In 2020 I filed a lawsuit urging the Supreme Court to decide who wins the presidency by throwing out millions of votes in cities like Atlanta, Philadelphia, Milwaukee and Detroit and their first-ring suburbs — most of which were cast by Black and brown people. In effect, the message I and all those attorney generals and U.S. House members supportive of my suit was sending was that Black and brown people can’t be trusted to vote.

 

Now, if you know your American history, disenfranchsing non-white people is as American as apple pie. You know the long hard slog the civil rights movement endured while taking on the systems and institutions set up in the Jim Crow South. 

 

But wait, there’s more!

 

Since I took office in 2015, the vast majority of individuals my office has prosecuted for voter fraud are people of color — and primarily women of color, a new analysis by the American Civil Liberties Union shows. The analysis, based on public records, court filings, media reports and assumptions based on common Hispanic surnames, found at least 72 percent of all the election fraud cases have been brought against Black and Latino defendants. At least 45 percent were against Black and Latino women. It also found that 86 percent of the prosecutions involved offenses allegedly occurring in counties with majority non-white and Latino populations.

 

My expansive hunt for voter fraud is part of a thinly veiled effort by Republicans to discourage minorities from voting as they face the most competitive elections in a generation. Trump won Texas by 6 percent, the thinnest margin of victory for a Republican nominee since 1996 when Bob Dole won by 5 points.

 

In truth, we have launched an all-out attack on voting rights at both the state and federal level. The data reveals the true targets of our voter suppression schemes. We Republicans here in Texas have a dangerous anti-democracy agenda that, if allowed to succeed, will invite discrimination and harassment and make it harder to vote, especially for people of color and Texans with disabilities.