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It's been a rough start to 2022 for Texas election officials

Texas voter registration form
Bryan R. Smith/AFP via Getty Images

Texas, which remains a Republican stronghold despite Democratic efforts to turn the state blue in recent election cycles, has come under the microscope for its voter registration practices.

An ongoing dispute over efforts by the second most populous state to clean its voter rolls took yet another legal turn Tuesday when a collection of voting rights organizations filed a lawsuit demanding access to relevant documents.

In 2019, Texas' secretary of state kicked off a process to remove non-citizens from the list of registered voters and claimed to have found 100,000 such people. But people who had become naturalized citizens got caught up in the sweep, leading to multiple federal lawsuits, resignations and a scaled-back approach that may still be sweeping up eligible voters.

The latest lawsuit responds to the revised plan for cleaning the rolls.


While the state believed the new approach, launched in the second half of 2021, would do a better job protecting citizens from a purge, local officials and voting rights advocates remained skeptical and found that errors were still being made.

The Campaign Legal Center, Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Texas, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and Demos requested records from the state, including data used to determine citizenship status. Having failed to receive any records, those groups filed a lawsuit against the state Tuesday.

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“It seems that Texas is incapable – or worse, unwilling – to learn from the past. Racial and ethnic discrimination in voting has been a sad part of Texas’s history continuing in the present. And discriminating against naturalized citizens falls into this unfortunate pattern,” said Ezra Rosenberg, co-director of the Lawyers’ Committee’s Voting Rights Project. “We need to shed light on precisely how Texas is identifying voters it wants to purge from the rolls in order to ensure that the precious right to vote is not snatched from eligible voters, whose only ‘crime’ is that they are naturalized and not native-born citizens.”

Texas elections officials were already scrambling to deal with concerns about new voter registrations in the wake of news that the state was facing a shortage of paper applications. It’s just one of nine states that do not offer online voter registration.

With the Texas primary coming up on March 1, new registrations were due by Jan. 31.

But Secretary of State John Scott sought to reassure Texans prior to the deadline: "This year alone, the SOS has provided tens of thousands of voter registration applications to counties, libraries, schools, and private entities. The SOS has also made a .pdf version of the voter registration application available to anyone who requests it, including private entities. Additionally, Texas voters can fill out an online application form, print, sign and send the completed application to their county voter registrar.”

Other organizations, including the Democratic Party, also took steps to assist new voters.

On a more positive note, a recent report found that Texas libraries have made significant improvements in meeting voter registration requirements after failing to meet state and federal standards in 2020.

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Senate Bill 16 would require new registrants and some existing registered voters to prove they are U.S. citizens.

Amber Mills, issue advocacy director for the Move Texas Civic Fund, said the requirement would be in addition to what the state already does to check someone's eligibility.

"When you're completing a voter form, you do also have to submit either your driver's license number or your Social Security number," Mills pointed out. "That's really important because that is how the state verifies who you are, and that's a key indicator that they use to protect their databases on the back end."

Even if you were born in the U.S., the bill could require you to show proof of citizenship with a passport or birth certificate matching your current name. According to the Secure Democracy Foundation, more than 38% percent of rural and small-town Texans do not have a passport.

Anyone who cannot prove citizenship would be placed on a separate voter roll and could only cast ballots in the U.S. House and Senate races.

Emily French, policy director for the advocacy group Common Cause Texas, said the additional barriers could prevent many residents from casting their votes in local, state and presidential races.

"All the DPS systems, all the immigration systems which say that they are citizens, but there can still be mistakes that mark them as noncitizens and could throw them off the voter rolls until they come in with these documents that they don't have," French explained.

The bill directs the Texas Secretary of State's Office to check all registered voters' status by the end of the year and send the names of registered voters who have not proven their citizenship before September 2025 to county elections offices.

Mills noted if you are flagged, there is no online system to comply with the request and all paperwork must be submitted in person.

"We are not disputing the goal of having only eligible citizens on the voter rolls, but we know that Texas already has strong systems in place," Mills emphasized. "It's ultimately the state's responsibility, the county's responsibility to do these voter roll checks, but what SB 16 would do is not change any of that, not improve any of that. It would just add an additional burden."

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