Correction: This article has been updated to clarify that Audrey Louis’s district does not encompass Bexar County.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s (R) office carried out search warrants in one of the state’s largest urban counties, a major Democratic stronghold, alleging incidents of vote tampering.

On Tuesday, the Texas Attorney General’s office conducted searches in Bexar County, the fourth most populous county in the state and home to San Antonio.

The searches followed a two-year investigation, with the office stating that “secure elections are the cornerstone of our republic.”

This action is part of a broader effort by Paxton to pursue election fraud cases, an initiative that spent $2.3 million in 2023 to prosecute just four cases, according to the Houston Chronicle.

“We are completely committed to protecting the security of the ballot box and the integrity of every legal vote. This means ensuring accountability for anyone committing election crimes,” Paxton said in a statement.

The case was referred by state District Attorney Audrey Louis, a conservative Republican whose district borders Bexar County.

Louis made the referral in 2022, following a 2021 ruling by the Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA), which determined that Paxton could not independently investigate election crimes. The ruling required him to work with local district attorneys in such cases, a decision that led Paxton to encourage his supporters to inundate the court with calls.

“The CCA’s shameful decision means local DAs with radical liberal views have the sole power to prosecute election fraud in Texas — which they will never do,” Paxton wrote at the time.

Audrey Louis, a conservative Republican, unseated Democratic incumbent René Peña, her former boss, in 2016. Peña had fired her just hours after she announced her candidacy.

While Louis’s jurisdiction includes the less populous Frio and Atascosa counties, Bexar County is not part of her district.

The attorney general’s office has declined to provide further details on the ongoing investigation, which unfolds amid unexpectedly close national races for both president and Congress in Texas, following Paxton’s previous efforts to challenge the 2020 election results.

While polling shows former President Trump, a Paxton ally and the Republican presidential nominee, maintaining a lead in Texas, Democrats are closing the gap. A recent ActiVote poll showed Vice President Harris trailing by 6.6 points — a smaller margin compared to Trump’s 2020 victory over Joe Biden.

Similarly, in the Senate race between Rep. Colin Allred (D-Texas) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R), The Hill/Decision Desk HQ tracker shows a similar gap, though polling from two Texas universities in July found the race to be as close as 3 points.

In 2020, Biden won Bexar County, home to 2 million voters, by an 18-point margin, while Trump dominated rural Atascosa and Frio counties — the latter seeing a 21-point shift toward Republicans, reflecting a broader trend of some Texas Latino voters moving toward the GOP.

Paxton played a key role in Republican efforts to overturn Biden’s victory, spending years advancing false claims that the election was stolen. In December 2020, he filed a lawsuit against four battleground states that Biden had won, arguing that their “failure to abide by the rule of law casts a dark shadow of doubt over the outcome of the entire election.”

The conservative-majority Supreme Court dismissed Paxton’s lawsuit just three days after it was filed. Additionally, the Texas State Bar has moved to discipline Paxton, with a Bar disciplinary committee labeling the lawsuit “dishonest.”

Despite Paxton’s objections, a state appellate court ruled in April that the Texas Bar could discipline him for his lawsuit challenging the 2020 election results. In response, Paxton appealed the decision in June to the state Supreme Court, accusing the appellate court of engaging in “politically motivated lawfare” against him.

In his filing, Paxton urged the state’s high court “to intervene to prevent the State Bar’s continued abuse of the legal system.”