Election experts cautious as Abbott touts voter roll purge

Gov. Greg Abbott makes an economic development announcement in Austin on Mar. 1, 2024. The press conference took place in front of the Governor's Mansion. (Credit: Maria Crane/The Texas Tribune)

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Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced on Monday that the state has removed roughly a million people from its voter rolls since he signed a legislative overhaul of election laws in 2021.

“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,” he said.

However, election experts point out that both federal and state law already required voter roll maintenance, and the governor’s framing of this routine process as a protection against illegal voting could be used to undermine trust in elections. The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 already governs how states should keep their registration rolls accurate and up-to-date, and also includes protections to avoid the inadvertent removal of properly registered voters.

“Year after year, people are taken off the voting rolls for all manner of innocuous reasons,” said Sarah Xiyi Chen, an attorney at the Texas Civil Rights Project.

Neither the governor nor the Secretary of State’s Office responded to requests for comment.

Removal of ‘noncitizens’ raises questions

The majority of voters removed from the rolls were taken off because they died, failed to respond to notices from election officials, or moved out of Texas. Abbott’s press release also said more than 6,000 voters were removed after being convicted of a felony.

The total Abbott cited includes more than 463,000 who were taken off after being placed on what is known as the suspense list. Such voters are removed after the voter registrar receives information that they have moved. If the voter does not update their information and does not vote for two election cycles, they’re then removed from the rolls.

In addition, the governor stressed that more than 6,500 “noncitizens” who shouldn’t have been registered were removed, and approximately 1,930 of those had a voting history.

In response to Abbott’s press release, a coalition of watchdog and voting rights groups in a letter Wednesday asked Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson whether Texas has been removing voters from its rolls within the 90-day period before an election, which would be a violation of federal law.

The groups, which include ACLU, Texas Civil Rights Project, and the Campaign Legal Center said some of the 6,500 potential noncitizens Abbott highlighted in his press release could have been mistakenly flagged. "We are alarmed by the large number of voters removed on this basis, indicating that eligible Texas voters have likely been erroneously identified as potential noncitizens and purged from the rolls,” they said in the letter, which also requested related documents from the Secretary of State’s Office.

Voter watchdogs such as Alice Clapman, senior counsel at the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights Program, said they want to know more about those voters, because Texas has wrongly flagged people as noncitizens before.

Erroneously flagging legal voters as noncitizens can occur when outdated information is obtained from naturalized citizens or if someone mistakenly checks the wrong box at the DMV, Clapman said.

In 2019, Texas officials flagged 95,000 voters whom they identified as “noncitizens” and accused broadly of voter fraud. After review, it turned out that many of the people identified on the rolls were naturalized citizens. The scandal resulted in the secretary of state resigning. The state abandoned the effort after numerous lawsuits, which resulted in the state setting new guidelines for future voter roll clean-ups.

ACLU of Texas attorney Ashley Harris points to the 2019 incident as an example of the state's lack of transparency about how it collects this data.

“It's difficult to tell what these numbers actually mean, and the state hasn't pointed to anyone who actually voted as a noncitizen, and they've provided data without context,” Harris said.

There has been no evidence of widespread noncitizen voting in federal elections, even as Republicans across the county — including former President Donald Trump — have ramped up unproven claims.

Clapman also said it’s unlikely that a noncitizen would risk deportation or other penalties to cast a single vote.

“The very idea is so illogical,” Clapman said. “It's irresponsible for politicians and others to be fanning the flames of misinformation out there and undermining trust in elections.”

Officials say Texas has ‘strong, clean voter rolls’

County voter registrars conduct extensive voter roll mainstance on a daily basis. As they receive and process applications, eligibility status is verified by the Texas secretary of state. But locally, one other way election officials check whether a voter is a U.S. citizen is through the local district attorney’s offices.

Across the state, those offices use their county voter rolls to send out jury summons questionnaires. Voters who respond to those surveys by indicating they’re not U.S. citizens are not eligible to participate in a jury. That information is also used by the voter registrar’s office to remove noncitizens from the rolls.

At a state House of Representatives committee hearing on elections Monday, officials with the Texas Secretary of State’s Office addressed how the state confirms that voters who register are U.S. citizens, and eligible to cast a ballot.

Christina Adkins, the agency’s elections division director, said that since 2021, the Texas Department of Public Safety on a weekly basis has provided data to the secretary of state from people who have obtained a state ID or driver’s license and identified as a noncitizen while doing so. Through that process they’re required to show DPS documentation of lawful presence in the United States, such as a permanent resident card — known as a green card — or an immigrant visa.

That data is compared with the voter rolls and sent to county voter registrars. In addition, election officials use information provided by volunteer deputy registrars — appointed by the county to help people register to vote — to check whether a voter registered at their U.S. naturalization ceremony.

If a voter provides the last four digits of their Social Security number on their voter registration application, the state also checks that the person on the application is who they say they are by matching first name, last name, and date of birth against data from the Social Security Administration.

Adkins emphasized the state has “strong, clean voter rolls” and that the state has been looking for ways to improve voter roll maintenance and eligibility verification practices. “For many, many, many years now, Texas has been on the forefront of making sure that we have the right data sets, that they are properly and securely validated,” she said.

The state is also looking into working with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice to obtain data on Texans with felony convictions, who may be on probation or parole.

“Identifying these individuals that are ineligible doesn't just make for a strong voter registration list, it also prevents individuals from potentially making mistakes that could impact them negatively, too,” Adkins said.

Last week, Attorney General Ken Paxton opened an investigation into “reports that organizations operating in Texas maybe unlawfully registering noncitizens to vote,” after a Fox News host made an unsubstantiated claim on social media that migrants were registering to vote outside a driver's license facility outside of Fort Worth.

Both the county election administrator and Republican Party chair said they had investigated the claims and found no evidence.

The law Abbott signed in 2021 set new rules and penalties for voter assistance, made it a felony for local officials to proactively distribute applications for mail-in ballots, banned local initiatives to expand voting hours and drive through voters, and gave partisan poll watchers increased autonomy inside polling places, among other things.

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