Something is Rotten in the State of Texas

[LetMyPeopleVote]

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In January, Cameron County in Texas agreed to halt a voter removal program after the grassroots political organization Voto Latino pointed out that the practice violates the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), which prohibits canceling voter registrations within 90 days of a federal election. In late December, Cameron County had begun sending letters to voters it suspected might not be citizens, giving them 30 days to prove their citizenship or their registrations would be purged. But why was Cameron County removing voters in the first place? Here, we break down what exactly is going on in Texas right now and why you should care......

Texas has tried to purge noncitizens for years, but it keeps flagging actual citizens for removal. When the state first attempted in 2019, acting Texas Secretary of State David Whitley (R) announced it had found 95,000 noncitizens on the voter rolls and gave the names to the Texas attorney general for possible prosecution for illegally voting. But the state soon discovered that, due to errors in state data and methodology, tens of thousands of the voters flagged were in fact naturalized citizens. Three legal challenges to the purge argued it was clearly flawed and unconstitutionally violated the rights of voters of color. As a result of a settlement in these cases, Whitley halted the effort. He later resigned.

While the legal settlement stopped the original purge, it didn’t stop the state from conducting a new one with improved data or methodology. Last fall, Texas tried again with a scaled-down approach, flagging possible noncitizen registrations for review and sending them to each county to investigate. But once again, it looks like Texas is flagging the registrations of actual citizens for removal. Elections offices in some of the state’s largest counties have found many of the voters flagged are indeed naturalized U.S. citizens — or in a few cases even natural-born ones.

Now, if Texas was simply flagging possible noncitizens and stopping at that, that would be one thing. But instead, the way Texas’ program works is that the flagged voters have to prove their citizenship within 30 days to avoid being purged, but Texas doesn’t have to prove they are noncitizens to go through with the removal. As of December, 2,327 voters have been removed — but only 278 were actually confirmed to be noncitizens. The rest simply didn’t respond to the notice in time and could still be citizens. In this way, Texas is very likely needlessly disenfranchising Americans.

[modrepub]

1. Clearly An Example Of Poor Data Capture

State data infrastructure systems are notoriously poor. COVID has lay bare all the shoddy treatment of large scale data gathering and analysis. This is particularly true for Republican controlled political units who are notoriously cheap (no new taxes).

Obviously, the smaller amounts of data you attempt to digest, the fewer the problems. Therefore, county and local units are probably best able to handle their own data, except maybe in highly populous regions.

Why isn't there more voter fraud? Probably because of local election control. Poll workers and county employees can manage their own data due to its small size. Once you've coagulated data and you've already done things on the cheap, there are bound to be lots of problems.

It's better to have a decentralized/local/small (bottom up) system than to have a big, centralized system that has many hands (that don't talk to one another). Conversely, it's easy to manipulate systems that are top down; a couple of well placed minions or choke points can wreak havoc.

[LetMyPeopleVote]

2. Richburg submitted was "hate-filled" and "indefensible and not legitimate political discourse."

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