At the detriment of our public discourse and the accuracy and fairness of our elections, conversations regarding verifiable fraud in the voting process have been relegated to either always being believed or always shunned by the loudest, most hyper-partisan voices in the room. However, nearly none of the most hardened voices on either side of the election integrity issue are even privy to the avenues and channels that would allow them to draw informed conclusions.
That’s why Josh Findlay, Director of the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Election Protection Project, jumped on the unique opportunity to sit down with Levi Fuller, Assistant Attorney General for the state of Texas. It’s important to remember that the position of Assistant Attorney General is an unelected position, meaning none of the claims made by Levi were made purely for political reasons. He immediately made it clear that voter fraud has been a present reality for years in the eyes of the Lone Star State’s top law enforcement officials.
Levi even claimed that credible accusations of fraud flooded the Attorney General’s Office from all four corners of Texas. He also explained why we’re not seeing many cases on voter fraud: “You’re not going to have prosecutions if you don’t have prosecutors.” Simply put, there’s not enough bandwidth to prosecute voter fraud. But just like refusing to prosecute low-level crimes—like many ideologically driven district attorneys do—doesn’t make the low-level crimes stop, the lack of prosecution for voter fraud doesn’t mean it’s not happening.
The lack of bandwidth is an issue the assistant attorney general has raised before, citing the from-bad-to-worse effect of a lack of prosecutors being coupled with little desire from many district attorneys to further pursue allegations. Levi later said that the amount of credible accusations of fraud across Texas were simply “too many to count.” During his time in the AG’s office, Levi has been privy to evidence that points to voter intimidation on the part of poll watchers, private organizations who offer cigarettes, alcohol, and money to those on the street to vote, and even instances of alleged illegal aliens voting after vote-by-mail ballots conveniently arrived at their doorstep.
In one of the more egregious instances mentioned in the podcast, the Assistant Attorney General describes how ballot harvesting, an illegal practice in the state of Texas that TPPF has been sounding the alarm on since 2020, has been used in past elections. Illegal harvesters prey on the uninterested and uninformed nature of many voters. Once the marquee, top-of-the-ticket race has been filled out, typically for president, governor, or senator, some voters often leave the plethora of remaining races blank. However, the harvesters who are “helping” the voter can fill in the remaining races—and get paid to do so.
In another instance, the Attorney General’s office was tipped off from a chain of text messages reading, “I’ve got 200 ballots that I’d like to sell.” These are by no means new revelations on the part of Texas’s Assistant Attorney General. Even NPR has highlighted the work of politiqueras a moniker for the politically and electorally sneaky, describing someone who, according to NPR’s reporting, bribes voters with among other vices, dime bags of cocaine.”
One politiqueras boldly responded to a reporter, “Oh yes,” when asked if she could theoretically help a Democrat in a razor-thin race get an extra 200 votes. Levi points out, and the NPR article confirms, that this is not some grand ideologically aligned conspiracy theory. Those who proclaim our elections are free of fraud simply don’t live in reality. Texas, with the strongest election integrity laws in the nation, is home to well-documented instances of fraud that are well-organized and go back decades. If that is true of a place like Texas, how deep-rooted are these same practices in critical swing states such as Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Michigan? The time has long passed regarding discussions of “if” voter fraud is happening. It undeniably is, it’s time to do something about it.