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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said Tuesday that he is investigating “more than 100 potential noncitizens” suspected of casting more than 200 ballots during the 2020 and 2022 election cycles.
Paxton’s news release said most of the cases involve Harris County voters. His office is also investigating possible instances in Guadalupe, Cameron, and Eastland counties, using information obtained from the Texas Secretary of State, the news release said.
In Texas, about 11 million voters cast ballots in Texas in the November 2020 presidential election, and more than 8 million in the November 2022 general election. The more than 200 ballots Paxton cited for the two full election cycles would amount to around one-thousandth of 1% of the ballots cast in just the two general elections combined.
Noncitizen voting is illegal, and documented cases of it are rare, but Republicans have argued that even a single instance is too many. They’ve called for eliminating the threat of noncitizen voting through state and federal legislation requiring documentary proof of citizenship from voters. Some states, including Louisiana, New Hampshire, and Wyoming, have recently passed such laws. But a bill in Texas failed to pass during the regular legislative session that ended in June.
In November, Texas voters will be asked to approve a constitutional amendment affirming that only U.S. citizens are permitted to vote, which is already codified in state and federal law.
To encourage states to crack down on the risk of noncitizen voting, President Donald Trump issued an executive order in March directing the Department of Homeland Security to provide all states free access to SAVE, a federal database managed by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, where election officials can check the citizenship status of registered voters.
Last month, the Texas Secretary of State’s Office announced it had referred 33 potential noncitizens who voted in the November 2024 election to the attorney general’s office. Paxton said his office is also investigating those cases.
“If you’re a noncitizen who illegally cast a ballot, you will face the full force of the law,” Paxton said in Tuesday’s news release.
Natalia Contreras is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. She is based in Corpus Christi. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org.
