County suspends 1,700 voters in error
Harris County mistakenly placed more than 1,700 voters on its suspension list in response to a local Republican official’s challenge of nearly 4,000 voter registrations, Tax Assessor-Collector Ann Harris Bennett says.
Republican challenge affected more than 1,700 registrations
Harris County mistakenly placed more than 1,700 voters on its suspension list in response to a local Republican official’s challenge of nearly 4,000 voter registrations, county Tax Assessor-Collector Ann Harris Bennett said Wednesday.
The situation quickly spun into a partisan spat with the Harris County Democrats accusing the GOP of targeting Democratic voters, and the Harris County Republican Party blasting Bennett, who also is the county’s voter registrar, for the suspensions and for confusing voters.
“Democrat Voter Registrar Ann Harris Bennett should not have jumped the gun by suspending those voters’ registrations,” Harris County Republican Party Chairman Paul Simpson said in a statement. “We urge Democrat Ann Harris Bennett to follow the law and quit violating voters’ rights.”
The suspensions came to light after Bennett’s office mailed letters to the voters whose registrations were challenged, asking them to confirm their addresses.
Assistant County Attorney Douglas Ray said counties are required to give voters 30 days to respond to those requests before placing them on a suspension list, but Bennett’s office took that action prematurely in some cases.
“They were following procedure they believed was the correct procedure, but after they consulted with us, they realized that the correct procedure was to wait 30 days,” Ray said.
Bennett blamed the mistake on a software glitch. She said her office discovered the error after three or four days, and immediately fixed the 1,735 suspended registrations.
The suspension list is poorly named, Ray said, because voters whose registrations are placed on suspension remain eligible to cast ballots. Voters are purged from the rolls, he said, only if they are placed on the suspension list, fail to respond to letters from the county and fail to vote in two consecutive federal elections.
Alan Vera, chairman of the Harris County Republican Party’s Ballot Security Committee, said he
filed the 4,000 challenges in July. Under Texas law, any voter may challenge the registration of another voter in the same county.
Vera said he aims to ensure Harris County voters cast ballots at the correct polling places. He said he and a group of volunteers combed through the rolls looking for voters who had listed locations of post offices or parcel stores, where they may have post office boxes, as their addresses.
Voters are supposed to register at the addresses where they live, so Vera said he is challenging those registrations as illegitimate.
“This was about making sure the voter registration records were correct, so people vote in the correct elections,” he said.
Vera in 2009 helped found True The Vote, a Houston-area tea party group that advocates for stricter voter registration and identification laws, and that supported President Donald Trump’s unproven claims that millions of illegal votes were cast in the 2016 election. Trump’s own voter fraud commission was unable to substantiate his claims, and since has disbanded.
Vera denied that his registration challenges were motivated by partisanship, but Harris County Democratic Party Chairwoman Lillie Schecter alleged in a Tuesday afternoon email to supporters that his effort targeted “nearly 4,000 Democratic voters.”
In a telephone conversation later, Schecter said she had no evidence to support her claim, and that her email should not be interpreted as a statement of fact.
“It is the assumption we’ve gone on, based on the fact it was sent over by Republicans,” Schecter said, adding that the party would cross-check the list of challenged registrations against heavily Democratic communities.
Third Ward resident Lynn Lane said he and several neighbors received letters from Bennett’s office stating their voter registrations had been challenged. He said that when he checked his registration online, it was listed as suspended.
Lane said he has learned he still is eligible to vote, but said many residents may assume their voting rights have been revoked if their registrations are listed as suspended.
“A lot of people will say, ‘I’m not going to vote,’” Lane said. “It acts as a deterrent.”
Bennett said she has yet to find evidence that the challenges targeted neighborhoods with high concentrations of Democratic voters.
“If you look at the zip code locations, they’re all over the county,” she said. “It’s not just the Third Ward area.”
The voter registrar’s office on Tuesday declined to share Vera’s challenged registration list with the Chronicle.
Rice University political science Professor Bob Stein said he has no reason to doubt the intentions of Vera and the county’s Republicans, but said that if the goal is to ensure voters cast ballots in the correct precincts, voter registration drives would be a more effective strategy.
“When we have turnouts of 8 or 10 percent, should we be worried about people voting at the right location or voting at all?” Stein said. “This seems to be a counterproductive way to help people vote.”