PropertyValue
?:author
?:datePublished
  • 2019-01-27 (xsd:date)
?:headline
  • Did Texas Discover 58,000 Cases of Voter Fraud by Non-Citizens? (en)
?:inLanguage
?:itemReviewed
?:mentions
?:reviewBody
  • On 25 January 2019, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton made a headline splash when he tweeted a VOTER FRAUD ALERT stating that the Texas secretary of state had discovered some 95,000 non-U.S. citizens had voter registration records in Texas, and that about 58,000 of those registrants had (illegally) voted in elections: Predictably, one group quickly seized on this announcement as proof that large-scale voter fraud was taking place -- including President Trump: Meanwhile, opponents maintained that the Texas efforts were an excuse for attempting to purge immigrants (who are more likely to vote Democrat) from voter rolls: 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: Indeed, with a few days, the Texas Tribune reported, the Texas secretary of state’s office was informing counties that some of those voters -- a substantial number in some cases -- didn’t belong on the lists it sent out: As the Denver Post observed, a similar effort undertaken in Colorado in 2012 ended up verifying less than 1% -- if even that much -- of nearly 4,000 voter registrations flagged for being tied to suspected non-citizens: What proportion of the 95,000 voter records flagged in Texas will eventually prove to be genuine cases of illegal registrations by non-citizens remains to be seen. On 27 February 2019, the Associated Press reported that U.S. District Judge Fred Biery of San Antonio blocked the removal of any voters and, according to his ruling, only 80 of the original 98,000 names on the list had been identified as ineligible to vote. Later, the New York Times reported that the Texas secretary of state agreed to rescind the advisory from January 2019. (en)
?:reviewRating
rdf:type
?:url