Texas must halt voter roll citizenship review now

The office of the Texas secretary of state has launched another citizenship review to supposedly clean voter rolls and ensure the integrity of elections. What it has managed to do instead is to shake our confidence in its review process by flagging a significant number of citizens as suspicious — again.

What state officials need to do is clean up their own act. Secretary of State John B. Scott should pause the review immediately.

In lists sent to county officials starting in September, the state has identified 11,737 voters as “possible non-U.S. citizens,” according to the Texas Tribune. The outlet reported that in Bexar and Travis counties, at least 15% of the voters listed had registered to vote at naturalization ceremonies.

In Dallas County, 12% of the 1,362 voters who were flagged showed proof of citizenship. The voter registrations of the other 1,202 people on the list were canceled because they didn’t respond to a “notice of examination” within the required 30 days, said Rivelino Lopez with the Dallas County Elections Department. He told us that the cancellations happened because the voters failed to meet the deadline and not because the county had proved independently that they were noncitizens.

Here we are again, almost three years after the botched voter purge that questioned the eligibility of nearly 100,000 Texas voters, at least a quarter of whom were soon determined to be citizens. That voter review didn’t get far before slamming into a series of lawsuits that the state had to pay $450,000 to settle, and it cost Secretary of State David Whitley his job.

Back in 2019, Texas used an obviously flawed system to identify suspicious voters. It flagged people who were registered to vote but who had shown the Department of Public Safety that they were not citizens when they renewed their driver’s license. That method did not account for people who became naturalized citizens after last renewing their license, which is usually good for six years.

As part of the lawsuit settlement, Texas agreed to a system that makes sense on paper. It would flag only people who registered to vote and then told DPS that they were not citizens.

Yet the number of voters whose eligibility is being questioned and who have actually turned out to be citizens should be cause for alarm, and it should prompt state leaders to halt the voter review and examine why their data is so unreliable.

It’s unfair for the state, which is closer to the federal government than local county officials, to put the onus of citizenship verification on the counties. Lopez with Dallas County told us that the elections department sent a sample of seven flagged voters to DPS to see if that agency had a record of citizenship. Lopez said all seven had indicated to DPS that they were citizens, but when the county tried to send a larger sample of 700 names to DPS for corroboration, state officials directed the county to send flagged voters a notice of examination.

Something is rotten. The office of the secretary state has tried to defend the review by pointing to the discovery of citizens in the list as proof that county officials are doing the vetting and that the system is working. But the truth is that too many law-abiding Texans who are naturalized citizens are being treated with unwarranted suspicion. It’s demoralizing and shameful. They deserve better.