Harris County pushes back against state’s call for voter purge

People wait in line to vote at a polling place on the first day of early voting on October 22, 2018 in Houston(Photo by Loren Elliott/Getty Images) People wait in line to vote at a polling place on the first day of early voting on October 22, 2018 in Houston(Photo by Loren Elliott/Getty Images) Photo: Loren Elliott, Stringer / Getty Images Photo: Loren Elliott, Stringer / Getty Images Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Harris County pushes back against state’s call for voter purge 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

The largest county in Texas is pushing back against the state’s effort to purge from the voter rolls nearly 100,000 people that state officials suspect are not U.S. citizens.

Harris County elections officials say they will do their own research on the affected voters before sending out notices that would give them 30 days to present documents to prove their citizenship, as recommended by the Secretary of State’s Office.

“We are going to proceed very carefully,” said Douglas Ray, a special assistant county attorney in Harris who specializes in election issues. “We’re going to make sure we don’t improperly disenfranchise anyone.”

In addition, a coalition of voting rights advocacy groups including the ACLU Foundation of Texas are putting pressure on the state to reverse course, and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund is warning counties they could face lawsuits if they comply with the state’s recommendation. State elections officials do not have the authority to remove people from the voter rolls. That power resides with county elections officials.

The reactions come three days after the Texas Secretary of State David Whitley announced that an analysis of state records found about 95,000 people who are on the voter registration rolls who may not be U.S. citizens — including 58,000 who have voted at least once in past elections as far back as 1996. Whitley said the state used Department of Public Safety records to identify drivers who submitted documents that proved they were not legal U.S. citizens at that time, but were eligible to drive. Then the state compared those names and Social Security numbers with the state voter rolls. It’s those matches that the state is now sending to county voting officials statewide to start the process of purging any non-citizens.

Texas Take: Get political headlines from across the state sent directly to your inbox

The effort was met gleefully by President Donald Trump, who saw it as confirmation of the voter fraud he’s long insisted is a national problem.

“These numbers are just the tip of the iceberg,” Trump wrote on Twitter on Sunday morning. “All over the country, especially in California, voter fraud is rampant.”

State officials said they are not releasing the names of the voters who have been flagged, but confirmed Harris County has the most.

Harris officials had not received the list Monday, but Ray said he’s already skeptical of the use of DPS records that he described as “notoriously” not up-to-date on peoples’ citizenship status. They say many of the people who were not citizens when they got their drivers licenses may be citizens now given that Texas naturalizes nearly 50,000 people annually.

Harris County Voter Registrar Ann Harris Bennett routinely sends members of her staff to naturalization ceremonies in the county to sign up new citizens to vote. Ray said the county is going to compare the list of names from the state with a list of people who have gone through those ceremonies.

Once county elections officials send out a “Notice of Examination” to voters identified as potential non-citizens, as the state is recommending, the voters have 30 days to provide documentation such as a birth certificate, passport, or certificate of naturalization. Otherwise, they are removed from the rolls.

Whitley, who has been Secretary of State for just over a month, indicated he has no problem with Harris County’s response.

“The Texas Secretary of State’s office takes no issue with county voter registrars lawfully using additional information at their disposal to conduct the list maintenance activity we initiated last week,” said Sam Taylor, communications director for the Secretary of State’s Office.

Democrats continued to criticize the state’s action on Monday. State Sen. Jose Menendez, D-San Antonio, said he feels the state is unfairly putting pressure on Latino voters.

“Voting rights of Latino and naturalized citizens continue to be under attack in Texas,” said Menendez, who is the chairman of the Texas Senate Hispanic Caucus. “The claim of 95,000 non-U.S. Citizens registered to vote is based on a system of incomplete data and assumptions.”

A coalition of voter advocacy groups including the ACLU and Texas Civil Rights Project have sent a letter to Whitley and the 254 counties to demand the state withdraw its letters to counties asking them to take steps to potentially remove the voters from the rolls. In the letter, the groups argue the state is using data that “looks deeply flawed.”

“As a result, we demand that you immediately rescind the Advisory before counties take action on it,” says the letter, signed by 13 different organizations.

The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund was more pointed, warning counties could face lawsuits if they challenge the eligibility of voters simply because they were not U.S. citizens in the past runs.

“Targeting naturalized citizens for voter purges is unconstitutional and will do lasting damage to the Texas electorate,” said Nina Perales, vice president of litigation at MALDEF.

But for Republicans, the Secretary of State’s efforts are being met with an I-told-you-so-fervor. For years, Texas Republicans have insisted that voter fraud is rampant, though a total of 130 people have been prosecuted on charges of voter or election fraud in Texas since 2005. The new list gives the state up to 58,000 potentially illegal voters that have already been forwarded to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican.

It is a felony to vote in Texas when you know you are not eligible.

State Sen. Kelly Hancock, R-North Richland Hills, said part of the problem in Texas is that penalties for voter fraud weren’t tough enough, so there are few people taking the time to prosecute offenders and few tracking how many cases there are. He said with the Legislature increasing penalties for things like absentee ballot fraud, he thinks there will be more effort to go after people who vote illegally or commit other acts of voter fraud.

jeremy.wallace@chron.com