According to an investigation from The Texas Tribune, ProPublica, and Votebeat, although Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said in August that the state of Texas removed over one million voters from its rolls, including 6,500 noncitizens, those numbers are misleading.
According to numbers from the Texas Secretary of State’s office, there were only 581 non-citizens removed from voter rolls, not 6,500.
Neither Abbott nor Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson wanted to speak on the record to the Tribune, but the outlet did contact some people who are Texas citizens who were unfairly removed from the rolls.
Jakylah Ockleberry, a 21-year-old native Texan, is one of at least nine people the Tribune identified who were either incorrectly described as non-citizens or who were removed because they didn’t respond to letters about their citizenship.
Ockleberry was in the dark about what had happened to her until she was contacted by multiple news organizations and asked pointedly, “How would something like that happen?”
In Travis County, where Ockleberry lives, the error was made by election workers. Instead of marking Ockleberry as a voter who had moved, the workers instead marked her and four other voters as non-citizens.
According to Bruce Elfant, the Travis County tax assessor and voter registrar, after acknowledging the mistakes made by his office to the Tribune, he indicated that the numbers suggested to him that non-citizen voting “is an infinitesimal, small issue.”
However, the messaging from Abbott and other Republican leaders have made it seem like the issue is widespread, even though the initial press release was amended to include the phrase “potential non-citizens.”
“It scared a lot of people. We’ve received a lot of phone calls and emails from people who are concerned that they’re not on the voter rolls,” Elfant said.
Although there are ways for voters to answer questions about their eligibility to vote, sometimes those mechanisms can fail.
According to Trudy Hancock, elections Administrator in Brazos County, “The post office messes up. We get a lot of cards back or mail back that says ‘undeliverable’ and the person will be like, ‘I’ve lived at this address for 20 years and I’ve never moved,’” Hancock said. “So you have to consider that there are outside circumstances that can affect our efforts to reach them.”
According to David Becker, the executive director and founder of The Center for Election Innovation and Research, the arguments from Abbott and his Attorney General Ken Paxton wouldn’t hold up in a court of law.
“Their claims would likely be dismissed until they could come up with something that actually documents how they got to those numbers,” Becker said.
According to CNN, Republican-led states are taking their cues from Donald Trump’s campaign, which has invited scrutiny from the Justice Department since they are potentially in violation of federal law dictating how states manage voter rolls as the election draws closer.
According to Uzoma Nkwonta, an attorney representing the New Georgia Project Action Fund, these attempts from Republicans are part of an effort to undermine future election results.
“There’s always been some litigation about voter rolls and list maintenance. But part of what you’re seeing with this explosion is what appears to be a concerted attempt to generate errors and controversy that can then be used down the road to undermine the election results,” Nkwonta said. “And that’s what makes this environment different. Now you are seeing what appears to be an outright assault on the list maintenance practices, outright assault on voter registration practices.”
Nkwonta concluded, “And when you are this close to an election, that balance tips in favor of the voter to make sure that no one is unlawfully removed because at this point you are often too late to correct errors in registration before the registration cutoffs.”
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