A conviction for voting fraud has been handed down in Texas less than a year after the state’s governor, Greg Abbott, gave his approval to a statute to ensure that elections are conducted fairly.
Attorney General Ken Paxton announced that a woman who was accused of committing voter fraud on 26 separate occasions was successfully prosecuted.
According to the Houston Chronicle, Monica Mendez entered into a plea deal with the Victoria County District Attorney’s Office on Friday in which she admitted to committing 26 felony counts of voter fraud. Among those counts were three instances of illegal voting and eight counts of election fraud. In addition to that, there were seven counts of helping voters in the submission of a mail ballot, and there were eight cases of unauthorized possession of a mail ballot.
Mendez is being accused of conducting a vote-harvesting operation to exert undue influence over the outcome of an election for a local utility board. After entering a guilty plea, she was placed on a probationary period of deferred adjudication for five years.
Since Texas Governor Greg Abbott implemented a new election integrity law in the state just a few months ago, there has been a great deal of debate regarding whether or not the new law was intended to discriminate against minority voters.
