AUSTIN, Texas — Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) filed a lawsuit Friday against Travis County over its voter registration policies, making it the third Democratic-leaning area in the state that he’s targeted.
Paxton’s charge: that Travis County, home of the state’s capital and the liberal stronghold of Austin, had hired a third-party company to help with voter registration, something that Paxton argues is outside of the authority of Texas municipalities.
In his suit on Friday, Paxton argued that the CEO of the company in question, Civic Government Solutions, has expressed “his interest in getting people to vote for progressive candidates.”
“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.
Such programs, he argued, “invite fraud and reduce public trust in our elections.”
Travis County spokesman Hector Nieto told The Hill that the county was “proud of our outreach efforts” while remaining “steadfast in our responsibility to uphold the integrity of the voter registration process.”
“It is disappointing that any statewide elected official would prefer to sow distrust and discourage participation in the electoral process,” Nieto added.
Paxton’s suit against Travis County closely follows his Wednesday suit against Bexar County, the state’s fourth-largest urban county that is the home of San Antonio and another major Democratic stronghold — as well as warnings against Harris County, its largest, to kill its own voter registration drive.
