Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Friday filed a lawsuit against Travis County, which includes the capital of Austin and is the fifth most populous county in the state, over its voter registration policies.
In a lawsuit filed in the District Court of Travis County, the attorney’s office alleged that Travis County hired a third-party company to aid in voter registration, which Paxton said runs afoul of the law. The firm in question, Civic Government Solutions, is a "partisan organization” because its CEO had made public comments about his interest in "progressive” politics, the suit says.

"Travis County has blatantly violated Texas law by paying partisan actors to conduct unlawful identification efforts to track down people who are not registered to vote,” Paxton, a Republican, said in a statement alongside the lawsuit. "Programs like this invite fraud and reduce public trust in our elections. We will stop them and any other county considering such programs.”

The suit, in part, urged the court to block Travis County from giving the group "thousands of taxpayer dollars to identify the names and addresses of potentially unregistered voters” because the county, according to Paxton’s office, lacks the authority "to contract with a vendor to identify and target potentially unregistered individuals who may or may not be eligible to vote.”
For its claims that the company has a partisan bent, Paxton’s complaint cited a podcast interview with it’s CEO, Jeremy Smith, released in September 2022, titled "Data and Tools for Progressive Politics with Jeremy Smith of Civitech.”

A spokesperson for Travis County, Hector Nieto, told The Epoch Times on Friday that it believes Paxton is trying to "sow distrust and discourage participation in the electoral process” by filing the lawsuit.

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