Fashionable once again

I remeber that, for a short period of time anyway, open racism was...um...frowned upon when exhibited by politicians in the public square.

Attorney General Abbott, a former Texas judge running for re-election this year, has long highlighted his efforts against voter fraud, calling it “an epidemic” and likening it to the infamous ballot-box stuffing in South Texas that won the 1948 Democratic senatorial primary for Lyndon B. Johnson.

But the suit said he had prosecuted only about eight people under the new law, all affiliated with the Democrats and all but one African-American or Hispanic.

Mr. Cruz, the solicitor general, said that other cases involving both parties were under investigation and that in any case the attorney general did not initiate voting fraud cases but received them from local authorities.

In the case of Ms. Meeks, the woman who said investigators had peeped into her bathroom, Angela Hale, a spokeswoman for Mr. Abbott, called her “the subject of an ongoing criminal investigation that stems from a complaint referred to the office of attorney general by a citizen in Tarrant County.”

“The investigation of Ms. Meeks has been conducted professionally and properly, to the full extent allowed by law,” Ms. Hale said in a statement.

Ms. Hale also defended Mr. Abbott’s use, in a PowerPoint presentation on voter fraud, of a postage stamp about sickle cell anemia, an ailment found chiefly among African-Americans, to show how possibly fraudulent mail ballots were examined for suspicious similarities. But she said another exhibit in the presentation, a “clip art” illustration of black voters in line at a polling booth, had been removed.