VOTER FRAUD

All attorney general's vote-fraud cases targeted Democrats

Outside complaints prompted inquiries, spokesman says

DALLAS - Republican Attorney General Greg Abbott, who said two years ago that Texas faced an epidemic of vote fraud, has since prosecuted 26 cases, all against Democrats and most of them black or Hispanic, according to a published report.

The cases have usually resulted in small fines and little or no jail time, The Dallas Morning News reported in Sunday's editions.

The newspaper said none of the cases involved large schemes with the potential to tip elections.

Democrats accused Abbott of conducting a partisan campaign to intimidate minority voters.

Abbott established a special vote fraud unit in his office, used a $1.4 million federal grant and sent investigators to look for fraud.

Most of the cases his office pursued involved mail-in ballots. In 18 of the 26 cases, the voters were eligible and their votes were properly cast, but the people who gathered them for mailing were prosecuted. State law bans carrying someone else's completed ballot to the mailbox unless the carrier's name and address are on the envelope.

Matt Angle of the Lone Star Project, a group that says its mission is to fact-check Republicans, said Abbott has mostly gone after people in heavily Democratic precincts who helped elderly or disabled neighbors vote.

Angle called the prosecutions "an exercise in intimidation. They are trying to send a message to a much larger community that voting is a risky business."

The most serious cases prosecuted were against a former Port Lavaca City Council member who lied to a grand jury about registering noncitizens to vote and a Refugio County commissioner who gave mail-in ballots to residents to mark in his presence. Both were convicted and imprisoned.

Others included a woman who voted for her dead mother and a man who voted twice.

Some of the cases have flopped. In March, a judge dismissed charges against three Hidalgo County women who were indicted on charges that they illegally assisted elderly voters and mishandled mail-in ballots in a 2005 mayoral race in McAllen.

Jerry Strickland, spokesman for Abbott, said each case that the attorney general prosecuted started with a complaint from an outside party.

The newspaper said it couldn't tell how many complaints the attorney general has received or investigated because, except for a list of the cases prosecuted, Abbott's office declined to release documents that the newspaper sought under public records laws.