The secretary of state’s office incorrectly included some voters who had submitted their voting registration applications at Texas Department of Public Safety offices, according to county officials. Now, the secretary of state is instructing counties to remove them from the list of flagged voters.
“We’re going to proceed very carefully,” said Douglas Ray, a special assistant county attorney in Harris County, where 29,822 voters were initially flagged by the state. A “substantial number” of them are now being marked as citizens, Ray said.
Secretary of State David Whitley issued an advisory to county voter registrars noting that his office was flagging voter registrations of persons who had provided the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) with forms of documentation (such as a work visa or green card) indicating they were not citizens at the time they applied for a driver’s licenses or ID cards. This process identified some 95,000 individuals, of whom about 58,000 had cast a ballot in one or more elections between 1996 to 2018.
Critics seized on a number of issues to challenge the suggestion that Paxton’s announcement meant tens of thousand of cases of voter fraud had definitively been uncovered:
1) The secretary of state’s advisory stated that the flagged records should all be considered “WEAK” matches. In a practical sense, this means that counties may not automatically revoke the flagged voter registrations without first mailing notice to those registrants requesting “information relevant to determining the voter’s eligibility for registration” and warning them that “the voter’s registration is subject to cancellation if the registrar does not receive an appropriate reply on or before the 30th day after the date the notice is mailed.”
2) The announcement referenced voting records spanning a 22-year period (1996 to 2018).
3) Persons who were non-citizens at the time they obtained driver’s licenses or ID cards may have since become naturalized citizens, but they are not required to go back to DPS and change their status, _making their voter registration records subject to being inaccurately flagged for review:_
That is not yet proven. The secretary of state’s advisory stated that the flagged records should all be considered “WEAK” matches. These people are not hiding and will be contacted to verify whether or not they are citizens.
Some or even many may have become naturalized citizens
Within a few days of the notice the secretary of state’s office was informing counties that some, and a SUBSTANTIAL number of the names in some cases, do not belong on the list.
They have admitted they incorrectly included some voters who submitted their voter registrations at Texas DPS offices.
Many are now being marked as citizens. That fifty eight thousand is going to end up being a miniscule number by the time all the supposed “errors” are identified.
The AG did not say these were confirmed frauds… They said that they didn’t match the following criteria…
* Last Name (including Former Last Name on the Voter Record), First Name, and Full Social Security Number (SSN) (9 digits); * Last Name (including Former Last Name on the Voter Record), First Name, and Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS)-Issued Driver License, Personal Identification Card, or Election Identification Certificate Number; or * Last Name (including Former Last Name on the Voter Record), First Name, Last Four Digits of the SSN, and Date of Birth.
No way of knowing yet… We do know the data covered a 22 year period from 1996 to 2018… What about middle names? This same criteria was used in Kansas during the famous Kobach voter purge that was ultimately thrown out in federal court…
1. The voter responded to the Notice in under 30 days indicating the voter is not in fact a U.S. Citizen (you would cancel for not being a citizen – Cancel Reason: Non U.S. Citizen); 2. The voter failed to respond to the Notice within 30 days and is being cancelled for failure to respond to the notice (Cancel Reason: Failure to respond to Notice of Investigation); or 3. The notice was mailed and returned as undeliverable to the registrar with no forwarding information available (Cancel Reason: Failure to respond to Notice of Investigation).
If you get a letter and don’t respond in 30 days, your registration can be canceled…
Trump won’t get any more nominations. Even if there is a vacancy in the next two years, precedent has been set - the Senate must wait to hear “the will of the people” in the 2020 election.