Two elementary school principals in Texas have been indicted for interfering in the Republican primary election that took place this year. The husband-and-wife team of principals works for the Denton Independent School District. 36-year-old Lindsay Luján and 33-year-old Jesús Luján are both charged with misdemeanor crimes after using their schools’ email system to encourage their employees to vote against Republicans who support school choice measures.
Jesús Luján is the principal at Borman Elementary School in Denton, TX. Lindsay Luján is the principal at Alexander Elementary School. The district has a total of 4,400 employees. Prosecutors say that the couple used their respective schools’ email systems to urge all their underlings to vote against certain Republicans in the state’s March 5 primary elections.
The couple has been indicted with unlawful use of an internal email system, a class A misdemeanor that carries a sentence of up to one year in jail and a $4,000 fine.
Both Lujáns sent improper emails to their underlings urging them to vote against Republican candidates who support school choice initiatives and to instead vote only for Republicans who fully support government-funded schools.
Prosecutors say Lindsay Luján promised all her staffers an extra 30-minute break to vote early in the March 5 primary. She then sent every staffer a list from the teachers’ union that identified Republicans who were “friendly” or “unfriendly” to the public school system.
Jesús Luján emailed his staffers and told them that they shouldn’t vote based on party lines. Instead, he urged them to have a “purple mindset” and to only vote for Republicans who fully support the public school system over school choice.
Believe it or not, this is not the first time that the Lujáns have been busted for abusing their public school positions to interfere in Texas elections. The Texas Department of Justice filed a lawsuit on February 22nd against the Denton Independent School District for the Lujáns’ actions earlier in the year. The school district settled that lawsuit on March 1st.
Even though their school district had just settled that lawsuit, the Lujáns both sent out new electioneering emails to their employees less than four days after the settlement!
“It is absolutely improper for publicly funded entities like school districts to engage in electioneering as Denton ISD has done,” said Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in February.
“Government officials everywhere are on notice that I will use every legal remedy available to me to stop school districts from influencing or coercing their employees to vote any particular way, especially when a district uses taxpayer resources and money to do so.”
Ever since AG Paxton overcame the fraudulent impeachment charges that members of the Bush dynasty threw at him last year, he has been on a crusade to clean up the Democrat Party’s electioneering and voter fraud in the Lone Star State. In nearby Carrollton, TX, just 25 miles southeast of Denton, Paxton indicted a former mayoral candidate on 109 counts of mail-in ballot fraud.
In 2021, Paxton noted that his office still had 500 outstanding cases of Democrat Party voter fraud related to the 2020 election, which he was waiting to bring to court.
“Voter fraud is real,” Paxton noted at the time. “Texans deserve to know their vote is legally and securely counted.”
The Denton ISD sent out a weak and tepid statement after the Lujáns were indicted, noting, “We agree that election laws should be followed.”
But do they? It will be interesting to see if these two principals manage to keep their jobs after being indicted on charges of election interference, or if the teacher unions will protect them and keep them in place.