AUSTIN — Last Friday afternoon, Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton took to Twitter to blast out alarming news.

“VOTER FRAUD ALERT,” the tweet said. “The @TXsecofstate discovered approx 95,000 individuals identified by DPS as non-U.S. citizens have a matching voter registration record in TX, approx 58,000 of whom have voted in TX elections.”

The tweet ricocheted across the internet for two hours before the state sent notice of the explosive number of suspected non-citizen voters to county election officials, who are charged with verifying the initial findings and purging any ineligible voters. The state had been working on the analysis since March 2018, but it took the elections officials less than a day to spot glaring errors. By Tuesday, the original list of 95,000 had been cut to roughly 75,000 names.

“I can’t speculate as to why the original list had mistakes,” said Williamson County Elections Administrator Chris Davis, who is President of the Texas Association of Elections Administrators and was among the first to notify the state of inaccuracies. “We weren’t, my county, wasn’t consulted on search parameters or methodology.”

The sequence of events spotlights a rocky rollout that put far more emphasis on splashy numbers than accuracy.

All 366 registered voters on the list sent to McLennan County election officials, for example, were incorrectly flagged and had already proven citizenship, the Waco Tribune-Herald reported.

Allegations of widespread voter fraud have become a rallying cry for Republicans, though evidence hasn’t borne it out. During his own election and afterward, President Donald Trump made repeated, unsubstantiated claims of illegal votes.

On HoustonChronicle.com: State hedges on claim that 100,000 Texas voters aren’t citizens, faces federal lawsuit

Florida sought to purge noncitizens from the voter rolls in 2012 and initially flagged 180,000 people. The number soon shrank to 2,600 and ultimately just 85 voters were taken off the rolls, according to the Tampa Bay Times.

The roughly 20,000 names cleared so far are only across a handful of the 254 Texas counties, and include voters who had already proven citizenship at naturalization ceremonies or when getting a driver license. Election officials in some counties, including Bexar and Webb, have yet to begin vetting their lists.

“I am not putting pressure on my staff to drop everything,” said Jose Salvador Tellez, interim elections administrator for Webb County. “I have a limited staff.”

Still, Texas Republican leaders aren’t backing off, though some are walking back the strong rhetoric.

Gov. Greg Abbott on Thursday urged state and local election officials to work “swiftly together to make sure our voter rolls are accurate to ensure integrity in the election process.”

He said Secretary of State David Whitley, whom he appointed, had made clear the list of suspected non voters contained “weak” matches that needed further vetting.

The nuance didn’t come through in a tweet Abbott had sent Friday, thanking Paxton and Whitley “for uncovering and investigating this illegal vote registration. I support prosecution where appropriate.”

The Secretary of State’s office sent the initial list of registered voters to Paxton’s office for possible criminal investigation. It’s not clear whether Paxton will begin work on those names, even after counties have already found tens of thousands of voters were wrongly flagged.

“To protect the privacy of the voters and witnesses involved in these cases and preserve the integrity of these investigations, we are not able to give play-by-plays of our progress,” said Marc Rylander, Director of Communications at the attorney general’s office, in a statement. “However, our office will spare no expense or effort in investigating each of these referrals.”

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Voting rights groups and members of the Mexican American Legislative Caucus say the whole operation was a political stunt that left legitimate voters at risk of having their registration stripped. A federal lawsuit filed this week by the League of United Latin American Citizens seeks to block the state’s attempted purge of voter rolls.

Abbott, Paxton and Whitley “need to apologize to those on the list and to the people of Texas whose money they wasted," Texas AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Montserrat Garibay said in a statement Thursday. "Our lawmakers, rather than make voting harder, should get to the bottom of this sorry episode to make sure it never happens again."

This is not the first time Texas has attempted a voter purge armed with erroneous information. In 2012, state election officials mistakenly matched living voters to the names of deceased people in their effort to purge dead voters from the rolls before the presidential election.

“We had a guy in our office, who worked with the voter registrar, and he got one of these notices — that he was dead,” said Harris County special assistant attorney Douglas Ray.

So, Ray said, when Harris County received the initial list earlier this week, he was already “very skeptical those people were actually non-citizens.”

Harris County, a Democratic stronghold, leads the state in wrongly flagged voters, with about 18,000 already cleared from the list. “We are going to proceed very carefully to check the voter registration files of each of the people who remain. We are going to complete that investigation before we go further,” Ray said. “It might take quite some time.”

The state analysis compared voter registration data — some going back as far as 1996 — to driver license records in which applicants had indicated they weren't U.S. citizens. Critics contend the approach would also wrongly capture those who were naturalized after obtaining a driver license. Some 50,000 people are naturalized each year in Texas, according to voter advocacy groups.

"Everybody wants clean and accurate rolls," said Myrna Perez, Director of the Voting Rights and Elections Project at The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School. "But there are ways to do it that aren’t sloppy and that use better methods of assessing information."

The Secretary of State’s office is planning to conduct smaller-scale checks on voter citizenship on a monthly basis, and is working with the Department of Public Safety “to get additional information that will help us going forward with these monthly checks, making sure they are efficient and accurate,” spokesman Sam Taylor said.

amorris@express-news.net