Many of the illegal voting cases the Texas attorney general has boasted about are unraveling after a key court ruling. But Tomas Ramirez III said the pursuit of charges against him has taken its toll.
DEVINE — In this small town of a few thousand people southwest of San Antonio, Tomas Ramirez III spent a decadeslong law career walking his clients through an array of legal procedures — indictments, arrests, arraignments — as they collectively faced a range of criminal charges.
Ramirez never imagined he’d get entangled in the same criminal justice system he helped his clients navigate. Until a sergeant investigator in the Texas attorney general’s office called him in February 2021.
The state official told Ramirez, who by then was a justice of the peace in Medina County, that Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office was pursuing criminal election fraud charges against him. An indictment accused Ramirez of illegally possessing absentee ballots of 17 voters during the 2018 GOP primary in which he toppled a Republican incumbent by nearly 100 votes. Three others were also accused in the case.
Ramirez said he never had any voter’s absentee ballots. The indictment did not explain how the alleged scheme worked or the role Ramirez was accused of playing. Ramirez, who denies committing any election crime, said the alleged scheme was never explained. The attorney general’s office did not respond to questions about how it alleges Ramirez harvested votes.
To Ramirez, the indictment was ludicrous.
“Nobody runs a ballot harvesting operation for 17 votes. Seventeen-hundred votes? OK, I get it. Maybe even 200 votes, but 17? Give me a break. You know, that’s just stupid,” Ramirez said in a recent interview. “There’s no way I’m gonna gamble away my ability to support my family to win 17 votes.”
Paxton’s office has not responded to requests for comment for this story.
The case was among roughly 100 election-related criminal cases that Paxton’s office has pursued in the past five years as part of a crusade to defend voter integrity. Election fraud remains extremely rare in Texas, and Paxton has been heavily criticized for making false accusations about the 2020 presidential election.
Paxton has vocally and publicly touted the scores of investigations and criminal charges, pointing to them as evidence that Texans are trying to illegally determine the outcome of elections. His office’s election integrity unit tracks the number of charges that have been successfully prosecuted, the number of pending charges and the number of active investigations in the state. Paxton has mentioned the figures in numerous speeches and news releases.
“Many continue to claim that there’s no such thing as election fraud. We’ve always known that such a claim is false and misleading, and today we have additional hard evidence,” Paxton said in a statement announcing the arrest of a woman a month before Ramirez was indicted. “I am fiercely committed to ensuring the voting process is secure and fair throughout the state, and my office is prepared to assist any Texas county in combating this insidious, un-American form of fraud.”
But behind the scenes, several of the cases have quietly unraveled because the state’s highest criminal court ruled that the Texas Constitution’s balance of powers forbids the attorney general — an elected member of the executive branch — to unilaterally pursue criminal charges that wend through the judicial system.
