Texas battles over Paxton-directed searches of Democrats: What you need to know

A Democrat trying to take one of the GOP’s most coveted Texas districts is at the center of an election-year probe by Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) in what the nation’s oldest Latino rights group calls a campaign of “intimidation.”

State authorities on Wednesday searched the home of Democratic party organizers in Bexar County, the state’s fourth-largest urban county and a Democratic stronghold, seizing the cellphone of Cecilia Castellano.

Castellano is a Democratic candidate running for the state House seat now held by state Rep. Tracy King (D), who is retiring. Authorities also searched the homes of organizers throughout Bexar, Frio and Atascosa counties.

On Monday, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) called on the Department of Justice to launch an investigation of its own, targeting Paxton’s office for violations of the Voting Rights Act of 1963.

“We’re not going to stop just because they come in and raid a few of our houses,” LULAC state director Gabriel Rosales told reporters Monday.

Here’s what you need to know.

What happened last week?

State agents from the Attorney General’s election fraud unit executed the search warrants of at least six Latino organizers across the three counties. 

Paxton in a statement said the searches were a necessary step to secure state elections, which he called “the cornerstone of our republic.”

“We are completely committed to protecting the security of the ballot box and the integrity of every legal vote. This means ensuring accountability for anyone committing election crimes.”

Democrats have decried the searches.

Former Bexar County Democratic Party chair Manuel Medina told The Texas Tribune that authorities broke down his door and pointed “six assault semi-automatic weapons in my face.”

On Friday, the Tribune reported state agents spent seven hours in Medina’s home, leaving with 65 cellphones, 41 computers and documents including family photos, according to a legal filing. 

“Crooked Ken Paxton is targeting Latinos and terrorizing seniors in my district,” state Sen. Roland Gutierrez (D) wrote on the social platform X, adding that he supported LULAC’s “call for an investigation of Paxton’s actions.”

What were the allegations behind the search?

Court filings obtained by the Tribune show the Democratic candidate who lost the primary race to Castellano told state investigators with Paxton’s election crimes unit — set up in 2022 to fight alleged Democratic attempts to rig the vote — Castellano and others paid a “ballot harvester” to get votes.

The investigation was based on a 2022 complaint to the Republican district attorney who oversees Frio and Atascosa counties, in which the loser of a Democratic party primary alleged their opponent hired “ballot harvesters.”

The primary loser, who has not been publicly identified, claimed a local organizer charged candidates up to $2,500 — payable on CashApp — to gather ballots from local disabled and elderly voters, and to help them vote by mail.

The tipster also alleged handwriting analysis of the mail-in ballots — whose use is tightly restricted in Texas — showed the organizer helped the voters fill out the ballots without disclosing that help. 

An investigator from Paxton’s office found evidence of this and “observed that several voters who had voted by mail did not appear to be eligible for assistance,” which would make helping them a state crime.”

While Paxton’s office won’t comment on the investigation, the attorney general last week said that “secure elections are the cornerstone of our republic.”

Paxton’s warrant told agents to look for “financial, business, organization and/or election-related items and records,” the Houston Chronicle reported. 

“We are completely committed to protecting the security of the ballot box and the integrity of every legal vote. This means ensuring accountability for anyone committing election crimes.”

Why is this seat important?

King’s district is up for grabs, and Republicans see it as a seat they can gain as they try to build a majority to pass school vouchers, a key priority for GOP state leaders that led them to try to purge their party of House members who oppose it.

The district is purple: it went for Gov. Greg Abbott by 6 points in 2022, but it has been solidly Democratic throughout King’s tenure, and its Republican Congressional representative, Rep. Tony Gonzales, has backed both bipartisan gun control laws and a law enshrining support for LGBTQ marriage equality.

Why are Democrats alleging intimidation?

Democrats argue the searches are part of a pattern of Paxton engaging in “in official oppression of primarily Latino and Black voters with the big lie of voter fraud,” as LULAC said in a statement.

Castellano told the Tribune she was targeted because Republicans need to take the seat.

“I feel like I’ve been violated,” Castellano said in an interview with the Tribune. “This political tactic is because the Republicans are vying for this seat. They want full power of the House. And we are not going to give up. We are going to continue to work hard.”

That effort and the recent searches were both part of “a coordinated effort by [Paxton] to influence voter registrars, senior advocates and campaign workers on contested races for the state legislature,” Medina, the Bexar County organizer, told the Chronicle.

“It's meant to suppress the vote of young voters and seniors who only vote by mail, two constituencies that are overwhelmingly Democrat.”

Medina’s attorney, meanwhile, wrote in an emergency motion to a Bexar County judge that the search was “grossly overbroad” and gave state Republicans seeking to flip the seat “sensitive and private and confidential information regarding contested elections.”

The seized information, he wrote, could “provide an unfair and illegal advantage to the prying eyes of opposing political foes.”

Medina challenged the search in court, and on Friday a Bexar County judge issued him a temporary protective order, barring state agents from going through the material until a mid-September hearing.

What is Paxton’s history on the election fraud issue?

Texas Republicans have campaigned on alleged voter fraud for more than a decade — using it to pass Voter ID laws which Democrats argue are aimed at restricting ballot access to their voters in a majority-minority state.

Paxton’s history with fighting alleged voter fraud began in late 2020, after President Biden beat former President Trump in the race for the White House. 

The attorney general was a crusader in the fight to get the Supreme Court to throw out ballots from battleground states crucial in Trump’s loss — an effort for which the state bar association is fighting to censure him.

Paxton has also fought to keep access to mail-in ballots restricted to those disabled or over the age of 65, beating back lawsuits from the state Democratic party. (The conservative-dominated Supreme Court declined to hear a Democratic party challenge to the state law.)

Paxton’s campaign against voter fraud has spent millions of dollars while achieving only a handful of convictions. 

One of his highest-profile fights as part of the effort was with the state’s own Court of Criminal Appeals, which in 2022 ruled it unconstitutional for Paxton to conduct election integrity prosecutions without the aid of a local prosecutor — something Paxton complained at the time was “lawfare” barring him from investigating the state’s biggest urban Democratic counties.

In other election integrity news, Paxton on Wednesday also announced an investigation into allegations that voter registration organizations were “illegally registering noncitizens to vote in our election.” 

Per the Tribune, the allegations appeared to originate in unsubstantiated claims by Fox News host Maria Bartiromo that when “a friend of mine’s wife” took her daughter to get a driver’s license, the Department of Public Safety office had “a massive line of immigrants getting licenses and had a tent and table outside the front door of the DMV registering them to vote.”

Bartiromo did not clarify how her friend knew these prospective voters were non-citizens. An investigation by Brady Gray, the chair of the Parker County GOP found no evidence for any of these claims.

“While these claims seemed strange from the onset, I take every claim of election fraud or interference seriously,” Gray added in a post last Monday.

Conservative activist Michael Quinn Sullivan praised Gray and alleged the claims were themselves a kind of Democratic false-flag, spread “as a way to suppress the votes of conservatives and distract from real efforts to bring meaningful security to our elections.”

None of this stopped Paxton from opening his own investigation.

“Texans are deeply troubled by the possibility that organizations purporting to assist with voter registration are illegally registering noncitizens to vote in our elections,” he said in a statement.

“It is a crime to vote—or to register to vote—if you are not a United States Citizen. Any wrongdoing will be punished to the fullest extent of the law.”