Texas has agreed to significantly narrow its use of driver’s license data to identify alleged non-citizens on its voter rolls, as part of a settlement announced Friday in the lawsuit it faced for trying to used this flawed data set to root out alleged voter fraud.
The state provided a list based on driver’s license data to county officials in January so they could begin purging their vote rolls, and high-profile Republicans claimed that it showed nearly 100,000 alleged non-citizens were illegally registered to vote. But officials found thousands of duplicates and false positives on the list, and the state soon found itself facing a lawsuit.
The procedures outlined in Friday’s settlement agreement stand to prevent Texas from targeting relatively recently naturalized citizens, which had happened with its original list.
To compile the January list, Texas’ Secretary of State office had compared records from the Department of Public Safety to its voter rolls. The state specifically looked at DPS records of individuals who had presented documents indicating they were not citizens when obtaining a driver’s license or other state ID.
The problem with Texas’ approach — which was obvious as soon as the state announced the list — was that it was catching individuals who had gotten driver’s licenses as non-citizens and then later became citizens, thus becoming eligible to vote. In fact, voter registration services are often provided at naturalization ceremonies.
At the time, the secretary of state’s office dismissed concerns about the data not being up-to-date, with its spokesperson claiming to the New York Times that his office could not ” see a situation in which this would produce a false positive.”
The spokesperson, Sam Taylor told the Times that their approach “very little, if any” room for error.
Friday’s settlement is a tacit admission that there was, in fact, plenty of room for error.
Voting rights groups sued Texas as well as some of the county officials who were starting to use the list to purge their rolls. Under the instructions released by Secretary of State David Whitley (pictured above) when he announced the list, the county officials were encourage to remove the individuals identified if they did not respond to a notice seeking confirmation of their citizenship status.
Under the procedure outlined in the new settlement, the secretary of state will look at the date of voter registration when comparing its voter rolls to the DPS data, and only send over to counties the names of individuals who presented DPS non-citizen documents after registering to vote.
The settlement also spells out matching criteria “to maximize the likelihood that the individual identified in the DPS database is the same individual identified” in Texas’ election management database.
“Naturalized American citizens in Texas should not have to worry about their state threatening to purge them from the voting rolls,” said Paul Smith, vice president of litigation and strategy at Campaign Legal Center, one of the groups that sued Texas over the list. “Today’s legally binding agreement means Texas can no longer target naturalized U.S. citizens for potential criminal investigation and removal from the voting lists based on stale data.”
Read the settlement below:
Texas Reaches Settlement In Suit Over Its Shoddy Non-Citizen Voter Fraud List
The true outcome here is that they will try a similar thing in another way. They have several other state’s “ideas” about how to do this to select from. This will be an ongoing battle.
Republicans continue to find any way to make it harder for American citizens who don’t vote for Republicans to vote…it’s the only way they can keep power in the face of their bad policies and the demographics that are seeing through their nonsense. Unfortunately, it’s working…which means we have to work harder to get control of the government back enough to block these things, and then hold onto it until we have enough power to undo their anti-American policies.
It’s probably also important to identify their actions as anti-American, because they really do go against the principles this nation was founded on.
They knew EXACTLY what they were doing. These snakes will just try and find another way to fk the REPUBLIC! Sam Houston is turning over in his grave.
But won’t this mean more brown people voting? What about the children? The white children?
Rump publicans’ natural approval rating, if their true beliefs are understood honestly, is about 25% tops. Even their best election rigging only gets them down to about a 45% threshold, so we really need to work on beating back the lying until those bastards only poll 44.