Texas’ list of suspected noncitizen voters was so sloppy that among the people it flagged was an El Paso County elections staffer, whose naturalization party the county’s elections administrator recalled attending a couple of years ago.
The staffer’s presence on the list — which Texas Republicans and President Trump have baselessly touted as showing tens of thousands of noncitizen voters — was highlighted in a lawsuit filed Monday alleging that state elections officials violated the constitution and the Voting Rights Act.
The error was also reported by the Texas Tribune, where El Paso County Election Administrator Lisa Wise said she spotted the staffer’s name on the list of 4,152 names provided to her by the state.
“We had a naturalization party for her,” Wise told the Tribune, which reported the staffer was naturalized in 2017. “She had gone and gotten her driver’s license, I think, four years ago.”
Local election officials in Texas have been scrambling since Texas Secretary of State David Whitley put out on advisory on Jan. 25 indicating that the state — by comparing voter registration records to the records kept by Texas Department of Public Safety, which issues driver’s licenses and other IDs — had found 95,000 potential noncitizens on the voter rolls, 58,000 having cast a ballot in the last 22 years of elections.
Civil rights advocates and election policy wonks quickly noted that such an approach is ripe for false positives, particularly among naturalized citizens who may have applied for a driver’s license before their naturalization.
Nonetheless, the secretary of state instructed local officials to vet the list themselves by sending notices to suspected noncitizen voters requiring they show proof of citizenship. Those who don’t respond to the notice within 30 days can then be removed from the voter rolls, under the secretary of state’s guidance.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton tweeted the numbers, as did President Trump, who further mischaracterized what the state had actually found.
VOTER FRAUD ALERT: The @TXsecofstate discovered approx 95,000 individuals identified by DPS as non-U.S. citizens have a matching voter registration record in TX, approx 58,000 of whom have voted in TX elections. Any illegal vote deprives Americans of their voice.
— Ken Paxton (@KenPaxtonTX) January 25, 2019
58,000 non-citizens voted in Texas, with 95,000 non-citizens registered to vote. These numbers are just the tip of the iceberg. All over the country, especially in California, voter fraud is rampant. Must be stopped. Strong voter ID! @foxandfriends
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 27, 2019
Since then, the list has been found to be riddled with hundreds of duplicates and thousands of citizens. Monday’s lawsuit, filed by several voting rights organizations, is at least the second lawsuit the state is facing for how it handled the allegations.
The lawsuit accuses Texas of treating naturalized citizens as second class citizens and of imposing on them a discriminatory burden by forcing them to show proof of citizenship at the risk of their voter registrations being purged.
Read the lawsuit:
