Texas voter purge may be sending a chilling message, lawmakers and advocates warn

Texans who may have been wrongly removed from the state's voter registration list or whose voter registrations have been suspended have little time to reverse course, Democratic state lawmakers and civil rights advocates warned Thursday, a few days after Republican leadership announced the purge of more than 1.1 million names from their voter rolls.

States are required by law to regularly update their voter registration lists to remove people who have died or moved or who are found ineligible to vote for other reasons. But Republican Gov. Greg Abbott touted the routine maintenance of the voter rolls in a series of election integrity bills he signed into laws in 2021.

"Texas’ strong election laws removed over 1 MILLION ineligible voters from our voter rolls," Abbott wrote Monday on X.

Numbers released by Abbott’s office show that more than 134,000 voters purged from state voter rolls since September 2021 had confirmed they had moved elsewhere and that 457,000 others had died.

But most of the voters who were removed, more than 463,000, had been placed on a suspended list. Names on the suspended list are deleted if the state receives information that voters have permanently moved out of their registered addresses or don't vote in two consecutive election cycles.

While the latest numbers of purged voters appear large, they are in line with routine maintenance of the voter rolls over the past several years.

But Democratic state representatives and Houston City Council members remain alarmed at the more than 2.1 million Texas voters who remain on the suspended list, mainly because county officials don't have their current addresses on record.

With nearly 13% of all 17.9 million voters registered in the state on the suspended list, “this represents more barriers for their votes to count,” state Rep. Christina Morales said in Spanish at a news conference.

Charleae Vincent, a resident of Harris County, said she was placed on the suspended list even though she was a consistent voter.

Voters like Vincent receive new voter registration cards by mail every two years. As Vincent waited for her card, she instead got a letter saying she had been placed on suspended status.

When she investigated how it could have happened, Vincent found out that her voter card never made it out of the post office because the machine couldn't read the address on the envelope, she said.

Often when people's voter registration cards or jury summonses are mailed and returned as undeliverable, their names get added to the suspended list under the assumption that their addresses may be outdated.

Resolving the mishap was complicated, Vincent said. It involved her driving 27 miles and tracking people fact-to-face who could help remove her name from the list.

State Rep. Gene Wu called on "every single person who thinks that they are currently registered to check their registration today” to find out whether they have been added to the suspended list.

Voters with suspended status can still vote as long as they update their addresses online before voter registration in Texas closes on Oct. 7. That should get people removed from the list in time for Election Day.

If voters find out they're still on the suspended list after having shown up at their polling places on Election Day, they can still vote after they complete a “statement of residence” form.

Voters with suspended status who may have moved to other counties will be required to vote in the counties where they previously resided or may be asked to submit provisional ballots.

Voters on the suspended list who were wrongly removed would need to register to vote again before Oct. 7, said Annette Ramirez, a Democrat running for Harris County tax assessor collector.

Sergio Lira of the League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC, the country's oldest Latino civil rights organization, raised concerns over the timing of Abbott's announcement.

The homes of several LULAC members, the chair of the Tejano Democrats, a state House candidate and a mayor were raided on Aug. 20. State Attorney General Ken Paxton has said the raids were connected to an ongoing election integrity investigation. Paxton, a Republican, has also been outspoken in advancing baseless claims about voter fraud.

“This is done strategically,” Lira said.

Lira and Democratic legislators added they fear that such efforts by top Republican leaders may further intimidate voters, especially in Latino communities.

"When these decisions and these tactics come down ... Latinos are most likely and more disproportionately impacted by these actions," said Mario Castillo, a Houston City Council member.

Republicans in Texas and other red states have made election integrity a major part of their messaging campaign ahead of the presidential election, creating fertile ground for false narratives about "rigged elections" and noncitizen voting that suggest the issues are more common than they actually are.

For example, a study of the 2016 election conducted in 2017 by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law found that “of 23.5 million votes cast, election officials only found about 30 cases of potential noncitizen voting,” The Associated Press reported.

Under federal law, only U.S. citizens can vote in federal elections, and states' routine updates of their voter rolls help catch any ineligible voters and remove them, including noncitizens.

The latest data Abbott released shows that efforts to keep voter rolls updated helped remove at least 6,500 "potential noncitizens" from voter registration lists and that the vast majority of them didn't have recorded voter histories.

Against that background, Wu said, it is important for “every single person who’s eligible to vote to register to vote.”