Tag: 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. 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. 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. “The mayor is innocent of what he’s being accused of,” said Mr. Molina’s lawyer, Carlos A. Garcia. 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. 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. Mr. Molina was arrested in the Democratic stronghold of the Rio Grande Valley, the result of an investigation led by a Republican attorney general. The Rio Grande Valley, which borders Mexico, has a long history of voter fraud. 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.