Texas AG Files Suit Against State’s 5th Largest County Over Voter Registration Push

A poll worker stamps a voters ballot before dropping it into a secure box at a ballot drop off location in Austin, Texas on Oct. 13, 2020. Sergio Flores/Getty Images

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Friday filed a lawsuit against Travis County, which includes the capital of Austin and is the fifth most populous county in the state, over its voter registration policies.

In a lawsuit filed in the District Court of Travis County, the attorney’s office alleged that Travis County hired a third-party company to aid in voter registration, which Paxton said runs afoul of the law. The firm in question, Civic Government Solutions, is a “partisan organization” because its CEO had made public comments about his interest in “progressive” politics, the suit says.

“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, a Republican, said in a statement alongside the lawsuit. “Programs like this invite fraud and reduce public trust in our elections. We will stop them and any other county considering such programs.”

The suit, in part, urged the court to block Travis County from giving the group “thousands of taxpayer dollars to identify the names and addresses of potentially unregistered voters” because the county, according to Paxton’s office, lacks the authority “to contract with a vendor to identify and target potentially unregistered individuals who may or may not be eligible to vote.”

For its claims that the company has a partisan bent, Paxton’s complaint cited a podcast interview with it’s CEO, Jeremy Smith, released in September 2022, titled “Data and Tools for Progressive Politics with Jeremy Smith of Civitech.”

A spokesperson for Travis County, Hector Nieto, told The Epoch Times on Friday that it believes Paxton is trying to “sow distrust and discourage participation in the electoral process” by filing the lawsuit.

“Travis County is committed to encouraging voter participation and we are proud of our outreach efforts that achieve higher voter registration numbers,” Nieto said. “We remain steadfast in our responsibility to uphold the integrity of the voter registration process while ensuring that every eligible person has the opportunity to exercise their right to vote.”

Earlier this week, Paxton filed a complaint against Bexar County, which encompasses the city of San Antonio, after it voted to pay the same company to send out voter registration forms to people living in the county.

In announcing his filing against Bexar County, Paxton argued that it is illegal for county officials to mail voter registration forms in an unsolicited manner and also flagged the county for hiring Civic Government Solutions, citing the CEO’s podcast interview.

“Despite being warned against adopting this blatantly illegal program that would spend taxpayer dollars to mail registration applications to potentially ineligible voters, Bexar County has irresponsibly chosen to violate the law,” Paxton said in a statement earlier this week.

During a meeting on Tuesday, Smith told Bexar County leaders that his company is nonpartisan.

“In its bylaws it is nonpartisan, in its mission it is nonpartisan, all of its contracts are nonpartisan,” Smith said, according to a reporter at the meeting.

He has also issued a warning for Harris County, the largest county in the state, about its own voter registration drive. Travis, Harris, and Bexar counties all lean heavily Democratic.

A statement issued by the attorney general’s office had warned both Bexar and Harris counties about using third-party vendors to distribute voter registration forms to unregistered people in the county, coming just days before he filed the lawsuit against Bexar County.

“Texas counties have no statutory authority to print and mail state voter registration forms, making the proposal fundamentally illegal,” he said.

Paxton cited his own office’s successful bid in 2020 to block Harris County from sending unsolicited mail-in ballot applications to registered voters in the county.

“Because the same can be said for mass mailings of voter registration applications, I am confident the courts will agree with me that your proposal exceeds your authority,” Paxton wrote in letters to both Bexar and Harris counties.

The legal activity comes just two months before the presidential election, scheduled for Nov. 5

The Epoch Times contacted Civic Government Solutions for comment but didn’t receive a reply by publication time.