Texas: “Senate Democrats unmoved as DPS shoulders blame for voter purge errors”

San Antonio Express-News:

Senate Democrats still pledge to block the confirmation of embattled Secretary of State David Whitley, even asa top Texas law enforcement official is taking blame for major errors in a list of suspected non-citizen voters.


“I take full responsibility as the leader of the Department of Public Safety,” Steven McCraw told the Senate Criminal Justice Committee this week. Had the department assigned a “senior level person” to the project, he said, it wouldn’t have turned over bad data that included thousands of people who had already proven their citizenship.


“I can tell you throughout the entire project, the secretary was not involved in any of it because he wasn’t there at the time,” McCraw said.

The mea culpa, however, is being met with skepticism from county election officials, who first identified mistakes in the state list, and from Senate Democrats, who still fault Whitley. He had been on the job about six weeks before launching the attempted purge.

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