The fight over voter registration in Texas Democratic-leaning counties is heating up.
In Tuesday, Travis County sued Texas state officials — including right-wing Attorney General Ken Paxton — over his repeated attempts to block the state’s urban counties from registering voters by mail.
“Today, Travis County, once again, fights back,” county attorney Delia Garza told reporters on Tuesday, The Texas Tribune reported. Travis County is home to the state’s capital, Austin.
The countersuit comes in the context of a tightening election — and less than three weeks before the critical Oct. 7 deadline to register Texans to vote.
In the suit, Garza asserts that Paxton and State Secretary of State Jane Nelson are in violation of Title 52 of the Voting Rights Act, which makes it “the duty of the Federal, State, and local governments to promote the exercise of [the] right” to vote.
The Travis countersuit follows three weeks after Paxton sued Travis County itself, alleging that county leadership’s use of a third-party voter registration company violated state law.
The suit comes in the context of legal action in other major Texas cities. Travis County officials filed the suit the day after a state district court judge dismissed Paxton’s suit against Bexar County, about 90 miles to the south of Travis and home of the similarly blue city of San Antonio.
Paxton sued Bexar earlier this month on similar grounds — legal action that came weeks after agents working for his office searched the homes and offices of local Democratic organizers and of a candidate for a crucial state representative’s seat coveted by the GOP.
It is in Harris County — the state’s most populous and a key Democratic base — that the GOP legal campaign has borne the most fruit. Paxton and Houston-area state Sen. Paul Bettancourt also threatened suits against Harris County, if the county proceeded with its own plan to send out registration forms by mail.
That county was the center of a 2020 legal campaign by Paxton to block vote-by-mail during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, which he has credited with holding the state for Donald Trump.
Harris County has now run out of time to send out its own registration forms, Houston Public Media reported.
Texas Democrats in the House of Representatives have called on the Department of Justice to investigate Paxton’s alleged violations of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Act.
The legal wrangling happens as the intersection of two long-running political fights between the states GOP-dominated leadership and the largely Democratic-controlled metro areas where most of its population actually lives.
Most immediately, Paxton’s suits are part of a broader trajectory of unproven claims, largely based on conspiracy theories but echoed by the national party, that Democrats are trying to steal the election by importing undocumented voters.
“Travis County has blatantly violated Texas law by paying partisan actors to conduct unlawful identification efforts to track down people who are not registered to vote,” Paxton said in a statement on the day he sued the county.
Paxton has made variations of this argument since 2020 — when he unsuccessfully alleged before the Supreme Court that Joe Biden had stolen the election from Donald Trump, earning an attempted censure from the State Bar.
But Republicans have intensified those claims as the presidential race in Texas has tightened and Senate challenger Rep. Colin Allred (D-Texas) has closed to within the margin of error with incumbent Sen. Ted Cruz (R).
The election fight is however a subset of a broader war within Texas: A decadelong attempt by a dominant but internally-divided GOP to strip authority from the state’s cities over issues from overseeing elections to running public schools to mandating rest breaks for construction workers in the state’s punishing heat.
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