Emails to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s hotline alleging illegal voting have been flooded with trolls and taunts

HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) — Wayne Schneider said he was surprised when he received a letter from his local tax office saying someone in his household was ineligible to vote.

That’s because the letter was addressed to his mother and included a registration form with her name on it, even though she is no longer alive.

“It’s been 16 years since my mother died and this is the first time we’ve had something like this,” Manor’s Schneider told 13 Investigates. “My wife said, you know, we should really report this, so give it to me, I’ll take care of it.”

On Sept. 30, Schneider’s wife emailed Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton at llegalvoting@oag.texas.gov to report illegal voting

Paxton launched the email tip line on August 28, saying: “The significant growth of the non-citizen population in Texas and a series of partisan efforts to illegally weaponize voter registration and the election process to overturn election results manipulate have urgent risks for local, state, and federal elections.”

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, lists just six criminal convictions since 2020 in Texas in its voter fraud database.

For comparison, more than 11.3 million Texans voted in the 2020 presidential election.

“We have a hard time getting people to vote. “The idea that there are people who should vote, who shouldn’t vote, or who should engage in illegal activities seems – the word ‘remote’ would be an exaggeration,” Bob Stein, a professor of political science at Rice University, said.

13 Investigators wanted to know who emailed the hotline set up by Paxton and whether it detected voter fraud.

We received more than 1,000 emails to the hotline, most of which were sent in the days after the address was announced. A review of the emails shows that 74% of them came from people trolling and mocking Paxton and his party with insults, some name-calling, a few vulgar images and even more complaints about him.

“So you started a chain of traitors?” read the subject line of an email. The body of the email continued: “Pay. How about you stop suppressing the vote?”

Hundreds of emails to the hotline included a nearly decade-old mugshot of Paxton, who was arrested and charged in 2015 on securities fraud charges. Just weeks before he was scheduled to go on trial earlier this year, prosecutors agreed, among other things, to drop the charges if Paxton completed 100 hours of community service and paid restitution.

SEE ALSO: Texas AG Ken Paxton Reaches Settlement in Securities Fraud Case, Agrees to Six-Figure Restitution

Of the 1,059 emails we reviewed, 12% were spam emails that likely came from people who signed up for rewards program tips or newsletters from places like Pottery Barn, Victoria Secret, Banana Republic, Old Navy and LGBTQ Nation had signed up.

6% of emails were difficult to understand, either because they contained broken web links or because they were so poorly written that they could not be deciphered.

There were only 3% of residents who appeared to believe they had information about illegal voting, although in most cases no concrete evidence was presented. These tips included tipsters revealing names and addresses of people they suspect have voted illegally in the past or will do so in the future, based on alleged conversations with the people, hunches or hearsay.

Another 4% of emails addressed concerns not directly related to illegal voting, such as how to remove deceased relatives from voter rolls or concerns about setting up voter registration booths in locations they believed were not should be allowed.

There were 15 generic emails from people who appreciated setting up an email to send tips about illegal voting, although none of those emails contained actual tips.

One resident wrote: “Thank you for this important tool.”

But there were far more emails against the tip line, with residents saying things like, “What a waste of my tax, you’re Ken.”

Another person wrote an email asking, “How many illegal voters did you reach with this email address and how many people did you poll for no reason?” This person sent a second email asking: “How many actual cases of illegal voting have been discovered? It seems this is just a way to scare people who are legally entitled to vote.”

13 investigators did not receive all of the emails we requested.

In Texas, if a government agency believes that information may be withheld under Texas law, it submits a letter to the Texas AG’s office requesting a decision whether to release the information under the Texas Public Information Act have to or not.

In response to our request, the AG’s office sent a letter on October 18 to another department within the AG’s office asserting that some of the emails did not need to be made public.

“A member of the OAG’s law enforcement division has identified certain emails that appear to contain credible allegations of misconduct. The release of these emails would harm the OAG’s investigative interests as well as potential criminal prosecutions related to these investigations,” reads the letter from an assistant attorney in the AG’s office.

13 Investigates reached out to Paxton’s communications team last Friday after receiving this letter and asked how many investigations had been opened into allegations of election-related misconduct.

We also wanted to know in which counties these allegations were made, what type of allegations they are investigating and how many tips the hotline has received.

As of Wednesday afternoon, we had not received a response from the AG’s office.

Last year, during a speech at the Heritage Foundation, Paxton said he was asked to speak on the “very controversial topic” of election fraud.

“I’m actually going to say those words. They shouldn’t really be said anymore in American politics. You can be censored. You can be criticized by the media. The words are ‘voter fraud.’ And I’m just going to say them out loud because this is happening not just in my state, but across the country,” Paxton said during the April 27, 2023 event.

However, the same foundation’s database shows only six criminal convictions related to voter fraud since 2020 in Texas.

Stein said proponents of the tip line could argue that it instills more confidence in voters. But, he said, there is no evidence that this is actually the case.

“The real concern about voter fraud is not the fraud. It doesn’t really exist, but if people think it exists, if people think that elections aren’t fair, aren’t honest, and are rigged for one party or the other, then you have a much more serious problem.” said Stone. “It’s not just asymmetrical. It’s not just Republicans. There are many Democrats who believe that elections are not conducted fairly.”

Schneider said that although he emailed the AG on the illegal election tip line, he doesn’t actually suspect any illegal activity related to the tip he sent them that his late mother had received mail in the she was asked to register to vote.

He said he doesn’t think anyone has any intention of voting on their behalf, but he wants someone to care.

“I think someone needs to at least take my mother’s name off their list somewhere. I mean, they had to think of it somewhere. “I don’t know where they got it from, but someone needs to look into where they got it from and delete it,” he said.

However, on Wednesday, Schneider said he had not received any follow-up from the attorney general’s office after voicing his concerns last month.

“It would be nice to find out how this happened and why we suddenly received this letter after 16 years,” he said.

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