Defending Your Vote: In South Texas, the parable of noncitizen voting takes heart stage

This story is a part of ABC Information’ monthlong sequence “Defending Your Vote,” profiling folks throughout the nation who’re devoted to making sure the integrity of the voting course of.

Cecilia Castellano awoke to the sound of her doorbell within the early hours of Aug. 20. The South Texas sky exterior her Atascosa County dwelling was nonetheless darkish, however as she emerged from her bed room — hair curlers in place, a gown draped over her shoulders — a lightweight reduce throughout her lobby.

Two voices on the opposite aspect of her entrance door introduced themselves: “Police Division.”

“I got here to the entrance and I truly regarded out via the window … they usually had been shining a flashlight in my window,” Castellano recalled in an interview with ABC Information’ Mireya Villarreal. “They stated, ‘Ma’am, we’ve a search warrant.’ I stated, ‘A search warrant for what?’ They usually’re like, ‘Nicely, can we are available in?'”

The officers offered Castellano with the warrant, then confiscated her telephone and requested her to put in writing down its PIN, she stated.

They had been trying to find proof of so-called “vote harvesting,” an opaque provision of a 2021 voter integrity invoice championed by the state’s Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and enforced by its controversial lawyer normal, Ken Paxton.

Each males have characterised the regulation, identified extensively as S.B. 1, as a safeguard towards noncitizen voting — an exceedingly uncommon prevalence already banned beneath state and federal regulation. However Castellano, a Democratic candidate for a seat within the Texas State Home, calls it voter intimidation.

“All I’ve carried out — all my group has carried out — is gone and knocked on doorways,” Castellano stated. “That is why I used to be caught off-guard. And to at the present time, I’ve gone from being scared, to being indignant, to [thinking] they’ve violated my civil rights — they’ve really tried to intimidate me.”

A 3rd-generation Mexican American, Castellano — who’s a grandmother and a enterprise proprietor — launched her longshot bid for public workplace with no expectation of incomes widespread consideration. However within the aftermath of Aug. 20, her marketing campaign has emerged as a flashpoint within the nationwide debate over noncitizen voting.

Castellano was amongst a number of distinguished Latinos in Texas who had been focused in reference to Paxton’s vote harvesting probe, which he stated was precipitated by “adequate proof” of election fraud. A county prosecutor exterior San Antonio referred allegations of “election fraud and vote harvesting” to the lawyer normal’s workplace in 2022, in response to Paxton’s assertion in August.

No fees have been filed within the case.

“Why are they coming to the areas the place it is predominantly Latinos?” Villarreal requested Castellano.

“As a result of they’re attempting to intimidate the Latinos,” Castellano replied.

Republicans, following the lead of former President Donald Trump, have claimed with out proof that undocumented immigrants might tilt the scales in favor of Democrats this November, more and more selling the debunked narrative as a centerpiece of their pitch to voters within the months main as much as Election Day.

“Our elections are dangerous,” Trump stated at ABC Information’ presidential debate in September. “And loads of these unlawful immigrants coming in, they’re attempting to get them to vote. They can not even communicate English, they do not know even know what nation they’re in virtually, and these individuals are attempting to get them to vote, and that is why they’re permitting them to come back into our nation.”

Home Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican, not too long ago tried with out success to go laws that will have required voters to show their U.S. citizenship via documentation — as an alternative of testifying to it beneath penalty of perjury as the present legal guidelines require — arguing in Might that, “Everyone knows, intuitively, that loads of illegals are voting in federal elections.”

However critics and election specialists say that merely is not true, they usually accuse Trump and his allies of producing unfounded and disingenuous claims of noncitizen voting as a part of an effort to make it tougher for eligible voters to register and vote. The libertarian Cato Institute known as allegations of widespread noncitizen voting “alarmist theorizing,” and the Republican elections chief in Pennsylvania not too long ago acknowledged that he “discovered that it occurred very, very, very occasionally.”

The Brennan Heart for Justice, a nonpartisan suppose tank, discovered that fewer than 0.0001% of the votes solid within the 2016 election had been made by suspected noncitizens.

“Noncitizen voting is a vanishingly uncommon phenomenon,” stated Sean Morales-Doyle, a voting rights professional on the Brennan Heart. “It’s a felony offense for a noncitizen to both register to vote in state and federal elections, or to vote. The results embody jail time, they embody hefty fines, they usually embody deportation.”

“It’s simply mind-boggling to suppose that somebody who has determined to maneuver themselves and their household to america and attempt to construct a life right here goes to danger all of that — danger their freedom and their presence in america — to solid one poll in a single election,” he stated.

Even so, leaders in a handful of GOP-led states have wielded the specter of large-scale noncitizen voting to justify mass purges from their voter rolls, together with in Tennessee, Alabama, Ohio, and Texas — the place Gov. Abbott has boasted of eradicating greater than 1,000,000 names from the rolls since 2021, when S.B. 1 was handed.

In Virginia, Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin stated he eliminated greater than 6,000 people suspected of being noncitizens from the state’s voter rolls — however a Washington Put up investigation discovered not a single instance of noncitizen voting throughout his time period. And on Friday, the Justice Division sued Virginia for allegedly violating federal guidelines that ban states from eradicating voters from the rolls inside 90 days of an election. Youngkin known as the lawsuit a “politically motivated motion” meant to “intrude in our elections.”

Because the nationwide debate over noncitizen voting rages on, Castellano has vowed to proceed her marketing campaign. Throughout a current afternoon of door-knocking in Jourdanton, Texas, the place she was trailed by a gaggle of reporters, two police cruisers approached Castellano.

“I am truly the candidate for state consultant for Home District 80,” Castellano instructed the law enforcement officials, explaining that the cameras following her had been reporters monitoring her marketing campaign.

“I stay up for incomes y’all’s vote — the lads in blue, the ladies in blue,” she instructed the officers.