Texas AG Ken Paxton executes search warrants in major Democratic county in election fraud probe

Correction: This article has been updated to reflect that Audrey Louis’s district does not include Bexar County.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s (R) office executed search warrants in one of the state’s largest urban counties — and biggest Democratic strongholds — where it alleges vote tampering.

On Tuesday, the attorney general’s office searched offices in Bexar County, the state’s fourth most populous county and the home of San Antonio.

The office said the searches followed a two-year investigation and that “secure elections are the cornerstone of our republic.”

The searches came amid a broader push by Paxton to prosecute election fraud — a campaign that in 2023 spent $2.3 million to prosecute just four cases, according to the Houston Chronicle.

“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,” Paxton said in a statement.

The office said the case was referred by state District Attorney Audrey Louis, a conservative Republican whose district abuts Bexar.

Louis made that referral in 2022, after a unanimous 2021 ruling by the Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA). Appellate court judges found that Paxton could not unilaterally investigate election crimes and required him to only prosecute such cases in conjunction with a local DA — a ruling that drove Paxton to urge supporters to flood the court with calls. 

“The CCA’s shameful decision means local DAs with radical liberal views have the sole power to prosecute election fraud in TX—which they will never do,” Paxton wrote at the time.

Louis unseated Democratic incumbent René Peña — her former boss — in 2016. Peña fired her hours after she announced her candidacy. 

While the less populous nearby Frio and Atascosa counties are in her jurisdiction, Bexar County is not.

The attorney general’s office has declined to give further details on the ongoing investigation, which is playing out amid narrower-than-expected national races for both president and Congress in Texas and in the aftermath of Paxton’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

While polling shows Republican presidential nominee and Paxton ally former President Trump continuing to lead in Texas, Democrats appear to be narrowing the gap. A recent poll from ActiVote found Vice President Harris behind by 6.6 points — a tighter margin than the one Trump defeated Joe Biden by in 2020. 

That margin is roughly the same as the one in the Senate race between Rep. Colin Allred (D-Texas) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R), according to The Hill/Decision Desk HQ’s polling tracker, though that race polled as close as 3 points in a July survey by two Texas universities.

In 2020, Biden took 2-million-voter-strong Bexar County by an 18-point margin, while Trump took rural Atascosa and Frio counties — the latter as a result of a 21-point shift toward Republicans that is part of a broader movement of some Texas Latino voters toward the GOP.

Paxton was at the forefront of GOP efforts to overturn Biden’s victory and has spent years promoting false claims that the president stole the election. In December 2020, he sued four battleground states that Biden had won, saying at the time that their “failure to abide by the rule of law casts a dark shadow of doubt over the outcome of the entire election.”

The conservative-majority Supreme Court threw that suit out three days after Paxton filed it, and the Texas State Bar has sought to discipline the attorney general for what a Bar disciplinary community called a “dishonest” suit.

Over Paxton’s protests, a state appellate court found in April that the Bar could discipline him for the suit — leading Paxton to appeal in June to the state Supreme Court to investigate the appellate court for its “politically motivated lawfare” against him for the finding. 

In that filing, Paxton asked the state’s high court “to intervene to prevent the State Bar’s continued abuse of the legal system.”

— Updated at 3:21 p.m.