County says state erred with lists of 'dead' voters

The Harris County Attorney's office on Tuesday defended Tax Assessor-Collector Don Sumners' decision not to purge presumed-dead voters from the rolls until after the November election, and accused the secretary of state's office of not following the law in providing a list of 9,000 such voters to the county.

About 72,800 voters statewide have received or will receive letters telling them records suggest they may be dead and that they must act within 30 days to stay on the rolls. The list was generated by the secretary of state using the Social Security Administration's master death file, as outlined in a new state law.

"The notice from the secretary of state did not make the required determination that the voters on the list were deceased," County Attorney Vince Ryan said, adding that two of his attorneys received the letters. "This action by the Texas secretary of state is outrageous, wrong, and unlawful."

Ryan also said the state cannot force Sumners, as the county voter registrar, to send the letters.

A spokesman for Secretary of State Hope Andrade disagreed, saying the office followed the law and that the provision requiring the office to verify a voter's death before notifying the counties has been superseded by a more recent law.

"We were directed under House Bill 174 to do this. Our office has federal and state requirements to maintain an accurate and secure voter registration list," Rich Parsons said. "Mr. Sumners has been aware of this for almost three months. Mr. Sumners has never once raised an objection or concern about this process."

If this process removes some voters from the rolls in error, Parsons said, they still will be able to cast ballots in November.

More stringent criteria

The secretary of state's office long has worked regularly to clean the rolls using data from the Bureau of Vital Statistics, Parsons said, and used more stringent criteria - in addition to undertaking months of testing - to evaluate this first batch of Social Security data.

That did not stop Democrats from raising concerns about voter disenfranchisement, noting recent rulings striking down Republican-led state redistricting and voter identification efforts.

Bill Brannon, executive director of the Texas Democratic Party, said other counties should follow Harris County's lead in delaying the purges, saying it "is being done at a time when it will be difficult for voters to correct."

In a letter to Andrade, Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, wrote, "I have grave concerns that very much alive and registered voters - not only in my senatorial district, but across all of Texas - will be disenfranchised as a result of this clearly flawed voter purge."

Parsons said he knows of no way data based on a person's name, date of birth and Social Security number could be manipulated by any characteristic, including race and political affiliation.

'Common-sense' law

The author of the bill requiring the secretary of state to begin using Social Security data to clean the rolls, Rep. Jim L. Jackson, R-Carrollton, said it was a "common-sense" measure to clean up voter rolls. He said controversy over the purge is "somebody is trying to make a big political partisan deal out of this when it's a bipartisan bill."

Jackson noted that the 300 complaints in Harris County represented about 3 percent of the 9,000 letters sent out by the tax office.

"That's not a very high rate," he said. "Of course, it's high for the people that got letters, but all they have to do is respond to them."

Parsons said Andrade's office provided Bexar County with more than 6,000 names as a result of matching the Social Security Administration's master file against the voter registration list.

Jacquelyn Callanen, Bexar County elections administrator, said after checking the secretary of state's list against other records, her office got down to 600 names.

Each county is asked to verify the voter's status before canceling the registration. Parsons said each county determines whether a letter should be sent to all the people on the list.

Culled the list

In Tarrant County, for example, officials culled the list before sending out letters. Elections administrator Steve Raborn said his office got about 4,000 names, but mailed letters to only about 1,800 voters after removing names its staff did not think were matches.

"To us, some of them were, obviously, not very strong matches," he said. "Some of them had different names, and things like that, and so we didn't send letters to those people."

Raborn said voters who do not dispute the letter will be removed from the rolls. He said he likely would purge them before the November election.

Dee Lopez, Travis County voter registration director, said Tuesday the number of citizen calls was up to 140, out of about 2,200 letters mailed.

"The only newness to this is that this is the first time that the secretary of state has matched against the Social Security database, and that's proving to be not so accurate," she said.

If the county does not hear back from someone saying he or she has been listed in error, Lopez said, "I will cancel. That's the law, and that's the ruling from the state, and we follow the law. We will cancel."

On hold until election

Sumners, for his part, said he had not spoken with the secretary of state's office and did not expect to.

"As far as I'm concerned it's dead. We'll deal with it after the election," he said. "We'll get responses in and we'll see who votes."

The accuracy of the death master file, which contains 85 million records, has been a repeated issue for Congress and the Social Security Administration, according to the agency's website.

Its inspector general, Patrick O'Carroll, testified before a Congressional committee in February that about 1,000 still-living people are found on the death list each month; a July 2012 audit found 1.2 million dead Social Security beneficiaries not on the list.

mike.morris@chron.com twitter.com/mmorris011 peggy.fikac@express-news.net