By Nathan Henderson-James

Reports out of Texas over the past month show a pattern familiar to voting rights groups: top law enforcement officials engaged in deeply politicized efforts to push prosecutions and policies that disenfranchise low-income and minority voters. Steve Rosenfeld, writing in the Texas Observer, lays out the the whole story in detail, but the general gist feels a lot like the politicization scandal the US Department of Justice brought to light over the course of 2007.

Citing "reports from over a hundred years of voter fraud in South Texas" the Texas Attorney General, Greg Abbot, set up a special task force in 2006 called the Special Investigations Unit with a $1.5 million grant and used it to search for instances of widespread voter fraud. Ideally such cases would be used to justify the pursuit of voter suppression policies like voter identification. Abbot is on record supporting such a policy, which was defeated in the 2006 Texas legislative session when a sick senator hooked up to an IV made his way onto the Senate floor to sustain the blockage of the bill.

Over the course of Abbot's investigations he has managed to bring a total of 26 cases, as Wayne Slater, writing in the Dallas Morning News reports today. Of those 26, two involved actual voters casting illegal ballots. Six appear to have been voter registration fraud and the remaining 18 were technical violations of mail-in ballot rules, specifically having a 3rd party mail the filled-in ballot without placing the 3rd party's name and address on the return label.

Here's what the AG's office had to say about that,

"These guilty pleas demonstrate precisely why it is so important to uphold the integrity of our election process in the state," Abbott said, speaking of Ray’s and Johnson’s convictions in a press release. "We will visit justice upon any who ignore the fact that we have election laws in Texas and they apply to everyone."

But as is often the case, other people had other views,

Lisa Turner, of the Lone Star Project, said Abbott’s goal was not merely to prosecute little old ladies. Rather, Turner said, it was to send a message to Texas’ minority communities, which lean Democratic, by sowing fear among the elderly about voting by mail. The Lone Star Project is a political action committee that first exposed Abbott’s prosecutions, issued reports on it, and maintains a staff to fight voter suppression in the state.

"It’s the equivalent of when a gang moves into a neighborhood and spray-paints their graffiti or their marker; it’s not to deface one building. It is to send a message," Turner said. "You have agents of the attorney general walking through a neighborhood, walking past three crack houses, to go talk to a voter. Think about that. What does that say their priorities are? It’s about holding on to the levers of power."

All of these cases involve low-income voters and all involve minorities. But none show any kind of widespread problem with voter fraud, the kind that partisans rail to frequently against as a rising threat to the integrity of the American electoral system. Because, frankly, such a threat simply does not exist. As Josh Marshal, writing at Talking Points Memo puts it,

No one denies there are isolated cases of vote fraud. The question is how organized and widespread it is, whether it's affecting the outcomes of any actual elections, and whether (depending on the answers to those questions) whether the extent of the problem justifies measures which also have the effect of making it either more difficult or more perilous for eligible voters to exercise their rights at the ballot box. The fact that these politicized and morally corrupt prosecutors offices can't come up with more than a trivial number of actual cases makes the answer to the question pretty straightforward.

Remember the larger context too. In the case of the US Attorney firings, most of the dismissals targeted prosecutors who refused to use the power of their office to advance the interests of the Republican party by engaging in these kinds of witch hunts.

Not surprisingly, Abbot is also pushing for a new law in Texas to require photo IDs to be allowed to vote -- the latest gambit to try to shave a few percentage points off voter participation among the targeted groups.

The recent fight in Missouri revolved aorund the same issues and Project Vote expect this and other tactics related to the suppression of already-marginalized voting groups to continue to crop up, especially as the national election in November steadily approaches. But, as we've seen from 2007 onwards, partisans seeking to shape the electorate to gain power, rather than by winning the votes of a majority of eligible voters, rarely rest and often engage in long-term efforts to lock out large segments of citizens from the foundational right of American democracy.

Project Vote tracks legal efforts to disenfranchise voters through its ElectionLegislation.orgwebsite and has provides technical assistance to state-based advocates working to defend voting rights. For more information you can visit our website and sign-up for our monthly newsletter, Democracy Matters.

Nathan Henderson-James is the director of Project Vote's Strategic Writing and Research Department (SWORD).