Amid campaign for Texas U.S. Senate seat, Paxton announces arrests for noncitizen voting

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced on Sept. 15 that the state had arrested seven people who were indicted for voting in the 2024 election, despite not being U.S. citizens. The arrests come as Paxton is facing off in a toss-up race against Democrat James Talarico for the U.S. Senate. 

“Foreign influence has no place in American elections. Today, my office is announcing our efforts to arrest foreigners who attempted to cheat the system and violate our laws that uphold election integrity,” Paxton said in a Sept. 15 press release. 

“I will not tolerate attempts to rig elections and silence the will of American citizens and voters,” he added. “I will continue to fight to ensure that Texas has free and fair elections.” 

Those arrested included people from the Democratic Republic of Congo, India, Nigeria, and Mexico. Six of the seven are charged with illegally voting, while one of the Nigerians was only charged with lying about his naturalization status. 

Critics of the focus on election integrity have charged Paxton and other Republican lawmakers with making an issue out of something that is statistically insignificant. Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, told Zeale News that is the wrong way to look at the issue. 

“The appropriate number of non-citizens voting is zero. Seven is the number who have been caught so far by state authorities,” Vaughan said. There may be more cases out there, and even if it doesn't appear to be enough to change the outcome of an election, there are times when it could be, and if it is allowed to get out of control, then there could well be elections compromised.” 

“No American voters ever should have their lawful ballot cancelled out by ineligible voters, whether from the next county or from another country,” she added. 

The Heritage Foundation has been one of the main advocates for tightening voter registration laws at the federal level. Don Palmer, senior legal fellow for Election Integrity at the Heritage Foundation, told Zeale News that allowing “non-citizens on the voter rolls has become the most common error in the voting registration process in years or even decades.” 

Citing the SAVE Program used by 26 states, Palmer said, “[s]tate audits and list maintenance using federal databases have identified tens of thousands of non-citizens on the voter registration rolls.” As examples he pointed to efforts in Virginia and New Jersey, where both states found around close to 6,000 non-citizens on their voter rolls.

“Whether it is the intentional registration by a non-citizen or the lack of competent safeguards at state agencies to detect non-citizen registration, these glaring failures highlight the need for a system requiring proof of citizenship and solid verification process before placing the individual on the official voter registration rolls,” he said. 

But Talarico sees his state’s election integrity laws as discouraging voting. 

“We already have a lot of voter suppression in Texas. It’s baked into our laws. I fought fiercely against those laws. It’s why we see such low voter turnout,” he said on the Jamie Kern Lima podcast. 

In a possible sign of how tight the race for the Senate is, voter fraud has been an issue that has come up on the campaign trail in a personal way for both Talarico and Paxton. Talarico first accused Paxton of voter fraud for registering to vote using the address of his estranged wife where he hadn’t lived for two years. However, it was later discovered by The Texas Tribune that Talarico had voted in five elections using his parents’ address after he had bought a home nearby. 

The race between Paxton and Talarico for the U.S. Senate is quite close, according to recent polling. The latest reports indicate that Talarico has a single-digit lead over Paxton, but more Republicans than Democrats are undecided about how they will vote on Nov. 3.