The Texas Civil Rights Project doesn’t know how many voters were impacted by this door-knocking campaign from the GOP, but those impacted appear to be among the most vulnerable.“Some of the most egregious complaints we've gotten have involved elderly voters, because some of the door-knocking efforts seem to be targeting people who are voting by mail and in Texas, voters over 65 are eligible to vote by mail automatically,” Beeler told VICE News.And Beeler pointed out that the door-knocking campaign could impact not only those who hadn’t voted yet but also those who had already sent in their ballot. “You can move to cancel your mail-in ballots, so if you get someone knocking on your door telling you that you're illegally voting and you're not informed and you don't call our hotline and you don't know about Texas election law, you can move to cancel your ballot,” added Beeler.VICE News has also uncovered reports of election officials demanding that voters hand over their smartphones and smartwatches before voting and found that some poll workers looking over voters’ shoulders and wearing obviously partisan attire while inside the polling stations.
This is not the first time a GOP-linked door-knocking campaign in Texas has tried to intimidate voters. In July, a right-wing group launched a campaign in Harris County, which includes Houston, to obtain non-public personal information from residents. “The Harris County Elections office has been informed of scammers who are impersonating election workers and going door-to-door in an attempt to obtain private voter information,” the Harris County Election office said in a Facebook post in July. The office also posted a picture of an affidavit that the door knockers were asking residents to sign “under penalty of perjury.”It turned out that the group running the campaign was the Texas Elections Network, a right-wing group founded last year by Melissa Conway, the Republican National Committee’s Texas state director for election integrity. The group did not respond to VICE News’ request for comment.The campaign was targeting “communities of color and historically Black neighborhoods here in Houston, trying to challenge the eligibility of certain voters,” Beeler said, adding that the group conducting the campaign submitted hundreds of challenges to the elections administrator in Harris County related to the 2020 election.“I think that the aggressive, egregious voter intimidation we have seen during this election cycle has a chilling effect on people and suppresses voter turnout.”
Gutierrez told VICE News that his group had received many other calls about issues at polling locations, including poll watchers who were taking notes while standing behind the check-in tables at polling locations “in a way that’s making voters unnerved.” Another voter reported poll watchers “getting way too close to where they could actually see the voter’s screen, as they were trying to cast their ballot,“ Gutierrez said.And, a Common Cause volunteer this week observed a poll worker wearing “what I would categorize as partisan, dog whistle jewellery,” Gutierrez said. The item was a bracelet that said “Free the J6ers. Arrest the mules.” Gutierrez added that there had been a number of reports made to Common Cause of poll workers wearing partisan hats and t-shirts at other locations.Some of the voter intimidation tactics included letters being hand-delivered to people’s homes. Residents in Tarrant County, Texas, this week reported receiving letters from someone claiming to be part of a group “investigating the integrity of local elections.” The letter lists the resident’s name and address and claims to known when and where they voted.It was only after the man voted that he realized that the person who had demanded his devices was not an election official.
Sam Taylor, a spokesperson for the Texas secretary of state’s office, told VICE News that his office had received “at least two complaints regarding potential voter intimidation,” but said those complaints are not publicly accessible until “either we’ve determined the complaint does not warrant an investigation by the attorney general, or the attorney general’s investigation is completed:”The letter called them an “enemy of the state of Texas.”