County election departments across Texas are trying to reassure voters amid a flood of formal challenges questioning whether their registrations are valid.
The challenges, filed by conservative groups and individual activists, seek to remove tens of thousands of voters from the rolls on the grounds that they don’t live in the county, are not citizens, or have died.
Election officials say the challenges are complicating the work they’re already doing to keep their voter rolls updated. They want voters to know that they’re following state and federal laws that protect voters from being improperly removed from the rolls if someone questions their eligibility.
Multiple election officials told Votebeat that the majority of the challenges they’ve received are against voters whose status their offices had already flagged through their daily voter list maintenance. In a few cases, the challenges start a process that could lead to careful removal of voters after the November election….
The large-scale challenge effort is being led by Houston-based right-wing group True the Vote, which has been working for years to purge the rolls of voters it perceives as ineligible ahead of the November presidential election. It’s part of a wave of challenges aimed at voters in several states, including such battlegrounds as Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania.
The group is using an online tool called IV3 that matches voter data with change-of-address records from the U.S. Postal Service. Activists relying on that tool have been delivering stacks of challenges to election offices, or emailing election administrators with spreadsheets listing voters’ names. True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht did not respond to Votebeat’s request for comment.
The effort has drawn criticism from election officials, courts and voting-rights advocates. For one thing, they say, the postal database that True the Vote relies on is outdated and not a reliable source for determining voter eligibility. For another, they say, the effort gives credence to false claims that large numbers of people are voting illegally by exploiting deficiencies in registration records.