With the presidential election drawing closer, it is reasonable to expect that the Regime Media will begin to intensify its voter suppression fearmongering and race baiting. The time is upon us where efforts to safeguard election integrity shall be deemed to be racist, no matter the underlying set of facts.
Such is the case with the CBS Evening News, and their coverage of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s investigation into voter fraud. Here is that report in its entirety (click “expand” to view full transcript):
CBS EVENING NEWS
8/27/24
6:40 PM
NORAH O’DONNELL: And there is an election uproar growing in Texas with a voting rights organization calling for a federal investigation. The League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC, is accusing the state's Republican attorney general of voter intimidation after authorities raided the homes of its volunteers over allegations of voter fraud. CBS's Omar Villafranca spoke with some of those whose homes were searched.
LIDIA MARTINEZ: They scared the hell out of me.
OMAR VILLAFRANCA: 87-year-old Lidia Martinez, who is LULAC’s longest serving volunteer, had her home raided as part of a fraud investigation by the Texas attorney general.
MARTINEZ: We live in the United States of America, you’re acting like Gestapos, this is not Russia.
VILLAFRANCA: They searched this room?
MARTINEZ: Everything.
VILLAFRANCA: Martinez says up to eight officers showed up at her home last Tuesday morning. They took her phone, her laptop, questioned her for hours, and made her wait outside.
MARTINEZ: I said, let me get dressed and they said, “No. go outside”.
VILLAFRANCA: What were you wearing?
MARTINEZ: My nightgown. And I had all of these policemen around me. It was embarrassing, humiliating. I was so angry. It was horrible.
VILLAFRANCA: The raid comes after state Attorney General Ken Paxton recently announced an investigation into allegations of election fraud and vote harvesting, which began in 2022. The Attorney General's office said it had found enough evidence to obtain search warrants, which they executed last Tuesday across three different counties. LULAC's president says this is voter suppression.
ROMAN PALOMARES: It is evident, through his patterns of lawsuits, raids, searches, and seizures, that he is trying to keep Latinos from voting.
VILLAFRANCA: Now the organization is asking the Justice Department to investigate Paxton. In a letter first obtained by CBS News, they called his actions, quote: "a serious violation of the civil rights of Latino citizens. Cecilia Castellano is running for a hotly contested state house seat and says officers executed a search warrant at her home.
CECILIA CASTELLANO: I believe that this is plain old politics that the Republicans are just trying to suppress the voice of the Latino community, trying to suppress me. That's not going to happen.
VILLAFRACA: We reached out to Paxton for comment but did not hear back. Now, a ProPublica report found that between January 2020 and September of 2022, Paxton's office opened up at least 390 cases for potential election crimes, but of those cases, only five led to conviction. Norah.
O’DONNELL: Omar Villafranca with that new reporting today. Thank you.
Viewed on its face, the report makes it look like the Texas AG’s office is prosecuting a nothingburger. The parties interviewed were all made to appear sympathetic, and the whole election integrity operation was made to look racist. But what really happened?
Quite a bit, per The Texas Tribune:
The investigation from Paxton’s office began in 2022, when the local district attorney referred the case to the state. The inquiry was prompted by a complaint from the loser of a Democratic primary runoff for a Frio County office.
The losing candidate told a state investigator that she had been told by others that the winner had hired the woman to collect ballots. The losing candidate then got all applications for mail-in ballots through an open records request and compared the alleged harvester handwriting to other applications that were not signed, concluding that the woman had filled out several mail-in ballots without disclosing that she had assisted, according to the affidavit.
The alleged vote harvester was helped by two other women, the losing candidate told the investigator. The main suspect charged candidates between $1,500 to $2,500 to collect the applications, mail ballots and sometimes drive voters to vote, the losing judge told the investigator, according to the affidavit. She received payments through her daughter’s Cash App, the losing candidate said. The affidavits do not indicate that the losing candidate provided any proof of the schemes.
The investigator obtained Cash App records for the account that showed the winning judge and another local candidate had paid the daughter close to the date of the election in 2022 — “in some instances, [adding] a note to the payment which stated, ‘election,’” according to the affidavit.
None of this made it into Villafranca’s report. Instead, we got the sympathetic grandma, LULAC- who, by the way endorsed Kamala Harris for president, and the candidate for whom the aforementioned ballots were allegedly harvested. A lot of smoke and mirrors, but no specifics as to the underlying reasons for why search warrants were executed.
In fact, things are a lot shadier than what was originally reported. Reasonable people may conclude that the real reason this report was filed today is to blunt another, more devastating press release from AG Paxton- nonprofit groups willfully registering noncitizens to vote:
Investigators from the Texas Attorney General’s Election Integrity Unit recently conducted undercover operations to identify potential voter registration of noncitizens in Texas. The investigation has already confirmed that various nonprofit organizations have been located outside Texas Department of Public Safety Driver License offices, operating booths offering to assist in voter registration for persons doing business at the driver’s license offices. But all citizens have already been presented an opportunity to register to vote as part of the process of renewing or being issued an identification card or driver’s license, so there is no obvious need to assist citizens to register to vote outside DPS offices—calling into question the motives of the nonprofit groups.
If you scroll all the way down to the end of the press release, you’ll find that undercover operations are ongoing. This is why LULAC and all the other groups are all up in arms. This noise is really about chilling the next investigation in furtherance of election integrity. Which makes the CBS report, as part of a broader effort to smear the investigation, an act of election interference.
