In an August 2018 email from John Crawford, a top official of the driver’s license division at the Texas Department of Public Safety, to an employee, Crawford said DPS had run data of licensed drivers to compare to state voter rolls before, and “we have an urgent request from the governor’s office to do it again.”
At a three-day hearing in federal court in San Antonio, none of the state’s witnesses ever mentioned that Abbott had pushed for the program when questioning turned to the origins of the program, which some officials called “routine.”
But the emails show Abbott applied pressure to officials at DPS to provide data that the Secretary of State could use for voter list maintenance.
From the emails, it appears employees from DPS and the Secretary of State’s office had been working on voter purge information since March 2018.
You can find the released emails here at CLC.