Ken Paxton Wants Texans To Snitch On Illegal Voters. A New Report Suggests He Should Check The Mirror.

Texas Attorney General turned Senate candidate Ken Paxton has had a rough year when it comes to loyalty. His estranged wife couldn’t even bring herself to endorse him in his Senate primary. His own defense lawyer, the guy who got him through both impeachment and a felony securities fraud case, is out here endorsing the Democrat. And now, according to a joint investigation from ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, it looks like Paxton may have a credibility problem with the law itself, specifically, the election law he’s made a pretty big deal about.

Back in February, Paxton launched an “illegal voting” tipline, inviting Texans to snitch on their neighbors for suspected voter fraud, and framing the effort in the kind of overheated rhetoric we’ve all come to expect: free and fair elections as the cornerstone of the republic, his office stopping at nothing to root out illegal voting, etc. Attached to the announcement was official guidance from his office spelling out exactly what counts as a violation — including the warning that it’s illegal to misrepresent your residence on election records, and that you have to register using the address where you actually live.

Cool guidance… except there’s one small problem. Paxton himself appears to have voted in six elections over the past two years, including the May runoff that made him the GOP Senate nominee, from a Collin County address he apparently vacated.

According to reports, Angela Paxton, in her divorce filing, said her husband moved out of their Collin County home back in 2024, and sources say Ken hasn’t moved back in. And yet that’s the address on his voter registration to this day.

So where has he actually been living? ProPublica and the Tribune traced him to a home in neighboring Denton County, bought through a trust in mid-February for $2.4 million. (The Daily Mail, for its part, has reported that Paxton moved into the home with Tracy Duhon, the woman whose affair with Paxton allegedly prompted the divorce in the first place, and even published video it says shows the two of them together at an airport in Iceland.)

Paxton is not registered to vote in Denton County. He is still registered, and voting, in Collin.

Spokesperson Madison Cercy declined to answer the substance and instead accused the outlets of running a “lie-filled tabloid story,” while touting the AG’s record as a “national leader on election integrity.” Asked twice by reporters to specify what was actually inaccurate about the reporting, the campaign had nothing further to say. That’s not really how rebuttals work, but okay.

Voting from an address where you’re not eligible is a second-degree felony under Texas law, carrying up to 20 years in prison and a $10,000 fine. Prosecutors rarely bring these cases, because residency is notoriously hard to pin down and there’s a carve-out for temporary absences — the kind college students and deployed service members rely on. As election lawyer Beth Stevens, who previously worked for the Harris County clerk and the Texas Civil Rights Project, put it, “So long as you truly intend to return, I think you’re fine.” The problem, she said, comes when someone’s actual behavior makes clear they’ve moved on for good while merely paying lip service to an eventual return.

You know, like when you’ve moved out during a very public, very ugly divorce, bought a $2.4 million house under a trust in the next county over, and reportedly moved your girlfriend in.

Clark Birdsall, an attorney who has defended a client Paxton’s office prosecuted for illegal voting, didn’t mince words either, saying it’s “especially egregious” that Paxton himself “appears he’s not conforming to the law.” And Joshua Blank of UT-Austin’s Texas Politics Project made the obvious point about optics: “We expect these laws to be understandable by ordinary citizens,” and when the officials tasked with enforcing them can’t seem to follow them themselves, “that raises serious questions.”

Listen, Paxton is no stranger to scandal, and he’s made a career out of getting through it. He walked away from a nine-year-old felony securities fraud indictment with little more than restitution and a community service requirement. He was impeached on 20 articles by his own party’s House and acquitted by his own party’s Senate. So I’m sure he’ll survive this one too, both politically and criminally. But what it tells Texas voters, in pretty plain terms, is that Ken Paxton seems to believe there’s one set of election laws for the state of Texas and another, considerably more flexible set, for Ken Paxton.

---

Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Bluesky @Kathryn1