Texas Lieutenant Governor Offers $1M Reward For Voter Fraud Tips

AUSTIN, TX — Texas' lieutenant governor has offered to pay rewards of up to $1 million for information leading to a conviction for voter fraud as the GOP continues to seek proof of election irregularities.

The reward offer Tuesday from Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick comes as his party's leader, President Donald Trump, continues to cast doubt on the outcome of the Nov. 3 presidential election that was called Saturday for his Democratic rival, Joe Biden. Despite projections giving Biden at least 279 Electoral College votes — nine more than the 270 needed to win — versus 214 for Trump, the incumbent president has sought to cast doubt on the voting process by suggesting widespread fraud, although no evidence of it has been provided.

One of Trump's biggest boosters in the Lone Star State, Patrick offered to pay tipsters $25,000 for information on voter fraud and said payments would be capped at $1 million. Tips should be first submitted to local law enforcement, Patrick instructed potential tipsters.

“I support President Trump’s efforts to identify voter fraud in the presidential election and his commitment to making sure that every legal vote is counted and every illegal vote is disqualified," Patrick wrote in a prepared statement. "President Trump’s pursuit of voter fraud is not only essential to determine the outcome of this election, it is essential to maintain our democracy and restore faith in future elections."

The offer comes despite Trump's win in Texas by 6 percentage points. It also comes against a historical backdrop of negligible voter fraud in the Lone Star State — to the point that it cannot be statistically measured. The fact-checking service PolitiFact found a Texas resident is more likely to be struck by lightning than the chance of voter fraud emerging in the state.

However, Patrick insists voter fraud occurs despite evidence to the contrary. “In Texas, we know voter fraud is real," Patrick wrote. "In just the last 60 days, we have had three major arrests on voter fraud including a social worker who was arrested last week for allegedly registering almost 70 developmentally disabled adults to vote without their signature or consent."

Patrick also has cast doubt on the integrity of absentee voting. "In Texas, we also know that it is possible to provide the results of mail-in ballots on Election Day. We counted 970,000 mail-in ballots last Tuesday — a 55 percent increase over 2018 — and added those results to the in-person voting total before midnight on Election Day. The delays in counting mail-in ballots in other states raises more questions about voter fraud and potential mistakes."

Patrick isn't alone in seeking to cast doubt on the elections process in Texas.

Days before the election, Gov. Greg Abbott cited the potential of voter fraud as justification to allow for only one drop-off site per county for absentee voting in Texas, which is restricted in the state primarily to disabled, sick or elderly residents.

And one week before the election, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton used a video from a right-wing conservative activist group called Project Veritas to boost his allegations of voter fraud. The heavily edited video shows an undercover operation purporting to show a campaign employee in San Antonio interfering as an elderly woman fills out her absentee ballot.

Paxton expressed shock at the undercover "sting" operation: "What’s shown in the video is shocking and should alarm all Texans who care about election integrity," the attorney general wrote in a prepared statement at the time. "We are aggressively investigating the serious allegations and potential crimes that Project Veritas’s documentary audio and video recordings shed light on today. My office is fiercely committed to ensuring that the voting process is secure and fair in all Texas elections — a process that this video unfortunately casts a shadow of doubt on.”

Democrats were quick to discredit Paxton's claims: “Project Veritas is a right-wing operation whose selectively edited videos have been repeatedly debunked. It is dangerous for Attorney General Paxton to be using their work as a basis for any allegations, let alone about our elections when we are one week away from Election Day,” said Beto O’Rourke, Texas Right to Vote co-chair and Founder of Powered x People, in a prepared statement. “Texans are doing their part by showing up in record numbers despite these tactics and will continue to do so through Election Day.”

Texas Democrats noted that Project Veritas has a long track record of releasing manipulated videos in coordination with right-wing funders and media outlets. Last month, the group noted, researchers at Stanford University laid out Project Veritas’ process to create disinformation around the election through edited videos released and amplified through social media networks, a process that the latest video followed closely.

Julián Castro, Texas Right to Vote co-chair and former mayor of San Antonio, also decried Paxton's claims. "Ken Paxton is once again using baseless allegations to support his ill-conceived Election Integrity Unit to sow distrust in our election and intimidate voters with threat of prosecution,” Castro said in a prepared statement. “This is clearly a politically motivated attack in coordination with a right-wing group hoping to manufacture chaos in the last week of the election.”

More recently, Paxton on Sunday filed a brief in the Texas Supreme Court arguing that under the Texas Election Code, county election officials must permit poll watchers to observe the counting of ballots. Paxton’s friend-of-the-court brief came in response to a lawsuit alleging that the Travis County Central Counting Station was violating Texas law by excluding poll watchers from areas where ballots were being counted and obstructing poll watchers from performing their duties under Texas law, he said.

“The election laws passed by our Legislature were specifically designed to ensure integrity, security and transparency," Paxton said in a prepared statement. "Poll watchers are critical for increased confidence in election integrity and the prevention of fraud. Texas law provides for poll watchers as a procedural protection against irregularities or unlawful conduct. Watchers must be allowed to perform their lawful duty and verify the ballots are counted correctly—something they can’t do when stuck in a holding room. I will always fight to uphold the law and preserve the integrity of our elections.”

The lawsuit accuses the Travis County Central Counting Station of sequestering poll watchers behind a locked door in a separate room "... where they could not observe counting activities and did not have sufficient access to verify the integrity of the process," Paxton wrote. "These allegations are supported by sworn declarations."

Read Paxton's amicus brief here

Former Texas Secretary of State David Whitley joined the fray in January 2019, revealing that 95,000 non-citizens were on the state’s voter registration lists while suggesting 58,000 of them had cast ballots in at least one election. Whitley's office sent letters to suspected non-citizens acccused of voting improperly, threatening disenfranchisement unless they provided proof of citizenship within 30 days.

The shocking find prompted a tweet from Trump: "58,000 non-citizens voted in Texas, with 95,000 non-citizens registered to vote. These numbers are just the tip of the iceberg."

Paxton reacted too, threatening to prosecute those listed by Whitley even before the identified residents had been confirmed to have been illegal voters. "VOTER FRAUD ALERT,” the attorney general wrote on Twitter. "The @TXsecofstate discovered approx 95,000 individuals identified by DPS as non-U.S. citizens have a matching voter registration record in TX, approx 58,000 of whom have voted in TX elections. Any illegal vote deprives Americans of their voice."

Problem was, it ended up not being true: Nearly a quarter of those identified as possible non-citizens were actually naturalized citizens. Texas later agreed to stop its investigation of noncitizen voters as part of a settlement agreement reached with civil rights groups in April, as the Washington Post reported.

Related stories:

• Texas Claims 95K Non-U.S. Citizens Registered To Vote
• Federal Judge Blocks Texas From Purging Voter Rolls

By May, Whitley tendered his resignation. “Working alongside the employees in the secretary of state’s office, county election officials, and representatives of our #1 trading partner, Mexico, has been my distinct honor and privilege,” he wrote in a letter printed by multiple local media outlets.

The same year PolitiFact debunked claims of rampant voter fraud in Texas coincides with the year Paxton took office. Since then, he said in promoting the Project Veritas video, he has placed a premium on ensuring the integrity of the voting process in Texas: “Election integrity has been a top priority of mine since I first took office in 2015. Anyone who attempts to defraud the people of Texas, deprive them of their vote, or undermine the integrity of elections will be brought to justice and penalized to the fullest extent of the law.”

PolitiFact isn't alone in casting doubt on voter fraud claims. The 5th Circuit Court, in an opinion finding the state's earlier iteration of a Texas photo ID law to be racially discriminatory, noted that there were “only two convictions for in-person voter impersonation fraud out of 20 million votes cast in the decade” before Texas passed its Draconian law, according to Brennan Center for Justice research.