were sharply criticized by legal experts and politicians. Election law expert Rick Hasen described the lawsuit as "the dumbest case I've ever seen filed on an emergency basis at the Supreme Court". Republican Senator Ben Sasse opined that the situation of Paxton initiating the lawsuit "looks like a fella begging for a pardon filed a PR stunt", in reference to Paxton's own legal issues (securities fraud charges and abuse of office allegations). Paxton has called the pardon speculation "an absurdly laughable conspiracy theory" and said the lawsuit is about election integrity. The case was quickly dismissed on December 11.
Later it was revealed that the failed suit had been drafted by Lawyers for Trump, a group connected to the Trump campaign. Several other state attorneys general turned down the offer to file the suit. Solicitor General of Texas Kyle D. Hawkins, who would ordinarily represent the state in cases before the Supreme Court, refused to let his name be attached to the suit. The Texas attorney general hired Lawrence J. Joseph of Lawyers for Trump as special counsel for filing the suit.
After the failure of his lawsuit, Paxton traveled to Washington to speak at a political rally for President Trump on January 6, 2021. In his speech, Paxton told the crowd "we will not quit fighting". Immediately following, the crowd of Trump supporters left the rally and stormed the United States Capitol building in a riot that led to the death of five people, including a police officer. In reaction to the violence and loss of life, Paxton falsely claimed that the rioters were liberal activists posing as Trump supporters. He was the only state attorney general to not condemn the insurrection.
In early 2021, Paxton's office refused to provide his work emails and text messages he sent or received while in Washington on January 6, after several Texas news organizations requested them in accordance with the state's open records law. In January 2022, the Travis County district attorney gave Paxton four days to comply or face a lawsuit.
In October 2021, Paxton falsely claimed that Biden "overthrew" Trump in the 2020 election.
Paxton defended Texas in a federal lawsuit involving allegations that Texas's congressional districts were gerrymandered. In 2017, a three-judge panel of a U.S. federal court based in San Antonio ruled that the Republican-controlled Texas Legislature drew congressional-district to discriminate against minority voters, and ordered the redrawing of Texas's 35th and 27th congressional districts. Paxton appealed the ruling, contending that the previous maps were lawful, and vowed to "aggressively defend the maps on all fronts"; U.S. representative Lloyd Doggett criticized the appeal as a "desperate, highly questionable Paxton-Abbott maneuver" coming "after yet another ruling against the state of Texas for intentional discrimination". Texas won on appeal when in a 5–4 decision the Supreme Court ruled there was insufficient evidence to prove that state Republicans acted in bad faith and engaged in intentional discrimination with respect to the 27th and 35th congressional districts.
Paxton sued Beto O'Rourke for fundraising walkouts of the 2025 redistricting.
In 2024, a unit created by Paxton raided the offices of Latino voting activists, seizing cellphones, computers and documents as part of a voter fraud inquiry. The League of United Latin American Citizens described the raids as an attempt to suppress Latino voters.
