The Harris County Elections Department is facing blowback for some of its social media ads relating to early voting. It appears they’ve been targeting them specifically to non-white voters.
This was first exposed by Parker Thayer with Capital Research, who took to X (formerly Twitter), saying: “The official Harris County, TX, Department of Elections bought $43,000 of early voting reminder ads on Facebook and Instagram, but many of the ads are using ‘Detailed Targeting’ filters clearly intended to discriminate on the basis of race.”
He spoke to KTRH about his findings, saying: “The county, apparently, selected filters for things like ‘African American literature,’ ‘African culture,’ ‘Latin music,’ and ‘Spanish-speaking.’” He says he was able to determine this by viewing Meta’s public ad tracker, which can be found here.
Thayer went on to say that he believes this could constitute both political and racial discrimination by the county. “The county went out of its way to apply race-minded filters to encourage the ads to be shown to demographics that historically vote Democrat,” he explained.
Thayer added that this type of political and racial discrimination has no place in politics.
We’ve reached out to the county Elections Department via email about all of this, but as of publication, they had not responded to a request for comment.