How Tea Partiers Fueled Texas' Latest 'Voter Fraud' Freakout
In August, a group of outraged conservative activists sent Governor Greg Abbott a letter that helped spark Texas’ latest voter-fraud scare.
Signed by more than 100 tea party leaders across the state, the letter declared, “The fact that our Texas elections are being compromised is beyond question.” In a press conference announcing their demands, JoAnn Fleming, an East Texas tea partier who’s been beating the immigrants-are-invading drum for years, warned that hundreds of thousands of “illegals” had registered to vote in the state.
“Reasonable people understand that American citizens get a little hot under the collar if they believe their votes can be stolen by someone here illegally,” Fleming said before passing the mic to Aaron Harris, a Tarrant County political operative affiliated with the Empower Texans wing of the state GOP. Harris, who Fleming called the “subject matter expert” on all things voter fraud, reserved most of his venom for Texas’ top elections official, Secretary of State Rolando Pablos, an Abbott appointee, who he claimed had failed to adequately police the state’s voter rolls.
“We’re asking [Abbott] to step in and ask the secretary of state to check the citizenship of people who register to vote in Texas,” Harris said. He later provided a citizen-action toolkit for conservatives to push for action before the November midterm election — talking points, sample posts for social media and scripts for flooding the governor’s office with calls and emails. “What we know is that Governor Abbott has historically been very responsive to public pressure, he’s been very responsive to the grassroots,” he told conservative organizers on a conference call later that week.
Read more: https://www.texasobserver.org/how-tea-partiers-fueled-texas-latest-voter-fraud-freakout/
