The Harris County Clerk's Office will stop using race-based targeting for election reminder ads under a settlement resolving a lawsuit brought by the Texas attorney general's office, according to the report. The lawsuit was filed last week. Attorney General Ken Paxton recused himself because he is the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate.
Investigative researcher Parker Thayer of the Capital Research Center said in a post on X that the county's Elections Department spent thousands of dollars on ads that used Meta's "detailed targeting" feature. Thayer said the filters were "clearly intended to discriminate on the basis of race" and were meant to boost turnout among groups most favorable to Democrat James Talarico. Keywords such as "Afrobeat," "China," and "Guatemala" were used in the targeting.
Harris County Attorney Abbie Kamin called the lawsuit "an absolute circus and a distraction from the work that matters" at a news conference. Kamin said the county maintains the ads were legal and that the ads made up less than 5 percent of the county's total voter engagement budget. Reports said Harris County had recorded around 862,000 tallied votes as of Thursday morning.