Dems not swayed by DPS vote claim

AUSTIN — Senate Democrats say they will block the confirmation of embattled Texas Secretary of State David Whitley, even though a top state law enforcement official has taken the blame for major errors in a list of suspected noncitizen voters.

“I take full responsibility as the leader of the Department of Public Safety,” Steven McCraw told the Senate Criminal Justice Committee this week.

Had the department assigned a “senior level person” to the project, he said, it wouldn’t have turned over bad data that included thousands of Texans who already had proven their U.S. citizenship and whose right to vote should not have been questioned.

“I can tell you throughout the entire project, the secretary was not involved in any of it because he wasn’t there at the time,” McCraw said.

The mea culpa is being met with skepticism from county election officials, who first identified mistakes in the suspect-voter list, and from Senate Democrats, who fault Whitley.

He’d been on the job about six weeks before launching the attempted purge of noncitizen voters.

“Ultimately, he’s responsible, because he is the secretary of state,” said state Sen. Eddie Lucio Jr., D-Brownsville. “I still think he’s a fine gentleman. He just made the wrong decision.”

Republican Gov. Greg Abbott first began casting blame on the public safety department two weeks ago, when it became clear that Whitley’s job was at risk.

All 12 Senate Democrats have vowed to oppose Whitley’s confirmation, a sufficient number to block it.

The secretary of state’s office in late January released the list of 95,000 registered voters suspected to be noncitizens. In response, Attorney General Ken Paxton took to Twitter to declare a “VOTER FRAUD ALERT,” saying 58,000 of those on the list had voted in Texas elections.

But county election officials, charged with vetting the names, quickly found tens of thousands of those people indeed were U.S. citizens who had been wrongly flagged.

A federal judge in San Antonio recently ordered a halt to the attempted voter purge, which civil rights groups contend was calculated to discourage immigrants from voting.

Some counties already had sent out notices to those on the list, threatening to remove them from the voter rolls if they didn’t prove their citizenship.

After a three-day hearing, U.S. District Judge Fred Biery said “the evidence has shown … there is no widespread voter fraud.”

Biery said state officials

had created “a mess” in their search for ineligible voters, describing the latter as “infinitesimal needles” in “the haystack of 15 million Texas voters.”

The secretary of state’s office began gathering data for the project in March 2018. But little is known about how the list was developed and vetted, since state agencies, including Abbott’s office, have turned down several public records requests filed by Hearst Newspapers, citing pending litigation.

Sen. John Whitmire, DHouston, said McCraw’s statement this week didn’t change his mind.

“I don’t know that changed anybody’s mind,” Whitmire said. “The harm has been done.”

No timeline on vote

The Democrats’ resistance is a rare show of force from the minority party this early in the legislative session, said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston. Abbott’s nominees don’t usually meet much pushback from the upper chamber.

“I can’t remember ever having someone this controversial in my 29 years in the Senate,” Lucio said.

Abbott reaffirmed this week he stands 100 percent behind Whitley, his former aide who he nominated as

state’s top elections official in December.

“The Department of Public Safety has an obligation to ensure that the information it provides to the secretary of state’s office is not only accurate, but also is understandable for the secretary of state to be able to use to ensure the integrity of the voter rolls in the state of Texas,” Abbott said.

Even so, county election officials said the list still would have swept up registered voters who may have become naturalized after applying for or renewing their driver licenses with DPS.

State Elections Director Keith Ingram acknowledged in federal court that the secretary of state’s office knew ahead of time that issue might pose some problems with the list. Some 50,000 people are naturalized each year in Texas.

“I don’t see why DPS is taking responsibility, other than it’s convenient for the Department of Public Safety to take the fall, rather than the secretary of state,” said Special Assistant Harris County Attorney Douglas Ray, who has said DPS data are notoriously unreliable.

Williamson County Elections Administrator Chris Davis questioned why the secretary of state’s office didn’t spot the errors that were quickly evident to

county officials.

“The secretary of state had a duty to vet this information,” said Davis, who is president of the Texas Association of Elections Administrators. “So much of this could have been avoided had they done so.”

Has happened before

Abbott has said Whitley’s office made clear to counties the list contained “weak” matches that needed further vetting. In a statement, Whitley said county voter registrars play an “an essential role in maintaining the accuracy of our state’s voter rolls.”

“Our goal has always been to ensure that qualified Texas voters have every opportunity to register and cast a ballot, and that ineligible voters are not registered to vote,” Whitley said.

The office didn’t answer questions about whether all the blame should fall on the Texas Department of Public Safety.

It’s not the first time the state has launched a voter purge effort with bad data. In 2012, the state wrongly matched living voters to the names of deceased people in its attempt to purge dead voters from the rolls.

It’s not clear when, or if, Whitley’s confirmation may come up for a vote on the Senate floor.