GOP plans a push for purge of voter rolls
Two years after Texas officials fumbled an effort to doublecheck the voting rolls on a hunt for noncitizens — and instead threatened the voting rights of nearly 60,000 eligible Texans — similar efforts to purge noncitizen voters are now the law of the land, thanks to provisions tucked into the massive elections bill enacted this month.
The secretary of state will again be allowed to regularly compare driver’s license records with voter registration lists in a quest to find people who are not eligible.
But while Republicans are determined to make another run at the purge that alarmed civil rights groups two years ago, they insist they’ve made key changes to prevent a repeat of the same mistakes.
“They blew it last time,” said state Sen. Paul Bettencourt, RHouston.
So much so that then-Secretary of State David Whitley resigned in the aftermath and triggered a public apology from
his office. Civil rights groups also sued his office and blocked the state from continuing the purge at the time.
Starting by December of this year, the secretary of state will review Department of Public Safety records every month looking for potential noncitizens. But this time, lawmakers have put in a provision that intentionally bars the secretary of state from going too far back in time as they scour driver’s license records, something that led to some of the problems in 2019.
In some instances, the state flagged legal voters who had become naturalized citizens since the time they first applied for a driver’s license a decade or more earlier. Noncitizens, including those with visas or green cards to stay in the U.S., are able to get Texas driver’s licenses. The state’s 2019 analysis flagged those drivers, but it never accounted for the fact that about 50,000 Texans become naturalized citizens each year.
The result was many legitimate voters receiving letters warning they were at risk of being knocked off the voter rolls and facing potential legal action because of faulty data.
By hastening to send out the written warnings, civil rights groups said, the state caused a lot of fear and confusion, particularly for naturalized citizens.
“Definitely this is substantially better than what they were doing before,” said Joaquin Gonzalez, an attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project.
But Gonzalez said he’s still worried about the reliability of DPS driver’s license databases and the inherent pitfalls of trying to compare millions of records against millions of other records. He said there is just too much room for error.
“There are still concerns that they will be falsely flagging people,” he said.
In 2019 in Harris County alone, 18,000 people originally flagged by the secretary of state’s office as potential noncitizens were found to be eligible voters. In other areas, such as Waco, every person on the list flagged by the office was a legal voter.
The idea of allowing the periodic purges worries state Sen. Carol Alvarado, D-Houston. But she said Democrats in the Legislature fought hard to add safeguards to avoid a repeat of the 2019 debacle.
More specifically, the new law prohibits the state from using DPS data from before a person’s voter registration became effective. So if people signed up for a driver’s license in 2005 but didn’t register to vote until 2020, the state can’t use that 2005 record to question their eligibility to vote.
“That’s a big change,” Alvarado said.
State Sen. Bryan Hughes, RMineola, defended the voter purge process, which he called list maintenance. He said the state should be able to go through the voter rolls regularly to make sure people who are not eligible to vote are not on the lists.
Already, election officials compare death records with the voter registration rolls to remove deceased voters. And the state also flags people disqualified from jury duty because they are not citizens to make sure they are not on the voter rolls.
Hughes said it is important to note that even in 2019, no voters were removed from the rolls. He said the state simply sent the lists to counties, which then sent letters to people to confirm their citizenship.
“No one was knocked off the rolls,” he said.
The changes to the process are an extension of what the Texas Civil Rights Project and others accomplished in their lawsuit in 2019, when those groups reached a settlement with the secretary of state to limit the scope of the records used.
The changes are part of Texas Republicans’ massive elections bill, which they say is aimed at making it harder for people to cheat in Texas elections, though they have found no evidence of widespread fraud. Democrats who oppose the legislation say the Republicans are using alarm about fraud to justify restrictions at the polls that will disenfranchise minority voters.
The 76-page bill gives partisan poll watchers more rights in watching election activities, bars drive-thru and 24-hour voting and bars county election officials from mailing absentee ballot applications to people who didn’t request them.
The debate over elections in Texas comes as the state is experiencing a surge in voter registrations. Since January 2014, Texas has added 3.1 million voters for a total of 16.7 million — a 23 percent increase.