Harris County Agrees to Remove Its Targeted Voter Ads and Not Bring the Settings Back This Election

The fight over how Harris County talks to its own voters on social media has a settlement, of a kind. The Harris County Clerk's Office agreed on Friday to remove the voter outreach ads it placed on social media for the November 3 election, after the Texas Attorney General's Office sued Clerk Teneshia Hudspeth and communications director Irene Nunez on Thursday, The Texas Voice reported. According to the Attorney General's Office statement, the Clerk's Office 'agreed to remove the advertisements that used racially discriminatory targeting settings and refrain from reactivating those settings during the applicable election period.' Bloomberg Law reported the same Friday agreement, noting the ads cost the county about $43,000 and generated up to one million views.

The lawsuit alleged the county used Meta's 'detailed targeting' based on racial demographics for ads urging readers to 'Plan. Check. Vote!' - a tag list running from African-American Literature and African-American History through Latin Music, Hispanic Kitchen, Spanish Language and dozens of countries and cities, and terms for Asian communities as well. The state alleged that directing voting ads to those terms meant 'attempting to increase the likelihood that only certain racial and ethnic groups - but not all - will vote,' and it asked a judge to order the ads deactivated or stripped of the targeting items. Attorney General Ken Paxton, a candidate for the U.S. Senate on Tuesday's ballot, recused himself from the suit, which was brought by the State through his office.

Both offices claimed the outcome. The Attorney General's Office announced it had 'secured a legal victory requiring' the removal and barring reactivation of the settings. Harris County Attorney Abbie Kamin answered that Paxton is 'clearly grasping at straws, trying to remain relevant and manufacture distractions,' and called the agreement itself 'a win for Harris County, ensuring the Attorney General's preposterous and baseless claims do not take away time and resources from critical county operations.' 'Today's agreement lets us get back to the work that matters for the people of Harris County,' Kamin said.

What the agreement does not do is decide the legal question underneath - whether a county may aim election information at particular communities - because no court has ruled on it. The Clerk's Office had already removed the audience tags late Thursday, hours after the suit was filed, saying it wanted to avoid distractions from the election; Friday's agreement converts that step into a commitment for the rest of this election period. Early voting ended Friday night, and Harris County's next election-administration task is Tuesday itself.