Days after officers acting on behalf of the Texas attorney general raided the homes of Democratic activists and a Latina candidate for the State House, Gov. Greg Abbott touted his efforts to clear the voter rolls of those who did not belong there.
Mr. Abbott, a Republican, said that more than 1.1 million voters had been purged from the list of eligible voters since September 2021, when he signed an election integrity bill into law that Texas Democrats had warned could prevent many eligible people from casting votes.
Officials said the removals were part of the state’s routine maintenance of the voter rolls, ensuring that those who have died or are no longer living at their registered address are removed. But the timing of the announcement from the Republican governor on Monday raised concern among Democratic officials and voting rights advocates, who feared a coordinated effort by top Republican leaders to intimidate voters and tamp down on Democratic efforts to increase registrations ahead the November vote.
“The message is we’re going to do everything we can to discourage voting in Texas,” said Mike Doyle, the chair of the Democratic Party in Harris County, which includes Houston. “Why else would you announce this as a big victory? This is supposed to be a routine accuracy check that has been going on forever.”
Mr. Abbott’s announcement followed the raids last week by the office of the attorney general, Ken Paxton, of members of the League of United Latin American Citizens, one of the nation’s oldest Latino civil rights organizations, along with a variety of Democratic candidates and consultants.It was accompanied by Mr. Paxton’s announcement that he was looking into registration efforts by groups in urban areas across the state as potential violations of law.
“My children now don’t want me to keep doing politics,” said Mary Ann Obregon, 80, the mayor of Dilley, whose home was raided.
Ms. Obregon said that she was now fearful of continuing to help residents in her largely Hispanic area south of San Antonio to register to vote, an act that she had previously not thought much about. “I felt afraid,” she said of the raid.
While the total number of voters removed cited by Mr. Abbott appeared large, it did not represent a significant change in what ordinarily occurs as part of the maintenance of voting rolls in Texas. In fact, a New York Times analysis of voter registration cancellation data in Texas since 2018 suggests that it was routine.
Nearly 500,000 of the voters purged during the time period highlighted by Mr. Abbott were dead. About the same number were cleared after they were put on a list of people who did not vote in two successive general elections and are believed to have moved.
Those numbers were roughly equivalent to the number of voters in those categories removed in previous years.
There were 18 million registered voters in Texas as of March, up from 16 million in 2020.
Reviewing and cleaning up voter rolls occurs routinely in every state. Federal law requires local voting officials to remove ineligible voters, usually those who have moved or died. But scrutiny of the practice has been heightened in Texas, where Democrats have long sought to register more of the state’s Hispanic population.
After Mr. Abbott’s announcement, activists from both parties focused on the small number of people thought to be non-U.S. citizens who the governor said had illegally registered to vote, and the smaller number who had actually cast ballots.
Mr. Abbott said around 1,900 possible noncitizens had a voting history in the state before their registrations were canceled. He said their records were being forwarded to the attorney general’s office for investigation.
For Mr. Abbott and other Republicans, it was potential evidence of criminal voter fraud by undocumented immigrants — a focus of conservatives across the country, despite the small number of documented cases of voter fraud.
For voting rights advocates and Democrats, the focus on a small number of noncitizen voters was a means of sowing fear in the state’s large Hispanic community. Many may turn out to have been erroneously flagged and removed, but will be unable to vote, advocates said.
Gabriel Rosales, who leads LULAC in Texas, said paper discrepancies are often cleared up, and the voters are restored to the rolls, including newly naturalized citizens who may not have a valid state driver’s license.
“They are painting a narrative that is false,” he said of Republican state leaders.
About 6.5 million Latinos are eligible to vote in Texas, according to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, but LULAC officials estimate that more than two million of them have not actually registered.
The fight over voter registration is a perennial one, and in Texas, there have been recent examples of Republicans trying to remove large numbers of possible noncitizens from the rolls. In 2019, the Texas secretary of state flagged nearly 100,000 voters, many of them erroneously, resulting in a number of inquiries and lawsuits, and his ultimate removal from office.
At the same time, the number of confirmed noncitizens who have been removed from the rolls appears to be far smaller than the figure Mr. Abbott cited.
The Texas secretary of state publishes monthly data that includes voters removed from the rolls for noncitizenship. That number comes primarily from comparing voter rolls to jury records that indicate that the person could not serve on a jury because they were not a citizen, officials with the secretary of state’s office said.
Since September 2021, when Mr. Abbott signed the new voting law, 657 people have been removed from the rolls after being identified as noncitizens in this way.
That compares to Mr. Abbott’s announcement that 6,500 possible noncitizens had been removed from the rolls. The larger number represents thousands of additional people whom state officials have flagged as possible noncitizens, and who did not respond in 30 days to a letter from an election official seeking to clarify their citizenship status, the secretary of state’s office said.
Those potential noncitizens were also removed, but can be restored to the rolls if they prove that they were flagged in error.
A spokesman for Mr. Abbott referred questions to the secretary of state’s office.
Voting rights advocates said there was nothing in the registration figures to suggest widespread election fraud.
“Any attempts to point to this data as evidence of criminal wrongdoing is part of a pattern of voter intimidation and suppression by the state of Texas and certain elected officials,” said Ashley Harris, a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas.
Some Republican lawmakers said the state’s efforts to accurately maintain the voting lists were critical for ensuring confidence in elections.
“You’ve got to have a voter roll with integrity if you’re going to have fair elections,” said State Senator Paul Bettencourt, a Houston Republican who has backed new laws to increase state oversight of elections, particularly in Harris County.
Mr. Bettencourt, who served for a decade as the elected voter registrar in Harris County, said he believed much of the issue stemmed from the lack of a national database of citizenship that local elected officials could use to rapidly confirm eligibility.
“This bedevils registrars across the country,” he said. “They don’t have a positive list to go check against.”
At the same time, he said, having a large number of people come off the rolls is not unusual. “In a two-year cycle, 10 percent of your roll could move,” even in an economic downturn, Mr. Bettencourt said. During a good economy, it could be even higher, he said.
Texas Democratic Party officials said they were looking into whether the effort to check the eligibility of voters had been targeted at any particular groups, though they cautioned that no evidence of that had emerged yet.
Under Texas law, local county voting officials have to periodically check to see if people still live where they are registered. They usually do so by sending mail to a voter’s listed address.
If the card is returned, the registration goes on a so-called suspense list. Voters on that list — there are usually between one million and two million at any given time in Texas — can still vote, and party officials said voting was the easiest way to get off the list.
Days after officers acting on behalf of the Texas attorney general raided the homes of Democratic activists and a Latina candidate for the State House, Gov. Greg Abbott touted his efforts to clear the voter rolls of those who did not belong there.
Mr. Abbott, a Republican, said that more than 1.1 million voters had been purged from the list of eligible voters since September 2021, when he signed an election integrity bill into law that Texas Democrats had warned could prevent many eligible people from casting votes.
Officials said the removals were part of the state’s routine maintenance of the voter rolls, ensuring that those who have died or are no longer living at their registered address are removed. But the timing of the announcement from the Republican governor on Monday raised concern among Democratic officials and voting rights advocates, who feared a coordinated effort by top Republican leaders to intimidate voters and tamp down on Democratic efforts to increase registrations ahead the November vote.
“The message is we’re going to do everything we can to discourage voting in Texas,” said Mike Doyle, the chair of the Democratic Party in Harris County, which includes Houston. “Why else would you announce this as a big victory? This is supposed to be a routine accuracy check that has been going on forever.”
Mr. Abbott’s announcement followed the raids last week by the office of the attorney general, Ken Paxton, of members of the League of United Latin American Citizens, one of the nation’s oldest Latino civil rights organizations, along with a variety of Democratic candidates and consultants.It was accompanied by Mr. Paxton’s announcement that he was looking into registration efforts by groups in urban areas across the state as potential violations of law.
“My children now don’t want me to keep doing politics,” said Mary Ann Obregon, 80, the mayor of Dilley, whose home was raided.
Ms. Obregon said that she was now fearful of continuing to help residents in her largely Hispanic area south of San Antonio to register to vote, an act that she had previously not thought much about. “I felt afraid,” she said of the raid.
While the total number of voters removed cited by Mr. Abbott appeared large, it did not represent a significant change in what ordinarily occurs as part of the maintenance of voting rolls in Texas. In fact, a New York Times analysis of voter registration cancellation data in Texas since 2018 suggests that it was routine.
Nearly 500,000 of the voters purged during the time period highlighted by Mr. Abbott were dead. About the same number were cleared after they were put on a list of people who did not vote in two successive general elections and are believed to have moved.
Those numbers were roughly equivalent to the number of voters in those categories removed in previous years.
There were 18 million registered voters in Texas as of March, up from 16 million in 2020.
Reviewing and cleaning up voter rolls occurs routinely in every state. Federal law requires local voting officials to remove ineligible voters, usually those who have moved or died. But scrutiny of the practice has been heightened in Texas, where Democrats have long sought to register more of the state’s Hispanic population.
After Mr. Abbott’s announcement, activists from both parties focused on the small number of people thought to be non-U.S. citizens who the governor said had illegally registered to vote, and the smaller number who had actually cast ballots.
Mr. Abbott said around 1,900 possible noncitizens had a voting history in the state before their registrations were canceled. He said their records were being forwarded to the attorney general’s office for investigation.
For Mr. Abbott and other Republicans, it was potential evidence of criminal voter fraud by undocumented immigrants — a focus of conservatives across the country, despite the small number of documented cases of voter fraud.
For voting rights advocates and Democrats, the focus on a small number of noncitizen voters was a means of sowing fear in the state’s large Hispanic community. Many may turn out to have been erroneously flagged and removed, but will be unable to vote, advocates said.
Gabriel Rosales, who leads LULAC in Texas, said paper discrepancies are often cleared up, and the voters are restored to the rolls, including newly naturalized citizens who may not have a valid state driver’s license.
“They are painting a narrative that is false,” he said of Republican state leaders.
About 6.5 million Latinos are eligible to vote in Texas, according to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, but LULAC officials estimate that more than two million of them have not actually registered.
The fight over voter registration is a perennial one, and in Texas, there have been recent examples of Republicans trying to remove large numbers of possible noncitizens from the rolls. In 2019, the Texas secretary of state flagged nearly 100,000 voters, many of them erroneously, resulting in a number of inquiries and lawsuits, and his ultimate removal from office.
At the same time, the number of confirmed noncitizens who have been removed from the rolls appears to be far smaller than the figure Mr. Abbott cited.
The Texas secretary of state publishes monthly data that includes voters removed from the rolls for noncitizenship. That number comes primarily from comparing voter rolls to jury records that indicate that the person could not serve on a jury because they were not a citizen, officials with the secretary of state’s office said.
Since September 2021, when Mr. Abbott signed the new voting law, 657 people have been removed from the rolls after being identified as noncitizens in this way.
That compares to Mr. Abbott’s announcement that 6,500 possible noncitizens had been removed from the rolls. The larger number represents thousands of additional people whom state officials have flagged as possible noncitizens, and who did not respond in 30 days to a letter from an election official seeking to clarify their citizenship status, the secretary of state’s office said.
Those potential noncitizens were also removed, but can be restored to the rolls if they prove that they were flagged in error.
A spokesman for Mr. Abbott referred questions to the secretary of state’s office.
Voting rights advocates said there was nothing in the registration figures to suggest widespread election fraud.
“Any attempts to point to this data as evidence of criminal wrongdoing is part of a pattern of voter intimidation and suppression by the state of Texas and certain elected officials,” said Ashley Harris, a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas.
Some Republican lawmakers said the state’s efforts to accurately maintain the voting lists were critical for ensuring confidence in elections.
“You’ve got to have a voter roll with integrity if you’re going to have fair elections,” said State Senator Paul Bettencourt, a Houston Republican who has backed new laws to increase state oversight of elections, particularly in Harris County.
Mr. Bettencourt, who served for a decade as the elected voter registrar in Harris County, said he believed much of the issue stemmed from the lack of a national database of citizenship that local elected officials could use to rapidly confirm eligibility.
“This bedevils registrars across the country,” he said. “They don’t have a positive list to go check against.”
At the same time, he said, having a large number of people come off the rolls is not unusual. “In a two-year cycle, 10 percent of your roll could move,” even in an economic downturn, Mr. Bettencourt said. During a good economy, it could be even higher, he said.
Texas Democratic Party officials said they were looking into whether the effort to check the eligibility of voters had been targeted at any particular groups, though they cautioned that no evidence of that had emerged yet.
Under Texas law, local county voting officials have to periodically check to see if people still live where they are registered. They usually do so by sending mail to a voter’s listed address.
If the card is returned, the registration goes on a so-called suspense list. Voters on that list — there are usually between one million and two million at any given time in Texas — can still vote, and party officials said voting was the easiest way to get off the list.
, Texas Touted Removing 1 Million From Voter Rolls. Most Had Moved or Died.