***Article first published by 'Big League Politics' on Jan 26, 2019***

Texas Secretary of State David Whitley released a statement documenting the conclusions of his year-long investigation into voter fraud within the state.

Whitley has identified over 95,000 non-citizens registered as eligible voters throughout the state of Texas. Out of that massive pool of illegal registered voters, the Secretary of State’s office discovered that 58,000 registered non-citizen voters have voted in one or more elections.

This revelation of fundamentally undemocratic and illegitimate voting practices enabled by lax voter registration and ID laws is sure to cast doubt upon the results of several close elections in the state this past election cycle. For example, Republican Congressman John Culberson, who had represented the state’s 7th congressional district west of Houston since 2001, lost his bid for re-election to Democrat Lizzie Pannill Fletcher by around 12,000 votes. It’s possible that ballots cast by ineligible non-citizen voters in the election could have cost him victory.

Voter fraud is a felony in Texas, and Whitley’s office is providing information on his investigation to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Since 2005, 130 cases of voter fraud have been prosecuted in Texas – perhaps with greater frequency than in other states plagued with election integrity breaches, but still a mere drop in the ocean when compared to the figures released in Whitley’s investigation.

The Texas Republican Party also released a statement reacting to the completion of the investigation, in which they called for the Texas Legislature to enact more stringent voter integrity laws to safeguard Texas elections.

Meanwhile, leading voices insisting that “Russian interference” represents a fundamental threat to the integrity of American elections seem eerily silent when confronted with a different- and perhaps more realistic- threat to credible elections in one of the nation’s biggest states.