Voting is easy, it takes very little effort.

YMMV.

The church leader’s case fits a pattern that has emerged in Texas under Paxton: Aggressive prosecutions for alleged election fraud crimes that upend lives but result in few cases that go to trial and end in a conviction. The Republican attorney general and his supporters believe election fraud is rampant, and point to the large number of charges filed as proof. Yet many of those charged have stories like Sanchez’s.

Civil rights groups say the charges tend to target Black or Latino voters and volunteers, many of whom are Democrats. The result has been a chilling effect on volunteers and community groups that for decades have worked to increase turnout in a state with one of the nation’s lowest voter participation rates. Critics say the charges are part of a wider effort by predominantly White, Republican state lawmakers to suppress votes in some of the fastest-growing parts of the majority-minority state: urban and suburban communities that lean Democrat.

“The goal isn’t to get a conviction,” said Chad Dunn, legal director of the UCLA Voting Rights Project, who has defended Texan clients against election-fraud claims and won a 2021 case that curbed the attorney general’s prosecutorial power. “It’s to set up a climate of fear around voting. He uses these witch hunts to gain attention and money.”