Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton issued an alarming tweet: “Now, thanks to the Texas Criminal Court of Appeals, Soros-funded district attorneys will have sole power to decide whether election fraud has occurred in Texas. This ruling could be devastating for future elections in Texas.”

The Dallas Morning News reports “Paxton announced in October the creation of a 2021 Election Integrity Unit, and his office regularly touts arrests made in voter fraud cases.” In 2020, Paxton’s office “closed 16 cases in a state with nearly 17 million registered voters.”

The Court of Criminal Appeals ruled 8-1 Wednesday to dismiss campaign finance violation charges against a southeast Texas sheriff. “The ruling, effectively strikes a provision of Texas election code that gave Paxton the authority to directly prosecute voter fraud cases,” writes The Dallas Morning News.

The Court opinion of “THE STATE OF TEXAS v. ZENA COLLINS STEPHENS, Appellee” states:

Zena Collins Stephens…presents the following question: May the Texas Legislature delegate to the Attorney General, a member of the executive department, the prosecution of election-law violations in district and inferior courts? No. Because Texas Election Code section 273.021 delegates to the Attorney General a power more properly assigned to the judicial department, we conclude that the statute is unconstitutional. Therefore, we reverse the decision for the court of appeals and remand the case to the trial court to dismiss the indictment.

The overturned lower-court ruling said the election code provision “clearly and unambiguously gives the Attorney General power to prosecute criminal laws prescribed by election laws generally whether those laws are inside or outside the Code.”

The Court of Criminal Appeals says, however, “the Attorney General can prosecute with the permission of the local prosecutor but cannot initiate prosecution unilaterally.”

As a consequence of taking away the Texas Attorney General’s ability to “unilaterally” prosecute election cases, Attorney General Ken Paxton expresses his concern that election and voter fraud cases will be in the hands of liberal prosecutors and district attorneys who have been backed and funded by Democratic megadonor George Soros.

Paxton’s line of thinking is a popular one. Prosecutors backed by Soros and his Open Society foundation are “destroying the criminal justice system in America” William Bratton, the former top cop in Boston, Los Angeles and New York City, told Fox News on Wednesday. Bratton was discussing the devastating spikes in crime across cities in the United States.