Settlement: Voters must be truly dead before being purged from rolls

AUSTIN - Lawyers who sued over a so-called voter purge announced an agreement with the state Wednesday that they said will protect Texans from being stricken from the rolls under the faulty assumption that they are dead.

"Plaintiffs believe that persons that have been confirmed to be deceased should be removed from the voter rolls, but that the persons charged with the administration of elections in the state must be very careful not to remove persons that have not been clearly determined to be deceased," said Buck Wood, who, with David Richards, brought the lawsuit on behalf of four voters.

They said the state agreed that no one will be removed from a voter list without information confirming that the person is deceased.

Those who oversee elections in Bexar and Harris counties said the court agreement will not change how they are doing things.

Secretary of State Hope Andrade said the agreement is in line with the process long in place for removing voters from the rolls. Andrade said counties still must adhere to a Texas Election Code provision that says if a registrar believes a voter to be ineligible, and the voter does not respond to a mailed notice in 30 days, the registrar shall cancel the person's registration.

Wood said that such action would be up to the registrar, noting that a new email sent to counties by the Secretary of State's Office emphasizes confirmation of a voter's suspected death.

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott said the Wednesday order "is another step toward improving the integrity of the election system. The order means dead voters can and should be deleted from the rolls, and allows for the removal of dead voters to continue."

'A sigh of relief'

Controversy arose after a new state law required voter registration rolls to be matched against the Social Security Administration's master death file in an effort to clean up the voter list. Officials previously had used other criteria.

Counties were given lists of "strong" and "weak" matches indicating whether people might be deceased. The weak matches turned out to include many of the living, and counties that sent letters to them received numerous complaints.

In Bexar County, the list of potentially dead voters was culled before initial letters were sent in an effort to eliminate the living from those who were contacted.

"This is business as usual," Jacquelyn Callanen, Bexar County elections administrator, said of the lawsuit agreement. The only thing it brought was "a sigh of relief," she said. "It meant nobody else was going to come down with all kinds of restrictions for us. This way we can continue to do our usual business plan."

No mandate to cull lists

After a controversy in Harris County - where many voters got letters saying their existence was in question - the county reached an agreement with the Secretary of State's Office to similarly limit those who are stricken from the rolls.

"I hope everybody's happy," said Don Sumners, Harris County tax assessor-collector and voter registrar. "I feel vindicated that we actually ended up with a solution that everybody could agree on, and it's pretty much what I was doing.

"We're not under any mandate to remove them from the rolls prior to the election date unless we have confirmation that they are, in fact, deceased," he said.

Andrade said the process "has never precluded counties from taking the time local officials deem necessary to confirm a voter's status."

Records to be reviewed

The email sent by the Secretary of State's Office to county election officials under the agreement said that voter registrars are expected to conduct an independent review of "weak" matches to determine whether a voter should be on the rolls.

The email said records should be reviewed as quickly as possible.

It said voter registrars will be in compliance if they act on voters who are confirmed dead before Election Day; they continue to investigate "weak" matches until after Election Day; and they update voter rolls appropriately when they get confirmation that voters are deceased.

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