The U.S. House’s main investigative committee has opened an inquiry into the Texas secretary of state’s review of the voter rolls for supposed noncitizens.
In letters sent to top Texas officials on Thursday, U.S. Reps. Elijah Cummings, the Democratic chair of the Committee on Oversight and Reform, and Jamie Raskin, D-Maryland, requested documents and communications from the secretary of state and the state’s attorney general related to the review through which state officials tagged almost 100,000 registered voters as suspect voters.
Texas officials rolled out the review effort in late January, shipping off lists of flagged voters to county voter registrars in what they described as routine maintenance of the state’s massive voter registration database. But state officials’ efforts have been dogged by errors in the data and litigation in federal court, which ground the entire review to a halt over concerns by a federal judge that it targeted naturalized citizens.
“We are disturbed by reports that your office has taken steps to remove thousands of eligible American voters from the rolls in Texas and that you have referred many of these Americans for possible criminal prosecution for exercising their right to vote,” the congressmen wrote to Secretary of State David Whitley.