Voter fraud hysteria is nothing new, as my immigrant ancestors knew

The circumstances that put them there are strikingly similar to what is going on today. Hysteria over supposed fraud at the ballot box is sweeping across red states, and especially Texas. Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) went so far recently as to raid the homes of Latino elected leaders, candidates and campaign workers, confiscating cellphones, laptops and documents.

My forebears would have recognized what it is going on. Then and now, officials in Texas employed heavy-handed tactics to intimidate voters, especially immigrants.

A little background: In the mid-1850s, there was an exodus from Upper Silesia, a region of Prussian Poland, to South Texas. These immigrant were fleeing — as so many others have — poverty and political turmoil. From the port of Indianola, they walked more than 150 miles across forbidding prairie.

Thirteen families, including that of my great-great-great grandparents Felix and Anna Maria Tudyk, established a settlement 18 miles east of San Antonio. They named it St. Hedwig, after the Catholic patroness of Silesia. Our family’s ties to St. Hedwig remain strong. My grandmother’s funeral Mass was held at Annunciation Catholic Church, which was built by those immigrants, and some of my relatives still worship there.

In the decades during and after the Civil War, these Polish settlers were viewed with resentment and suspicion. As the Texas State Historical Association notes in an entry on its website written by local historians Regina Tolley Kosub and Allen Kosub: “The Silesian settlers owned no slaves and did not understand the reasons for the Civil War. In 1862 their neighbors took notice of their reluctance to volunteer for service in the Confederate Army.” So 19 of them were conscripted.

After the war, during Reconstruction and as the Jim Crow era was dawning, the Silesians aroused further hostility by welcoming and doing business with enslaved people freed from nearby plantations; in return, the freedmen taught the immigrants how to produce cotton, which became a profitable livelihood for many of them.

In the 1880 election, Texas voted overwhelmingly for Democrat Winfield S. Hancock, but Republican James Garfield eked out a victory nationally, with one of the narrowest popular vote margins in history.

Back then, Texas elections were conducted in the open, not by secret ballot. Everyone knew who had voted for whom. And it’s not hard to imagine that feelings were sore. Local officials decided to take theirs out on five or six of the Silesians, by accusing them of voting illegally.

The state constitution allowed any foreign-born male Texan to vote if he met residency requirements and “at any time before an election, shall have declared his intention to become a citizen of the United States.”

Charges against the Silesians came before U.S. Commissioner George Paschal and made news around the state. The anti-Reconstruction Brenham Weekly Banner, whose editor and publisher had been a colonel in the Confederate Army, wrote: “They have lived in the settlement for upwards of thirty years and never took out naturalization papers.”

Some pleaded guilty. No doubt they were under enormous pressure, given that they were facing big fines. But one of them, Karl Zigmond, showed up in court with his passport, naturalization papers and a voter registration document dated in 1871.

And here’s where things got even sketchier.

A subsequent investigation showed there was indeed some possible fraud going on — likely committed by the local officials who were running the election.

Fourteen pages of district court records where the naturalization proceedings for some 300 immigrants were supposed to be recorded turned out to be ... blank. Two successive district clerks blamed each other.

Voter fraud is exceedingly rare, certainly less so than it was in my ancestors’ day. But the impulses that drive harassment and intimidation are still alive.

The raids that Paxton conducted as part of what he calls an “ongoing election integrity investigation” have yet to produce any evidence of misdeeds. As my colleague Arelis R. Hernández has written, critics of Paxton, a darling of Donald Trump and the right, note that: “In pursuing election fraud cases — often targeting Hispanic and Black Texans — over the last decade, he has left a trail of dismissed charges, unrealized threats, lost court cases and ruined lives in his wake.”

So, yes, the integrity of our elections is under threat — and, as has been the case going far back in our history, some of those most determined to undermine it are the people who claim to be the guardians.