The Harris County Clerk’s Office changed audience tags on online get out-the-vote ads Thursday night after the Texas Attorney General’s Office sued over the settings. Teneshia Hudspeth said the tags were removed “to avoid unnecessary distractions” from the election.
Harris County ads and audience tags
The dispute centers on ads that told voters to make a plan to vote and ran on Meta platforms like Facebook and Instagram. The petition said the ads began running in late September and early October, and that the targeting tags included African-American literature, Latin music, Hispanic kitchen, East Asia, 27 different countries and several foreign cities, including Madrid and Bangkok.
The lawsuit described the advertising settings as “racially discriminatory” and asked a Harris County district judge to order the social media ads pulled or reconfigured so they would not carry identifiers targeting voters along racial and ethnic lines. The complaint said the clerk’s office used ad targeting that prioritized people of certain ethnicities but not others.
Texas Attorney General lawsuit
The Texas Attorney General’s Office argued that the ads targeted Black, Latino and Asian voters while excluding “European ethnicities.” It also said there can be no legitimate reason for Harris County to intentionally target voter ethnicities, cultural interests and countries, but not European ethnicities, cultural interests or countries, including interests tailored to people in Houston or Texas who would actually be voting in Harris County Elections.
The office also wrote that “Every moment that these advertisements remain active and improperly targeting users based on their race or ethnicity, Defendants are violating the Texas Constitution.” That language pushes the dispute beyond a routine ad-settings fight: the legal theory in the petition turns on whether the targeting tools themselves were used in a way the state says crosses constitutional limits.
After Thursday night
The clerk’s office moved first by removing the audience tags, but that did not end the legal clash. The lawsuit asked for the ads to be pulled or reconfigured, so the setting change may affect the form of the dispute without necessarily answering the attorney general’s broader claim about how the ads were run in the first place. For voters, the practical shift is simple: the online ads no longer carry the same audience labels that drew the lawsuit, even as the case remains tied to how Harris County used racial and ethnic targeting in the first place.
