By Karen Brooks Harper
The Dallas Morning News Texas voter rolls bulletin news
(The Dallas Morning News) — More than a million names have been dropped from Texas voter rolls in the past three years, including nearly half a million people who have died, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott said Monday in an announcement crediting anti-fraud legislation with the purge.
The dropped names also include half a million whose eligibility status is unclear, mainly because they didn’t respond to notices about address updates or other questions from the state.
Texas also purged the names of some 6,500 people who are considered “potential noncitizens,” Abbott’s office said, referring to those with records the state flagged for follow-up over citizenship status but got no response.
Voter registration in Texas hovers just below 82% of the voting-age population, the state’s highest rate since 2004, according to the Texas secretary of state.
Abbott called the numbers a success and attributed them to a package of anti-fraud legislation he signed in 2021 that included random election audits by the Texas Secretary of State. The bills also held counties more liable for leaving dead, relocated, noncitizen or otherwise ineligible voters on the rolls and increased the penalties for election workers who knowingly violate voting laws.
Texas voter rolls bulletin news
“Election integrity is essential to our democracy,” Abbott’s emailed statement reads. “Illegal voting in Texas will never be tolerated. We will continue to actively safeguard Texans’ sacred right to vote while also aggressively protecting our elections from illegal voting.”
Voting advocates noted that most of the names were purged as part of routine voter maintenance processes, and that the legislation Abbott signed in 2021 – Senate Bill 1 – just served to put up barriers to voting.
“Governor Abbott’s announcement lacks transparency and doesn’t paint the full picture of routine voter roll maintenance,” said Sarah Xiyi Chen of the Texas Civil Rights Project. “Year after year, people are taken off the voting rolls for all manner of innocuous reasons, and while Senate Bill 1 did enact stricter barriers for registering to vote, there is no evidence to suggest that the governor’s data can be attributed to the law.”
Of the potential noncitizens, 1,930 of them have a voting record in the state, Abbott said. Those cases are being turned over to the attorney general’s office for investigation into whether those votes were cast illegally, the statement said.
In a hearing Monday of the Texas House Committee on Elections, Christina Adkins, director of the secretary of state’s elections division, said Texas has been at the forefront of voter roll maintenance and that several states have emulated its efforts to check registration lists for non-citizens.
”Texas is very good at list maintenance activities. We have strong, clean voter rolls,” Adkins testified.
Texas voter rolls bulletin news
Adkins said the Texas Department of Public Safety provides the secretary of state’s office data sets weekly flagging individuals who provide proper paperwork indicating they are not citizens. The secretary of state’s office checks those against voter rolls and notifies counties of the possibility that a registered voter might be a non-citizen.
Abbott’s office did not give any other indication of whether the rest of the 1.1 million dropped names represented potential illegal votes.
More than 6,000 registrants were dropped because they have felony convictions that made them ineligible at the time their records were checked, according to Abbott’s office.
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In Texas, someone can register and vote while they are still under felony indictment but have not yet been convicted. A felon can vote if they have completed all the necessary sentences and court requirements related to their conviction.
Texas laws already prevent a convicted felon who is actively serving a sentence, including probation, from being registered to vote.
Adkins told lawmakers Monday that her office is also in talks with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice to get information about felons on probation.
”We are making strong matches to make sure we’re identifying the right individuals, so that we’re not overbroad in sending out investigations and notices,” she said. “And I think that that story is not being told publicly.”
Texas voter rolls bulletin news
The state purged the names of 65,000 people because they didn’t respond to a mailed notice that they were ineligible to vote and asking that the voter prove their eligibility.
Another 463,000 people were dropped after they didn’t respond to suspension notices, which are mostly mailed out when a voter registration card is returned in the mail or elections officials get other signals that the voter has changed addresses.
The state routinely drops those voters from the rolls, a process that was in place before the 2021 legislation, after a suspension hasn’t been addressed or the person hasn’t voted in four years. Those voters are often reinstated when they register again.
Another 134,000 were dropped after they let the state know they had moved, and some 19,000 voters requested that their names be removed from the rolls, the statement said.
The names of 457,000 deceased registrants were also dropped, Abbott said.
(Staff writer Phil Jankowski contributed to this report.)
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Texas voter rolls bulletin news