On the heels of a request that Georgia turn over documents related to allegations of voter suppression, the House Oversight Committee is now seeking documents from election officials in Texas and Kansas, the committee announced Thursday.
The Texas document requests — sent to Texas acting Secretary of State David Whitley and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton — have to do with a sloppily assembled list the state used to claim that tens of thousands of noncitizens were registered to vote and to instruct local officials to start the process of purging them from the voting rolls.
The Kansas requests — sent to Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab and Ford County Clerk Debbie Cox — examine the decision to move a polling place in a minority heavy district to a location outside of city limits, more than a mile from the nearest bus stop.
The letters were signed by Chairman Elijah Cummings (D-MD) and Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), who chairs the Oversight subcommittee on civil rights and civil liberties.
Both the Texas and the Kansas issues were subject to lawsuits. The civil rights groups who sued over the relocation of Dodge City, Kansas, polling place were unable to move it back in time for the 2018 elections, but have since settled the lawsuit, with the city agreeing to open new polling places for future elections.
The litigation over Texas’ shoddy voter fraud list is ongoing, but a judge has signaled he intends to severely limit how the list can be used to remove voters from the rolls. Since Whitley announced the list in a January advisory, thousands of individuals named on it have turned out to be duplicates or false positives.
The House Oversight Committee’s Georgia investigation is looking at the state’s purging practices, its efforts to close polling places, and equipment issues that resulted in long lines on Election Day.
Gov. Brian Kemp (R), who was secretary of state during the 2018 election, and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) did not meet the House committee’s deadline last week to turn over the documents. However, a Hill aide told TPM on Wednesday that the committee received commitments from the Georgia officials that they would fully comply with the inquiry in a timely matter.
