Texas Democratic Party: Moving Texas Forward

Leading up to his own 2006 reelection campaign, Texas Republican Attorney General Greg Abbott led a highly partisan “voter fraud” goose chase that cost Texas taxpayers $1.4 million and was nothing more than an attempt to use his office to carry out an effort to suppress the vote. 

Abbott’s high profile crusade did not prosecute a single case of voter impersonation and resulted in only a handful of indictments – and almost every one was related to technical violations that did not involve illegal or fraudulent ballots. Almost every person Abbott indicted was an elderly African American or Hispanic voter, which was hardly surprising given the fact that “voter fraud” training materials his office developed featured visual images of people of color. Adding insult to injury to Texas taxpayers, Abbott repeatedly refused to publicly justify the use of taxpayer funds for his expensive and ultimately fruitless voter fraud witch hunt.

• Abbott launched his campaign by referring to an “epidemic of voter fraud,” but he found no evidence of systematic voter fraud. Out of the 7.4 million ballots cast in 2004, Abbott prosecuted only 26 isolated local cases primarily related to technical violations that typically involved eligible voters who cast their vote correctly. Every person Abbott prosecuted was a Democrat, and despite the fact that Abbott was sent well-documented complaints that indicated over 100 ballots had been mishandled in Highland Park, a heavily Republican area of Dallas, no action was taken by the Attorney General. (Source: Dallas Morning News)

• One of the elderly targets of “Abbott’s Army” suffered a stroke that friends say was caused in part by constant harassment by Abbott’s agents who were desperately trying to make a case against her for having helped her elderly neighbors vote by mail. Gloria Meeks, then 69, later sued Greg Abbott, giving a sworn statement that two state investigators peeped into her bathroom window twice while drying off after a bath. (Source: The New York Times)

• With Governor Perry’s approval, Abbott diverted as much as $1.4 million in federal Byrne Grant funds away from their intended uses for law enforcement efforts to pay for his bogus voter fraud crusade, even though voter fraud is not listed as a proper use of Byrne Grants funds under federal guidelines. (Sources: Department of Justice)
• By diverting Byrne Grants funds to a partisan voter fraud effort, Abbott and Perry made fewer funds available for their intended use – fighting drug offenders and violent crime.  While Abbott launched his campaign with great hoopla, an East Texas Narcotics Task Force was forced to shut down due to a shortage of federal funds, prompting Task Force Sgt. Kim Graham to comment: “We do have local meth labs in East Texas and for some reason the governor of Texas thinks we don’t. I don’t know what people here are going to do.” (Source: Fort Worth Star-Telegram via Free Republic)

• During the last legislative session, Senate Democrats sought Abbott’s testimony on his use of $1.4 million in taxpayer funds “without finding a single case where someone tried to impersonate an eligible voter at a polling place.” Greg Abbott declined to appear before the Senate. (Source: Dallas Morning News)

Without question, law enforcement agencies, schools and neighborhood programs could have benefited from the federal Byrne Grant funds that were diverted to Abbott’s campaign year voter fraud goose chase, further evidence that as long as Texas is under one party Republican rule, Texas taxpayers will be forced to endure the misuse of our tax dollars for purely partisan purposes.

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