Border County DA Pledges Crackdown on Voter Fraud

A Texas border county district attorney says he is going to crack down on voter fraud and is conducting investigations.

Starr County District Attorney Omar Escobar says there are questionable applications for mail-in ballots and he suspects that people lied on their voting applications, reported The Monitor. He has also found noncitizens who have registered.

The DA also gave the elections department a list of those convicted of felonies, including those who are on felony probation and are thus ineligible to vote.

The Starr County elections department alerted the border DA about the suspicious applications for mail-in ballots.

Starr County is located on the Mexican border and is in the Rio Grande City and McAllen-Edinburg statistical areas. A legal organization founded by a former Reagan Administration member sued Starr County in 2016 claiming there are more registered voters than eligible voters in the county. The county is listed along with 12 other Texas counties as having similarly over-registered voters, Breitbart Texas reported in October 2017.

The other Texas counties on the list are: Loving, Brooks, Irion, McMullen, Kenedy, Jim Hogg, Culberson, Edwards, Roberts, Polk, Kent, and Cottle.

“Our legislature has given us a very clear mandate to begin and try to prevent voter fraud,” Escobar told The Monitor.

The Democrat district attorney who was unopposed in the general election said he had alerted the public about a new Texas law that went into effect on December 1.

Texas Senate Bill 5 (SB 5) makes it a crime to provide false information on a voter application. It also makes it a crime to apply in the name of a potential voter without their consent. The offense is a felony.

The Monitor noted the lawsuit filed by the American Civil Rights Union (ACRU) in 2016 which alleges that the county was violating the National Voting Rights Act by failing to keep an accurate list of registered voters.

The Public Interest Legal Foundation filed a lawsuit in March 2016 against Rafael R. Montalvo, in his official capacity, as the election administrator in Starr County. The legal foundation sued the election administrator for failing to use reasonable efforts to keep the county’s voter rolls maintained, and for failing, under federal law, to provide records showing that voter rolls had been protected and did not include non-citizen voters.

Bob Price serves as associate editor and senior political news contributor for Breitbart Texas. He is a founding member of the Breitbart Texas team. Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX, Gab, and Facebook.