“Texas’ election chief defends sharing flawed noncitizen list”

AP:

Texas’ election chief on Thursday defended giving prosecutors a list of 95,000 potential noncitizens on the state’s voter rolls before vetting the information, which turned out to wrongly include scores of people who were naturalized before casting legal ballots.


Secretary of State David Whitley deflected sharp questions from Texas lawmakers over whether his office made mistakes in his first public comments since his office in January called into question the citizenship of tens of thousands of voters since 1996. Nearly 58,000 of those voters were said to have cast a ballot at least once, but those numbers quickly unraveled .


Within days, local officials found that the list wrongly included scores of naturalized citizens, setting off accusations from Democrats and Latino rights groups of attempted voter suppression and launching another heated voting rights battle in Texas.

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