As Tulsi Gabbard completed her transformation from a Hawaii Democratic politician to a MAGA surrogate last year, she put down stakes in a far redder state. Gabbard and her husband bought a home outside of Austin and declared under oath last June that they were “resident(s) of the State of Texas.”
But a few months later, Gabbard voted in the 2024 general election back in Hawaii.
Election law experts said Gabbard’s vote, coupled with her claiming a homestead tax break on her Texas home, raises questions about whether she properly cast her ballot and illustrates the complexity of state voting laws.
Gabbard is now director of national intelligence under President Donald Trump. Trump has continued to press false claims of widespread voter fraud and demanded further actions by state and federal authorities to address it.
Representatives for Gabbard said she never intended to abandon her longtime Hawaii residency, despite signing the sworn declaration calling herself a Texas resident.
“Director Gabbard was, is, and intends to remain a Hawaii resident,” Gabbard’s lawyers, Jesse Binnall and Jason Greaves, wrote in a cease-and-desist letter sent to CNN prior to this article’s publication. “That is where she lives, pays taxes, and, of course, votes.”
Under Hawaii voting regulations, when voters have a homeowner’s tax exemption, that home is presumed to be their residence for election purposes.
Gabbard’s attorneys said she applied for a homestead tax exemption, which Texas law only allows on a principal residence, because she “took the advice of local officials” who told her it was required to shield her address from public view. Her office said she was facing a significant security threat.
Gabbard’s representatives did not respond to questions about why she separately swore under oath that she was a Texas resident if she considered herself to still live in Hawaii, and did not provide a comment from her after repeated requests.
It’s not clear whether Gabbard could have run afoul of voting laws in Hawaii or property tax laws in Texas with her actions. In their letter, her attorneys argued that “the definitions of residency for the purpose of voting in Hawaii and for claiming a homestead exemption in Texas are totally different, and on their face, not mutually exclusive.”
But Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University who studies election law, said Gabbard’s vote raised “a bunch of questions.”
“If she voted in Hawaii without actually living up to Hawaii’s eligibility standard, then that’s a problem,” said Levitt, who served as a voting policy adviser in the Biden administration. “Alternatively, if she always meant to keep Hawaii as home, that could well be a problem for that Texas tax exemption.”
Hawaii law says that individuals can only have a single residence for election purposes, and defines a voter’s residence as the “place in which the person’s habitation is fixed, and to which, whenever the person is absent, the person has the intention to return.”….