This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.

Last Tuesday, early voting began in the primary elections to choose nominees for Texas’s upcoming U.S. Senate race. One of the Republican candidates for that Senate seat, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, marked the occasion by publishing a “legal advisory” informing Texans that a host of normal election activities are actually crimes.

Texas effectively makes it illegal for you to encourage people to vote for a particular person or proposal if you’re in the vicinity of a ballot. Under state law, any in-person interaction that occurs “in the physical presence of an official ballot or a ballot voted by mail” and is “intended to deliver votes for a specific candidate or measure” constitutes “vote harvesting services.” If you offer or receive “compensation” or some “other benefit” in exchange for such “services,” you face up to ten years in prison, and up to $10,000 in fines. 

“Other benefit” is a broad term, and local civic organizations fear that the law may cover a broad array of interactions. If a campaign gives its get-out-the-vote volunteers free t-shirts to wear while door-knocking, both the campaign and its volunteers may have broken the law. If a voter gives those volunteers a few glasses of water so they can keep knocking on doors in the Texas heat, that voter may have broken the law, too. “Vote harvesting is a felony,” Paxton’s advisory warns, in bolded........

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