Updated at 10:40 p.m. Monday: Revised to include additional information from a spokesman for the Texas secretary of state.

AUSTIN -- Conservatives on Monday seized on a state report about non-U.S. citizens possibly voting, saying Texas should tighten procedures to ensure voters are citizens, while voting rights advocates accused the state GOP of gliding over facts to stoke fears and engage in "voter suppression."

County officials in North Texas and elsewhere, meanwhile, said that they’re trying to figure out how best to comply with Secretary of State David Whitley’s request that they scrub a newly updated list of about 98,000 residents. According to state officials, they weren’t citizens when they obtained a driver’s license but eventually wound up on voter rolls.

Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins, who sits on a commission that chooses the local elections administrator, spoke skeptically, as did fellow Democrats from Dallas to the Legislature.

“We want to do everything that we can to make sure that the election process runs the way it’s supposed to, that only people who are citizens are registered to vote -- but that no one is knocked off the rolls for any reason other than they’re not qualified to vote,” he said.

But Prosper GOP Sen. Pat Fallon, who on Monday filed a bill to require proof of citizenship when people register to vote, said Texas needs to stop taking applicants at their word -- even though they sign a statement below a warning that perjury could lead to 180 days in jail.

“Right now, when you register to vote in Texas, it’s the honor system,” he said. “That’s not good enough. We need free, open and honest elections or you don’t have a representative republic. Period.”

On Friday, Whitley, who is the state’s top elections official, announced his office was flagging about 95,000 individuals who had received driver licenses while not citizens and then registered to vote. In Texas, non-citizens who are permanent legal residents or have a work visa can receive a driver license, but they are not eligible to vote.

Initially, Whitley said about 58,000 of those who had received a driver's license without being citizens had voted in an election between 1996 and 2018. Critics said those numbers were misleading and did not take into account people who had received their license while not citizens and later received their citizenship.

On Monday, Whitley spokesman Sam Taylor increased the figures slightly. He said the “initial matching test” that was sent to Attorney General Ken Paxton so he could look at possible “illegal activity” was followed by a Saturday evening computer run. It yielded numbers that were sent to county election officials Saturday night, Taylor said.

“The numbers did not change significantly” from Friday’s, he said -- 98,017 matching records, of whom 58,173 have “voting history.”

“The two figures are taken from different snapshots in time - the list we sent to counties on Saturday being the most current,” Taylor explained.

Premature list?

Jenkins, the Dallas County judge, though, criticized state officials for prematurely pushing a narrative about the voters on the list without having all the information first, such as whether they became naturalized citizens.

“It’s an unusual deal,” Jenkins said. “Understand that it’s the legislative session; there may be a political reason why people want to do a press release before they communicate with the elections administrators or provide any documentation. I don’t think that’s the appropriate way to run the secretary of state’s office.”

Taylor, who is Whitley’s spokesman, said officials with most Texas counties participated in recent trainings offered by the state on voter registration list maintenance. Dallas County was represented at a Jan. 9 training, he said.

Whitley’s action reverberated from Austin to Washington. Long a nemesis to voting rights advocates, he defended the state’s voter ID law while a lawyer in the attorney general’s office, when Gov. Greg Abbott was the state’s top lawyer, recalled Chad Dunn, general counsel for the state Democratic Party.

Whitley should know from the voter ID lawsuit that “their databases are such a mess that they can’t tell anything meaningful from them,” Dunn said.

President Donald Trump, though, welcomed Whitley’s announcement as confirmation of the voter fraud he’s long alleged, though experts have said it’s rare -- and claims that non-citizens vote in large numbers remain unverified.

“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.”

58,000 non-citizens voted in Texas, with 95,000 non-citizens registered to vote. These numbers are just the tip of the iceberg. All over the country, especially in California, voter fraud is rampant. Must be stopped. Strong voter ID! @foxandfriends — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 27, 2019

The report also emboldened those who have sought stricter requirements on voter registration.

“This is something that we’ve been after for a very long time,” said Daniel Greer, executive director of Direct Action Texas, a grassroots conservative group based in Dallas-Fort Worth. “The step now is for the counties to go in and do their due diligence.”

Greer said Whitley’s report would give his group momentum to ask lawmakers to tighten voting requirements during the legislative session.

“Our election code hasn’t kept up with technology, with a lot of things,” he said. “We need to come back and say where we can, ‘Here’s what we need to be doing.’”

State Rep. Mike Lang, a Republican from Granbury who is a member of the tea-party aligned Freedom Caucus, filed a bill similar to Fallon’s in November. Republican Stephanie Klick of Fort Worth, the chairwoman of the House’s elections committee, said she would “take a look” at the numbers but there was still much that was not known.

Voting rights advocates, however, have cast doubts on the state’s numbers and cautioned local elections officials against taking action based on the state’s report.

Civil rights advocates pointed to a similar initiative in Florida, where state officials who compared a driver's license database with voter rolls came up with a list of 180,000 they identified as potential non-citizens in 2012. That list shrunk to 2,625 names. Ultimately, only 85 names were removed from voter rolls, according to news reports.

“Texas officials have taken another page straight out of the voter suppression handbook,” said Beth Stevens, voting rights legal director for the Texas Civil Rights Project.

“The ‘investigation’ outlined by the Secretary of State is woefully inadequate and risks purging thousands of eligible Texans from the voting rolls,” she warned, deploring “a radical anti-voter agenda.”

The Texas Civil Rights Project along with 12 other groups, including the ACLU of Texas and the League of Women Voters of Texas, called on Whitley immediately to rescind the advisory he sent county officials Friday.

The groups also urged local county registrars not to take action on the state’s report “until the Secretary of State has provided greater transparency on its procedures and ensured there are adequate safeguards for not identifying lawfully registered naturalized citizens.”

Local officials say checks will take time

For local officials, the checking process could take weeks, said Collin County elections administrator Bruce Sherbet.

“I’m not sure all of it would be done before the May election,” he said, referring to May 4 municipal elections that include a wide-open race for Dallas mayor in Dallas County.

Dallas County elections administrator Toni Pippins-Poole didn’t return phone calls and a text message seeking comment on how her office plans to proceed.

According to Collin County’s Sherbet and Chris Davis, the president of the Association of Texas Elections Administrators, local officials are used to adding new voters, entering changes of address and name, and canceling the registrations of those who die or are convicted of felonies. That work is automated, Sherbet noted.

In the new task Whitley has urged on them, he said, "each record would need close review prior to additional action.”

Sherbet said so far in January, his office has processed about 5,600 changes and additions. On Monday, it received from Whitley a list of about 4,700 names. The “non-citizen” checks would entail more than a month's worth of work, he estimated.

Asked if he would move very deliberately, as a Harris County official told the Houston Chronicle would happen in the state's most populous county, Sherbet replied, "I'm not planning on pushing back."

Before Collin officials begin their review of the list, Sherbet said, “I want to speak to our county attorney before we proceed on this end. We haven’t started analyzing the file yet.”

Tarrant County elections administrator Heider Garcia said it’s too early to make a judgment on whether voter fraud is “a big problem” in his county.

“This is a new data source that we plug into our set of information,” he said. “We don’t know yet if we have a lot of false positives, or if we have a real problem here."

Robert T. Garrett and James Barragán reported from Austin. Julieta Chiquillo reported from Dallas.