The Dallas County Republican Party Has Some Thoughts About the Voter Purge Fiasco
Someone get Texas Secretary of State David Whitley one sequined glove, please. Last week Whitley dethroned the late Michael Jackson as king of the moonwalk, appearing to move forward while walking backward. On Jan. 25, Whitley and Attorney General Ken Paxton announced that as many as 58,000 noncitizens may have cast ballots in Texas elections between 1996 and 2018, and as many as 95,000 noncitizens were registered to vote.
It was a bombshell announcement Paxton dropped late on a Friday afternoon, exploiting the news cycle to get word out over the weekend, before reporters could examine the numbers closely. "Voter fraud alert," Paxton wrote in a tweet. "Tip of the iceberg," the tweeter in chief said from the White House the following Sunday.
Then came Monday, time to cue "Billie Jean." Whitley faced a deluge of media reports picking apart his and Paxton's political stunt. Alexa Ura's coverage at the Texas Tribune was especially good, but newspapers and television stations across the state got in their licks on a clearly flawed process. (Potential problems with the numbers were pretty clear from the outset. For example, the lists were drawn by comparing the names of noncitizens holding Texas driver's licenses with names on voting rolls. It was possible, likely even, that some "noncitizens" became citizens after they got their driver's licenses but neglected to tell the DPS. That's not required, and naturally no red-blooded American, even a new one, will get anywhere near a DMV office unless absolutely necessary.)
It's clear at this point that thousands of voters included in the advisories Whitley sent to county voter registrars across the state as potential noncitizens shouldn't have been on the list in the first place. They, as the Secretary of State's Office confirmed in a post-advisory round of phone calls, had already proved their citizenship to the state.
Read more: https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/dallas-county-gop-speeding-to-voter-fraud-dead-end-11544168