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Texas County’s Embrace of Mail-In Voting Backed by 17 State AGs

Texas County’s Embrace of Mail-In Voting Backed by 17 State AGs

Seventeen Democratic state attorneys general have thrown their weight behind a Texas county clerk who was sued by the state over plans to send mail-in voting applications to all registered voters in Houston-based Harris County, the most populous county in Texas.

A Texas appeals court this month allowed Harris County Clerk Chris Hollins to proceed with the initiative and rejected the state’s argument that Hollins was luring voters into criminal conduct. The state is now trying to persuade the all-Republican Texas Supreme Court to halt Hollins from sending the applications.

”All Americans who are eligible deserve to perform their civic duty safely this year as we continue to navigate through the pandemic,” Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said in a statement Tuesday, announcing that she and fellow attorneys general filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of Hollins. “For this reason, clerks across this nation are doing all they can within the confines of the law to simultaneously protect voters and our democracy.”

Texas is an important battleground in the national vote-by-mail conflict spearheaded on the GOP side by President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that widespread use of mailed ballots leads to rampant voter fraud.

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