Fox News anchor Maria Bartiromo is perhaps best known for spreading the baseless claim on air that Dominion Voting Systems rigged the 2020 presidential election. Her source for that “information” was a viewer who also claimed to be “internally decapitated” and said she spoke with the wind. Along with similar misinformation, this false claim landed Fox in court for defamation, and the company agreed to pay an unprecedented $787 million settlement to Dominion.

But last month, Bartiromo returned to reporting baseless hearsay again, this time to cast doubt on the upcoming election. On August 18, she claimed on social media that the wife of a friend of a friend went to a DMV in Weatherford, Texas, and saw a “massive line of immigrants getting licenses” and a “tent and table outside the front door of the DMV registering them to vote!” Apparently the “same Dems” were registering immigrants to vote outside other DMVs in the area as well. Without explanation or evidence, the post insinuated that something nefarious must be going on because the people at the DMV appeared to be “immigrants.”

Law enforcement and even the local Republican Party completely debunked Bartiromo’s rumor. A spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety, which issues drivers’ licenses in the state, pointed out that assuming people are undocumented immigrants based on solely on their appearance is “kind of racist.”

Still, Bartiromo’s post has continued to spark a firestorm of suspicion — and action from some Texas authorities. Ken Paxton, a Republican and Texas’s scandal-plagued attorney general, quickly announced an investigation into claims that unspecified “organizations” may be “unlawfully registering noncitizens to vote.” He followed that by announcing a new “illegal voting” tip line, writing: “Significant growth of the noncitizen population in Texas and a pattern of partisan efforts to illegally weaponize voter registration and the voting process to manipulate electoral outcomes have created urgent risks to local, state, and federal elections.”

Paxton recently filed lawsuits against some of the most populous and diverse counties in Texas (which also happen to lean Democrat) for hiring contractors to mail voter registration forms to constituents. Apparently, as part of a two-year investigation into claims of election fraud, Paxton also ordered squads of state police to aggressively search the homes and property of........

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