Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has opened investigations into 33 people he says voted in the 2024 election even though they may be noncitizens.
Mr. Paxton said the referrals came from the Texas secretary of state’s office, which ran voter lists through a Homeland Security database.
“Noncitizens must not be allowed to influence American elections, and I will use the full weight of my office to investigate all voter fraud,” Mr. Paxton, a Republican, said. “These potential instances of unlawful voting will be thoroughly investigated, and I will continue to stand with President Trump in fighting to ensure that our state’s elections are safe and secure.”
He said the names were checked against the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database, run by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service.
The Trump administration has granted states more access to the data to test their voter databases against it.
Federal authorities have also been pursuing illegal voting instances under Mr. Trump, with a half dozen prosecutions so far.
Homeland Security Investigations last week arrested a Haitian man in Florida who was charged with unlawful voting.
Prosecutors this month also won a 65-month sentence against Carlos Abreu, an illegal immigrant from the Dominican Republic, who pleaded guilty to weapons and identity theft charges as well as voting under the stolen identity of a U.S. citizen.
Abreu lived 17 years under the name of the U.S. citizen, a Puerto Rican whose identity he assumed in 2007.
Given that he was using a valid, albeit stolen identity, it’s unlikely a case like his would have been caught through a check of the SAVE database.
Voting rights advocates say noncitizen voting is so rare as to be a nonissue.
Voter integrity activists say states generally haven’t gone looking for it, so the full extent isn’t known.
The 33 potential cases in Texas were out of more than 11 million ballots cast in the state in November.
