How Ken Paxton Built the Foundation for the New Big Lie

Texas Attorney General Ken PaxtonMother Jones illustration; Drew Angerer/Getty

It started, according to court filings, with a tweet. On August 18, Maria Bartiromo, the Fox News Host, alerted her 1.4 million followers on X to a development that might not, at first glance, seem like news: She was hearing troubling reports of lines at the DMV. The information had come to Bartiromo fourth-hand. The wife of a friend of a friend had recently taken her 16-year-old to three different offices to get a driver’s license, which in Texas is administered by the Department of Public Safety. At the first two, she encountered “a massive line of immigrants getting licenses” inside, and “a tent and table outside…registering them to vote.” The post blew up on X, where it has been viewed 2.3 million times. 

There was plenty of reason to be cautious about this particular game of telephone. A local Republican Party chair investigated Bartiromo’s source’s source’s wife’s claims himself and found no evidence they were true. A local election administrator also found the allegations unfounded. Nothing described in the tweet, on its face, was even illegal. But fears of renegade registrars would not die. The next day, an investigator working for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton arrived at a DPS facility outside San Antonio for an undercover operation. “I was notified that voter registration was possibly occurring in or about the area surrounding the driver’s license office,” the officer wrote in his formal report.

As a test, the investigator asked the young man registering voters—a volunteer deputy registrar with a non-profit called Jolt, which promotes civic engagement among Latinos in the state—if he could bring a form home to his daughter. (He made positive identification of “cards I have encountered multiple times in the execution of my duties,” the investigator confirmed, sounding as if he had just unearthed a stash of fentanyl, “which I recognize to be voter registration cards.”) The registrar said he could not—Texas has strict rules about handling such applications. Instead, he suggested that the investigator fill out a form on her behalf. The officer declined and walked away. The registrar’s advice, he concluded, was “not only incorrect, but illegal” 

This, Jolt would later argue in a lawsuit in federal court, was also wrong. The undercover agent could have registered his daughter on the spot, as long as she was eligible and he had her permission—both of which he would have been assenting to under penalty of perjury. It was all right there in the county’s training video. But the attorney general’s office was undeterred. Two days later, Paxton announced that there was an open investigation into possible unlawful efforts to register non-citizens to vote. And on August 30, after Jolt protested that Paxton was interfering with their work, he sent the group a formal request to open up its books or face the consequences. In court filings, the agency would later credit the initial tip to reporting from an “award-winning journalist.”

The Jolt investigation fit a years-long pattern. Four years ago, citing massive fraud but no evidence, Paxton carried water for Trump’s Big Lie by filing a lawsuit asking the Supreme Court to strip four states Joe Biden won of their electors, so that Republican legislatures could appoint them instead. Now, the state’s top law enforcement official has used the powers of his office to spin a new election conspiracy. Wielding dubious tweets and flimsy pretexts, he has used the myth of large numbers of non-citizens voting to intimidate aid groups on the border, interfere with voter-registration efforts, and purge real citizens from the rolls. For a man who has spent much of his nine years in office under a cloud of personal and professional scandal, his headline-seeking ploy has offered a chance at redemption—and perhaps even an inside track at a promotion.

Paxton and other Texas Republicans have long sought to use fears of election malfeasance to their advantage. His predecessor as attorney general, the current Gov. Greg Abbott, once led an investigation into alleged voter fraud that involved spying on a woman in her own bathroom. In the runup to the 2020 election, the Houston Chronicle reported, Paxton’s office spent 22,000 hours to root out fraud that Trump and his allies claimed was rampant, but only produced 16 prosecutions, none of which resulted in jail time. But you could trace the start of Paxton’s current crusade to the spring of 2022, when Paxton was locked in a bitter runoff primary and still managing fallout from his efforts to overturn the election. 

On May 6 of that year, the State Bar of Texas sued Paxton’s top deputy over his role in the Electoral College case, charging that he had violated ethics rules by participating in a knowingly frivolous lawsuit. (The bar would eventually sue Paxton too; both cases are still ongoing.) A few hours later, Paxton shot back with major news of his own: He was investigating the bar’s charitable foundation, for “possibly aiding and abetting the mass influx of illegal aliens.”

The announcement was part of a pattern—a complaint from a prominent conservative served as a pretext for Paxton to go after his perceived opposition. In this case, the AG’s office said it was acting off a complaint from Republican Rep. Troy Nehls, a former sheriff of Fort Bend County in the Houston suburbs who voted to overturn the 2020 election results. The issue was that the nonprofit had donated to legal-aid organizations that work with immigrants—which, in the AG’s phrasing, meant that it was possibly “providing grants to organizations that support, fund and encourage illegal immigration.” That investigation was followed by an announcement of more probes, targeting three immigrant-rights nonprofits that the bar foundation had supported, again alleging that their work was possibly “aiding and abetting the invasion of illegal aliens.” 

Paxton’s go-to weapon in those investigations was a consumer-protection tool called a Request to Examine, which allows the office—with limitations—to gain access to the books of corporations and nonprofits in the state. In February, his office sent an investigator to surveil Annunciation House, a 50-year-old Catholic shelter network in El Paso that offers food, clothes, and educational services to migrants, and then hand-delivered a request to examine its records, demanding it comply within 24 hours. After the organization asked for more time and clarification as to what it was actually obligated to produce, Paxton filed a lawsuit to try to shut the group down. His office argued that by providing aid services, the organization was operating a “stash house” and engaging in “human smuggling.”

It is not actually a great mystery why Catholics devote themselves to assisting those who need help. But Paxton’s legal campaign tapped into a conspiracy that has become almost an article of faith on the right, spread by figures such as Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and JD Vance. The Biden administration hadn’t just mismanaged the border-security apparatus. These MAGA leaders charged that NGOs, backed by shadowy left-wing funders, were facilitating the mass migration of people to the United States to help the Democratic Party win elections through some combination of massive fraud and demographic shifts. It is a plot to steal not just one election, Musk has argued, but every future election—because once this imagined conspiracy goes into effect, Democrats will be unstoppable. Evidence of such a conspiracy has been lacking. Creating the illusion of such evidence has fallen to men like Paxton.

The new election lie began on the border and expanded outward from there. In April, two brothers from Long Island, operating under the moniker of American Muckrakers, posted a photo of a flier they claimed to have found inside an outhouse in Matamoros, reminding migrants in the Mexican border city to vote for Joe Biden. The flier, which bore the name of a local migrant aid NGO, appeared to have been translated into Spanish via an app and featured an outdated phone number, according to the New York Times. The NGO called it a hoax. But the story traveled fast. After the Heritage Foundation’s Project Oversight posted it, the story was picked up by Musk and Fox News. The flier was flown to Washington, where Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Ga.) wielded it during the impeachment proceedings against Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas. And within a few days, Paxton—citing the evidence of right-wing social media influencers—began investigating three more migrant aid organizations, one of which was operated in El Paso, and two in the Rio Grande Valley.

For Paxton, these kinds of announcements were all in a day’s work. But to the groups that find themselves on the receiving end, they’ve invited threats and harassment, and added new obstacles to fulfilling their mission. In a statement that she said she had been cleared by her lawyers, Andrea Rudnik, director of Team Brownsville, one of the nonprofits Paxton has sought records from, said that the campaign had “made it more difficult to do our work, advocate for our clients, and freely express ourselves. It has also instilled a greater sense of fear in us that people in need won’t be able to get basic assistance.” The investigation, she said, was not just “an abuse of power,” but “it shows a lack of empathy.” She worried about who would do the work should they close.

The courts have mostly rejected Paxton’s efforts. A judge blocked Paxton’s attempts to depose Rudnick in August. In El Paso, he received a more stinging rebuke. A federal judge threw out his subpoena of Annunciation House and accused the AG of merely seeking “a pretext to justify its harassment of Annunciation House employees and the persons seeking refuge.” Paxton’s behavior, he said, was “outrageous and intolerable.”

Paxton was embarking on a cynical “fishing expedition,” says Rochelle Garza, president of the Texas Civil Rights Project, which is representing Team Brownsville and Las Americas, another border group that has been targeted by the AG. (She was also Paxton’s 2022 Democratic opponent.) 

“He’s gone after a lot of these organizations that are very, very small, and he’s using it for nefarious purposes to sow distrust in our electoral system by pushing a lie in order to create distrust in our elections.”

Paxton has not exactly run away from that assertion. “The reality is, the plan from the beginning [was to] get these people here as fast as possible and get them voting,” he said in a June interview with—who else?—Maria Bartiromo. It was the only thing that would make Democrats competitive this fall: “This is the biggest threat to our democracy, our republic, that I think we’ve seen since who knows when.”

If targeting Catholics and retired teachers prepping meals on the border was the foundation of Paxton’s new election conspiracy, the next logical step was to target groups, like Jolt, that actively register voters in the state’s larger metro areas—again, under the pretense that they were enabling illegal non-citizen voting. The AG’s case has been sloppy. Paxton’s attorneys asserted in court, for instance, that they launched their investigation in response not just to Bartiromo’s Ferris Bueller tweet, but also a viral video posted on X by a self-described “Alpha MAGA Male,” who filmed himself asking a Jolt registrar if “illegal aliens” could vote. That’s not just flimsy, but also impossible—the video was posted after the AG’s office dispatched its investigator to Universal City.

“As best I can tell,” says Mimi Marziani, an adjunct professor at the University of Texas and prominent civil rights litigator who is representing Jolt in the case, “he is abusing the power of his office to do something that is promoting his own interest, and his allegiance to former President Trump.”

It wasn’t just Jolt. Paxton has gone after a wide swath of groups that organize Latino communities in the state. In August, he filed a lawsuit to shut down a Houston-based non-profit called Familias Inmigrantes y Estudiantes en la Lucha, or FIEL, ostensibly on the grounds that the group had violated rules on political speech by nonprofits by criticizing Abbott and Trump, as well as a new state law empowering law enforcement to arrest people they suspect of having entered the country illegally. That same month, his office initiated a series of early-morning raids that his office said was in response to allegations of vote-harvesting by a local political operative. 

As part of that investigation, armed law enforcement agents showed up at the homes of elderly members of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), a century-old civil rights organization that runs voter registration drives and had filed a lawsuit against SB1, a restrictive new voting statute Abbott signed into law in 2021. Among the people whose home was raided was Cecilia Castellano, a Democratic candidate for state representative in an open South Texas seat that Republicans are trying to flip. According to the Texas Tribune, the raid stemmed from an investigation that began in 2022. Castellano has not been charged with any crime, nor has anyone else.

Later that summer, Paxton’s office went to court to stop three of the state’s biggest counties—Bexar (San Antonio), Travis (Austin), and Harris (Houston)—from using their offices to run voter-registration drives. They had approved plans, or (in the case of Harris were considering proposals), to send voter registration forms and other information to voting-age citizens the county had deemed eligible. Filling out a form was only the first part of the process. A county office would then have to verify the information. Then the Texas secretary of state’s office—part of Gov. Greg Abbott’s administration—would have to verify it too. Nonetheless, Paxton tried to stop them, arguing that informing people of their constitutional rights in such a manner could lead to fraudulent registrations from non-citizens.

“[A]s you are aware, the Biden-Harris administration’s open border policies have saddled Texas—and the entire country—with a wave of illegal immigration that has resulted in ballooning noncitizen populations across our State,” Paxton wrote in a September letter to Bexar County officials. “It is more important than ever that we maintain the integrity of our voter rolls and ensure only eligible voters decide our elections.”

But the capstone to Texas Republicans’ big push—and Paxton’s years-long campaign to argue that immigrants, with the help of sinister left-wing forces, were poised to spoil the election through massive fraud—was the voter rolls themselves. Here he was tapping into an infamous tradition. In 2019, the Abbott-appointed secretary of state David Whitley resigned after an attempted voter purge incorrectly flagged at least 25,000 eligible voters as potential non-citizens. This summer, the governor announced that the state had found 6,500 non-citizen voters on the rolls and was referring 2,000 people to Paxton’s office for prosecution for having voted as non-citizens. A subsequent investigation by the Texas Tribune and Pro Publica found that the actual number of people identified by the secretary of state was 581—not 6,500—and that at least some of the people on the list had documents proving their citizenship.

Paxton aimed a bit higher. In September, he sent the federal government a list of 450,000 voters who did not include a Texas driver’s license number on their voter registration forms, and asked Washington to cross-reference this list with immigration databases. 

“This list is essentially anyone who doesn’t have their driver’s license number memorized or doesn’t have an ID—which we know is disproportionately people of color—but there’s no indication that people are non-citizens or that they have improperly registered to vote,” says Ashley Harris, a staff atttorney with the ACLU of Texas, whose group urged the federal government not to comply with Paxton’s request. “It’s just people that register with their Social Security number, or, in some cases, older voters who have been registered to vote for so long that it predates the federal requirements.”

The immigration check would have opened up still more problems—for instance, that it might flag people who have been naturalized as citizens. And anyone caught up in this purge would have to “jump through extra hoops to preserve their voter registration” with just days or weeks left before the deadline. Ultimately, the Biden administration declined to cooperate, but Paxton still got what he wanted: He has cited the standoff as evidence that Democrats are willfully enabling massive fraud “by enabling non-citizens to illegally vote.”

In waging legal battle after legal battle with small nonprofits and community groups, and spreading fears about a stolen election that hasn’t yet transpired, Paxton is helping not just his party but also himself. Paxton’s subservience to Trump in the aftermath of the 2020 election may have got him in trouble with the state bar, but it might have also saved his job, as he survived a bitter primary and then an impeachment trial in successive years. Now, his willingness to do the bidding of Trump and his allies has earned him a possible seat at the table in a future Republican presidential administration. Trump said in May that he’d even consider Paxton to be his next attorney attorney general.

In the campaign’s final days, Paxton has remained at the beck and call of conservative activists. Last week, after the Department of Justice ordered Musk to halt his $1 million daily lottery for Trump-supporting registered voters in swing states, the attorney general shot back. 

He was filing a Freedom of Information Act Request, he announced, to “investigate the federal agency’s intimidation” of the world’s richest man, by “selectively targeting Elon Musk’s voter registration drive.”