South Texas Mayor Is Arrested on Election Fraud Charges, Fueling Bitter Political Fight

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/us/texas-voter-fraud-molina-edinburg.html

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EDINBURG, Tex. — The mayor of a South Texas border city was arrested Thursday on charges that he orchestrated an illegal voting scheme in which he asked residents of nearby towns to change their addresses so that they could cast votes for him.

The arrests of Richard Molina, the mayor of Edinburg, and his wife, Dalia Molina, came amid a bitter political fight in Texas over election fraud, and were made in a region with a long history of voting improprieties and public corruption scandals. The Molinas turned themselves in on Thursday morning.

Ken Paxton, the state’s Republican attorney general, whose office oversaw the investigation of Mr. Molina, has aggressively prosecuted voter fraud cases, even as a recent attempt by the state to purge noncitizens from the voter rolls was plagued by problems and inaccuracies.

Mr. Molina, 40, won the November 2017 election by 1,240 votes, and for nearly all of his tenure has been dogged by accusations of cheating. Municipal elections in Texas are nonpartisan.

Nearly 20 people have been arrested since last year in connection with the fraud case. Prosecutors said the scheme — involving Mr. Molina, his wife and paid campaign workers — was largely carried out by having numerous voters who did not live in Edinburg claim they were residents, including many who stated they lived in an apartment complex Mr. Molina owns.

According to court documents, Mr. Molina and his wife were both registered as volunteer voter registrars in the 2017 election and were authorized to help people fill out voter registration applications. Several of those with false addresses were signed by Mr. Molina and included his voter registrar number, according to the criminal complaint.

In that election, Mr. Molina, a former police officer, pulled off an upset victory by defeating the incumbent mayor, Richard Garcia, who had been mayor for 11 years and had been running for re-election.

“I feel that he didn’t steal the election away from me — he stole the election away from the community,” said Mr. Garcia, a lawyer. “The suspicions arose, when you started seeing, in checking the lists on the last days of the election, you started seeing a lot of names with the same address. There was one little house — it’s a 400- or 500-square-foot little one-room place — and there was maybe 20 people registered to that address.”

Mr. Molina has repeatedly maintained his innocence, and his supporters say the accusations against him originated with complaints from political opponents who had backed Mr. Garcia’s re-election.

Mr. Molina was charged with two felony counts of illegal voting and one felony count of engaging in organized election fraud. Ms. Molina, 42, was charged with one count of illegal voting.

“The mayor is innocent of what he’s being accused of,” said Mr. Molina’s lawyer, Carlos A. Garcia. “My client unseated an incumbent in the last election. As a result of that, he went in and made some changes. There were and are several people who are upset at my client, and it’s our position this is all politics. There’s a power struggle in Hidalgo County, specifically in Edinburg.”

Cary Zayas, the spokeswoman for the City of Edinburg, said in a statement defending the mayor that the arrests “have no impact on the city’s day to day operations.”

Mr. Molina and his wife were arraigned late Thursday morning in Edinburg, a city of 90,000 residents that is next door to McAllen and home to a University of Texas Rio Grande Valley campus. By the afternoon, the mayor was back at City Hall at a previously scheduled meeting. He sat in the council chambers, looking relaxed and checking his phone occasionally, while listening to presentations on the future use of the Ebony Hills Golf Course.

Mr. Paxton’s election fraud unit has become one of the busiest in the nation. It prosecuted 33 defendants in fiscal year 2018, and there are currently 75 active investigations statewide.

In January, the Texas Secretary of State’s office said it had discovered that about 95,000 people identified as noncitizens had matching voter registration records in the state, and that about 58,000 of them had voted in one or more Texas elections. David Whitley, the secretary of state, provided the information to Mr. Paxton for potential prosecution.

But that flawed effort — thousands of names, it turned out, were incorrectly included — was later halted by a federal judge. By February, of the nearly 100,000 registered voters whose citizenship Mr. Whitley’s office had called into question, only about 80 were deemed ineligible to vote.

“The evidence has shown in a hearing before this Court that there is no widespread voter fraud,” the judge, Fred Biery of the United States District Court in San Antonio, noted in a ruling that month.

Mr. Molina was arrested in the Democratic stronghold of the Rio Grande Valley, the result of an investigation led by a Republican attorney general. But the case is being prosecuted by a local Democrat, Ricardo Rodriguez Jr., the Hidalgo County district attorney, with assistance from Mr. Paxton’s office.

Mr. Molina’s lawyer said the accusations against his client fit with a partisan election-fraud narrative, adding that the mayor had also filed similar voter-fraud complaints with the county and the state but that those complaints went nowhere.

The Rio Grande Valley, which borders Mexico, has a long history of voter fraud.

In 2013, campaign workers known as politiqueras — a fixture of political campaigns in the Valley — were arrested by F.B.I. agents and accused of giving residents in the town of Donna cash, drugs and cigarettes in exchange for votes. The typical payment to a voter was $10.

In January, Mr. Paxton’s Election Fraud Unit arrested a woman in Starr County for using a dead person’s identity to vote illegally in a 2016 Democratic primary.

And it has been said for years that President Lyndon B. Johnson captured his Senate seat through fraud by overcoming a 20,000-vote deficit to achieve his famous 87-vote victory in the 1948 Democratic runoff primary against a former governor. A South Texas political boss, George Parr, had manufactured thousands of votes in Duval County, just north of the Rio Grande Valley.