Ken Paxton’s vote harvesting investigation in South Texas renews questions over politiqueras

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McALLEN — Filomena Leo started to weep this week as she reminisced about her late husband William “Billy” Leo and the way he would encourage their neighbors to vote.

Billy Leo, who died in 2018, was at one level mayor of La Joya, a Rio Grande Valley metropolis of about 4,600 folks, and Hidalgo County clerk — amongst a number of different public roles he held in South Texas.

As a politician and civic chief, he additionally was influential in popularizing the give attention to absentee voter turnout in native races right here.

To assist enhance voter turnout beginning within the mid-Nineteen Eighties, he employed marketing campaign employees to interact aged residents and assist them vote by mail. Such marketing campaign employees got here to be identified regionally as “politiqueras,” although Leo moved away from the time period when it turned related to unscrupulous methods akin to paying for votes, his spouse mentioned.

“He did not like that at all,” Leo mentioned. “He was very clear with those that helped him get the vote out — yes, he would pay them for their day, but never, never to offer voters pay for their casting a vote.”

The mobilization of marketing campaign employees to help aged and disabled voters has been criticized regionally and all through the state lately, changing into the goal of crackdowns by state lawmakers who’ve enacted tighter restrictions on voting by mail.

Impressed largely by the unverified claims of voter fraud by former President Donald Trump and his allies following the 2020 election, the Texas legislature enacted one of many largest rewrites of election legal guidelines.

Recognized as Senate Invoice 1, it barred native election officers from sending unsolicited purposes to request a mail-in poll, even to individuals who mechanically qualify to vote by mail. The regulation additionally established new guidelines for helping voters with mail-in ballots, requiring the helping individual to fill out paperwork disclosing their relationship to the voter.

Final week, Texas authorities searched the properties of no less than six Latinos as a part of an ongoing “election integrity investigation” launched by Legal professional Common Ken Paxton.

Of their search, authorities seized cellphones amid allegations {that a} longtime Frio County political operator had illegally harvested votes for a number of native races lately, in response to court docket data obtained by The Texas Tribune. Vote harvesting is the act of amassing accomplished mail-in ballots from a large swath of individuals.

Among the many targets of the search had been Cecilia Castellano, a Democratic candidate for the Texas Home, and Manuel Medina, a former chair of the Bexar County Democratic Get together and chief of employees to state Rep. Liz Campos, D-San Antonio. They and the marketing campaign employees whose properties had been raided deny any wrongdoing.

Information of the raids went viral, particularly after one of many nation’s main Latino advocacy organizations accused Paxton of intimidating voters in an try and sway an upcoming state Home race for Republicans.

Allegations of voter harvesting performed by politiqueras typically floor after elections within the Valley which has seen its honest variety of heated election contests.

In 2018, the town of Mission, which abuts McAllen to the west, was embroiled in a authorized dispute over the outcomes of an election, a dispute that pitted former Mayor Norberto “Beto” Salinas towards then-Mayor Armando “Doc” O’Caña.

Salinas accused O’Caña’s marketing campaign of bribery, unlawful voting, and tampering with mail-in ballots throughout a runoff election that had unseated Salinas after 20 years as mayor.

After almost two weeks of testimony, the decide presiding over the trial dominated the election invalid. Nevertheless, a re-do election was by no means held as a result of the thirteenth Courtroom of Appeals reversed the choice, permitting O’Caña to stay mayor.

Rick Salinas, a Mission legal professional who represented Beto Salinas, his father, within the election contest, blames poll harvesting for what he views because the decay of the native political scene.

“A large number of the people that are holding public office right now, they are the product of these politiqueras and this underground movement that has existed for a long time,” Salinas mentioned.

Gilberto Hinojosa, the Texas Democratic Get together chair who represented O’Caña within the 2018 election contest, argues there was no proof of poll harvesting within the O’Caña case.

Salinas and Hinojosa are once more locked in a dispute centered round one other court docket trial associated to the difficulty of helping voters at polling websites.

Hinojosa mentioned he believes vote harvesting has occurred within the Valley and in different components of Texas. Nevertheless, he mentioned, Republicans solely examine alleged election fraud in Latino and Democratic strongholds just like the Rio Grande Valley.

“What Paxton has done is misuse his office to intimidate normally Democratic voters from participating in the process,” Hinojosa mentioned.

The distinction between serving to aged voters in a scientific strategy to drive turnout and breaking the regulation could be a skinny line, particularly because the regulation has modified lately, election observers say. What could also be unlawful now might need simply been regular apply just a few years in the past, mentioned Alvaro Corral, a political scientist on the College of Texas Rio Grande Valley.

“I think it’s a shift in perception,” he mentioned. “This can’t be disentangled from the broader post-2020 crackdown on, just generally, access to the ballot in Texas.”

And the legal professional basic’s investigation, he added, may have a chilling impact on voter engagement efforts in Latino communities.

“My sense,” Corral mentioned, “is that election officials are increasingly hesitant to just provide basic language assistance for folks post SB 1 in Texas.”

Reporting within the Rio Grande Valley is supported partially by the Methodist Healthcare Ministries of South Texas, Inc.

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