Democrats are working hard to get out the vote. From Vice President Kamala Harris visiting rural Georgiato Gov. Tim Walz hyping up a union crowd in Milwaukee, to 34,000 Taylor Swift fans joining a Zoom fundraising call and entering their “Swifties for Kamala” era, the efforts are paying off. In contrast, former President Donald Trump and Gov. JD Vance stayed off the campaign trail for Labor Day, and Trump has no upcoming events on his schedule until Sept. 7.
Instead of trying to get their supporters to the polls, the GOP is falling back on familiar tactics: voter suppression and unsupported claims of voter fraud.
Leading the way, as usual, is Texas—though they’re not alone. But before diving into just how bad things are getting, it’s important to remember that while voter suppression is real, voter fraud on any meaningful scale is absolutely not. It’s been debunked and debunked and debunked. Even if you just look at swing states, or use the breathless reporting from the hyper-conservative Heritage Foundation, the numbers literally do not add up.
Nothing about those uncontroverted facts means a thing to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is overseeing an almost comically evil attack on voters in his state. Paxton is convinced that President Joe Biden only won the 2020 election because of widespread voter fraud. Now, Paxton’s “Election Integrity” unit is ensuring the integrity of the 2024 election by having multiple armed officers execute a search warrant and seize the possessions of people like 87-year-old Lidia Martinez, whose ostensible crime seems to be registering people to vote.
Tuesday, the League of United Latin American Citizens, of which Martinez has been a member for over 35 years, called a press conference asking that the Department of Justice step in. The group, which is the oldest and largest Latino civil rights organization in the U.S., also sent a letter to the DOJ late last month after Martinez’s home was raided. LULAC said that four other members of the organization have been similarly targeted by Paxton.
According to Paxton, LULAC members are being investigated for “allegations of election fraud and vote harvesting that occurred during the 2022 elections.” There’s a lot to unpack there. First, election fraud is not a thing. Remember how it was so much not a thing that even Trump’s handpicked “voting integrity” commission couldn’t find evidence of it?
Next, “vote harvesting” is just a scary-sounding term for the perfectly banal act of collecting absentee ballots and bringing them to polling places or election offices. It’s only in the GOP world, where more voter turnout equals less of a chance they win, that ensuring more people get to vote is a bad thing.
Finally, these allegations date not from efforts during this election but from the 2022 midterms. It takes a lot to believe that Paxton spent two long, cautious years investigating and only just managed to wrap it up in time for the 2024 election. Instead, it looks a lot like what LULAC calls it: voter intimidation. Many people are going to think twice about helping to register voters if the next step is a dawn raid by armed officers.
Paxton is also threatening to sue Bexar and Harris Counties—both of which went handily for President Joe Biden in the 2020 election—over their efforts to send voter registration cards to everyone. So, to recap: Paxton does not want private groups to help people register to vote. He also does not want the government to help people register to vote—well, at least the government in blue counties.
Paxton can’t do all of this voter suppression alone, however. Thankfully for the GOP, Texas also has Gov. Greg Abbott, who is busy bragging about removing over 1 million voters from the state rolls since 2021. Cleaning up voter rolls is a normal process, and states have to remove people who move or die. Indeed, the number of voters Texas removed from its rolls this time isn’t unusual compared to previous elections.
But by highlighting this large purge so close to the election—and only a few days after the LULAC raids—Abbott is insinuating there is something nefarious that he is working to stop. Actually, he’s just coming right out and saying that, for example, thousands of noncitizens were suspected of voting.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because in 2019, Texas made a loud splash when it flagged a staggering 95,000 voters for “citizenship review,” alleging that “tens of thousands of noncitizens” were not just registered to vote, but had previously voted. It took only a few days for this to start falling apart, with the state having to almost immediately admit that 25,000 people were on the list by mistake, and many were citizens. The entire affair ended with a whimper, with Texas agreeing to rescind the advisory as part of a settlement in three lawsuits brought against the state.
Ohio is also getting in on the action, with Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose also flagging alleged noncitizens. Much like Texas, though, this falls apart, with some of the alleged noncitizens actually being recently naturalized citizens who are therefore fully eligible to vote.
LaRose keeps sending voter fraud referrals to investigators, but the state has seen only 13 convictions across multiple elections. As the Ohio Capital Journal put it, this would mean Ohio’s voter fraud rate is about .0001%as over 14 million state ballots were cast in that time.
In states that don’t have a government willing to attack its own citizens for trying to vote, there are private right-wing groups like United Sovereign Americans causing trouble. The group has brought lawsuits in Pennsylvania and Marylandalleging those states have mismanaged their voter registration and rolls. Explicitly stating its goal is to challenge voter rolls in multiple states, hoping to get different rulings from different federal courts, the group is thus forcing the Supreme Court to step in.
It isn’t surprising that Republicans are having to resort to improper voter purges and stale, long-debunked allegations of voter fraud. When Trump took complete control of the Republican National Committee earlier this yearone of his first acts was to shift resources away from Bank Your Vote, a 50-state RNC effort to encourage early voting. This echoes Trump’s 2020 rhetoricwhere he kept trashing his own party’s GOTV efforts by attacking mail-in voting.
Couple that with the fact that Trump has spent over $80 million in super PAC money on his legal fees instead of on running for president, and it is easy to see why the GOP’s best path forward is preventing people from voting.
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