But this close to an election, the risk of disenfranchising or discouraging eligible voters is high. Efforts to “clean” the voter rolls have indeed wrongly or improperly ensnared eligible voters in the past. In 2019, for example, Texas officials flagged 95,000 voters whom they identified as “noncitizens” and accused broadly of voter fraud. After review, it turned out that many of the people identified on the rolls were naturalized citizens. The scandal resulted in the secretary of state resigning. The state abandoned the effort after numerous lawsuits, which resulted in the state setting new guidelines for future voter roll cleanups.
That relatively recent episode has prompted concerns about the press release put out last month by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, asserting that Texas has removed 6,500 “potential noncitizens” from its rolls since 2021.
Advocacy groups want to know how the state identified those voters as potential noncitizens, and whether those steps complied with the procedures put in place after the 2019 incident. Many of those voters, they point out, may in fact be citizens.
Nonetheless, the number in Abbott’s release is making its way into the comments made by other Republicans on the issue. For example, at the opening of a House Judiciary Committee meeting on the proof of citizenship legislation Tuesday, Rep. Chip Roy, a Texas Republican, cited it, and he described the removed voters only as noncitizens — not “potential noncitizens.”
In response to the concerns about noncitizen voting, election officials have repeatedly stressed, in court and to the public, that there are multiple measures in place to prevent noncitizens from registering and casting ballots, and no evidence that these things are happening, outside of rare and isolated instances.
Former Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill, a Republican who left office in 2023, said in an interview that election officials perform many checks before adding a voter. In that state, “at least two people have to sign off to say that this person should be added to the voter rolls,” he said. Texas election officials, too, have emphasized the checks they use to keep voter rolls accurate and ensure only eligible voters are on them….