For more than a year, Ken Paxton has told Texans that large numbers of noncitizens are voting in their elections. He announced investigations. He put out press releases. He built a Senate campaign on it.

On August 17, NBC News published what the effort actually produced. Reporter Justin Goldman reviewed court documents, public records and Paxton's own statements and found that three people have been prosecuted.

Not three thousand. Not three hundred. Three.

The Numbers Are Worse Than "Three"

Through a public records request, NBC News obtained the list of 53 names that were referred to Paxton's office for investigation.

Of those 53, exactly one — Ada Otuka — was formally charged with noncitizen voting.

The other two noncitizens prosecuted in Texas since 2020, Eliseo Morales-Tapia and Samuel Hall, weren't on the referral list at all. Meaning the pipeline Paxton built produced a single charge, and the other two cases came from somewhere else entirely.

And then there's the part that should end the conversation:

At least five of the 53 people referred to Paxton's office were listed as American citizens in previous court records.

Five citizens. On a list of suspected noncitizen voters. Handed to the state's top law enforcement officer, who spent a year on it.

More Americans were wrongly swept into this than were successfully charged.

He's Run This Play Before

This is not Paxton's first announcement of a mass noncitizen voting problem.

In 2019, he claimed 58,000 noncitizens had voted in Texas. That number was later refuted in court.

Fifty-eight thousand, then. Three, now. Same office, same claim, same result — a huge number for the press conference, and nothing that survives contact with a courtroom.

His public framing has never softened. He has said:

"Illegal aliens and foreign nationals must not be allowed to influence Texas elections by casting illegal ballots with impunity. I will not allow it to continue."

Asked about the actual results, Paxton's office provided no public updates on the investigation and did not respond to NBC News for comment.

That's the tell. When the number is 58,000, there's a podium. When the number is three, nobody's available.

Even Heritage Says This Isn't Real

You do not have to take a Democrat's word for the scale of noncitizen voting. Take the Heritage Foundation's.

Heritage — a conservative think tank that maintains a voter-fraud database precisely to argue fraud is a problem — has tracked fewer than four noncitizen voting cases nationally per year since 2000.

Nationally. Per year. Across all fifty states.

Joshua Blank, who studies Texas politics, put it this way: "The idea that fraud is a common occurrence in the electorate is a position that's political but not backed up by any fact whatsoever."

What This Costs Texans Who Are Citizens

There's a temptation to file this under "politician exaggerates" and move on. Don't.

The hunt has a cost, and the people who pay it are eligible voters. This is the same attorney general who just won back the mail-ballot ID rule that rejected one in seven Texas mail ballots — a rule a judge had struck down for violating the Americans with Disabilities Act, in a state with more than 3 million voters who have a disability. He called that a "major victory."

Every "widespread fraud" announcement is the justification for the next rule that makes voting harder for somebody who is entitled to do it. The fraud is the pretext. The restriction is the product.

And five citizens learning they'd been referred to the attorney general as suspected illegal voters is not a rounding error. It's the machinery working exactly as designed — generating suspects to justify the search.

The Part About Paxton's Own Voting

One more thing, because it's hard to leave out.

While Paxton was running this investigation, a Texas Tribune and ProPublica investigation found that he voted six times from a home he no longer lives in — and a formal complaint over it would be referred to his own office.

The man who set up a tip line for illegal voting has an unresolved question about his own ballots. He has found three noncitizen voters in over a year. He has not found time to answer that one.

This is the record Texas Republicans signed off on when they made him their Senate nominee.

Source

• Texas AG Paxton claims widespread noncitizen voting. Three people have been charged. — Justin Goldman, NBC News, August 17, 2026. Photo: Brandon Bell / Getty Images. (NBC's full report is behind a subscriber wall; the findings above are also summarized in Raw Story's account.)