Some state lawmakers, Austin and San Antonio area leaders and activists are pushing back against what they say is voter intimidation coming from the state's highest elected officials.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced last week that more than a million people have been taken off Texas voter rolls since 2021, when Senate Bill 1 was signed into law. The law added a number of new restrictions and criminal penalties related to voting, including new identification requirements for people voting by mail.
Abbott said people were removed for a variety of reasons, and those removed include people who have died, noncitizens and Texans who have been placed on what is called a suspense list, which is a list of voters who are flagged for registration discrepancies, like an outdated address. He claims the reform helps Texas crack down on illegal voting.
“Illegal voting in Texas will never be tolerated,” Abbott said in a press release. “We will continue to actively safeguard Texans’ sacred right to vote while also aggressively protecting our elections from illegal voting.”
The announcement comes just two months before thousands of Texans are set to cast a ballot in this year’s presidential election and local races.
But some local officials are saying Abbott's announcement is ill-timed and a move intended to intimidate voters and sow doubt about the integrity of the election. Removal of voters is actually pretty routine, and the next major “purge” won’t occur until after the Nov. 5 election.
Travis County Voter Registrar Bruce Elfant is in charge of voter roll maintenance for the county and confirmed the clean-up is a routine task.
The last time voter list maintenance happened in Travis County was in 2022, when more than 21,000 people were removed from the voter roll, according to county data.
Every two years the county sends out new voter registration cards following a presidential or midterm election, and the cards that are returned are flagged and placed on a suspense list, Elfant said.
Cards are returned for a number of reasons. Sometimes the returned card was for a person who has died. It can also happen because of a mistake by the post office, or if a resident says they no longer live in the county to get out of jury duty. But a lot of cards are simply returned because of change of addresses, Elfant said.
A voter can sit on the suspense list for four years before they are officially removed. However, voters on the list can still vote if they sign a statement of residence before casting a ballot. That is often done at the polling site and resolves the issue.
“What we do with list maintenance is very routine,” Elfant said. “It's a way to keep voter rolls as clean as we possibly can. … People move, people pass away. ... It's pretty dynamic.”
Overall, Elfant said this is not a new process, and there will not be any massive voter removals right before the election. He said he was not aware of any complaints or indications of people being erroneously removed from the rolls.
Abbott’s announcement has also been coupled with other “intimidation tactics,” leaders say. Recently, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced a series of raids that targeted Latino households in South Texas that was part of an ongoing election integrity investigation. So far, no criminal charges have been made. Paxton’s office also recently set up an illegal voting tip line.
@texaspublicradio Federal and state investigations are now being sought after investigators with the attorney general's office raided the South Texas homes of Democratic campaign workers, volunteers, and a Texas House candidate. Attorney General Ken Paxton ordered the raids to investigate alleged election fraud and voter harvesting during the 2022 midterm elections. "Voter harvesting" is collecting completed absentee ballots from voters and delivering them to polling places or election offices. Ramon Palomares, the national president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, said the raids had nothing to do with voter harvesting. "This is pointblank voter intimidation, and LULAC will fight for the right of every Latino to exercise their right to vote," Palomares said. Get the whole story at npr.org 🎤 Brian Kirkpatrick / TPR 📹 Gabriella Alcorta-Solorio / TPR
♬ original sound - Texas Public Radio
State Rep. Lulu Flores said these actions are classic intimidation tactics meant to keep people from exercising their right to vote, but it will not stop her and other elected officials from encouraging people to go to the polls.
“Stop scaring us, stop violating our voting rights, and do the right thing,” Flores said.
Elfant said it is not uncommon for infrequent voters to find themselves not registered to vote during presidential election years. He encouraged everyone to check their voter registration status.
There are 908,300 people registered to vote in Travis County and more than 1,230,000 in Bexar County.
The deadline to register to vote is Oct. 7. Residents can check their registration and find out how to register at votetexas.gov.
'No show'
Paxton was a no-show Friday at the Bexar County Courthouse to stop the county-funded registration of voters.
He was expected to ask a judge for a temporary restraining order to stop the effort approved by county commissioners this week.
"Obviously, if he would have shown up it would have been an exercise of power, of flexing his muscle, of saying Bexar County you have my attention and I'm going to do everything I can to intimidate as many people as I can,' said Bexar County DA Joe Gonzales.
Commissioners in Bexar and Travis counties plan to pay an outside firm to send voter registration cards to more than 200,000 people who just moved here or moved within the county.
Paxton is suing because he said the counties don't have the statutory authority to register voters.
The attorney general claims that the company hired by both counties, Civic Government Solutions, is a partisan group that will persuade people to vote for progressive candidates. The AG also argues the outreach effort encourages noncitizens to register.
Lydia Camarillo with the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project told KUT that doesn’t really happen.
"In fact, undocumented folks will tell us, 'Oh no no no, I do not want to get in trouble, I do not want to divide my family, I do not want to be to criminalized and I do not want to be deported or for someone in my family to be deported," Camarillo said.
Bexar and Travis counties plan to fight Paxton's lawsuits in court.
LULAC protest
Chanting "Sí, se puede," protestors with the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) demonstrated outside of Paxton's San Antonio office on Saturday.
Their volunteers were recently the target of raids from Paxton's office searching for voter fraud.
Henry Rodriguez, Executive Director of LULAC's San Antonio chapter, said state government has been targeting voter registration efforts for years.
"We're going to take our fight to the appropriate place and that's to the Attorney General, to Greg Abbott, and to Trump himself. That's where it all comes from," Rodriguez said. "Everybody wants to dance to the music, to the rhythm of Donald Trump. But we're not scared of him. We're not scared of anybody."
Trump for years has claimed there is widespread voter fraud without evidence — recently suggesting "long-term prison sentences" for "election cheating."
Numerous studies of elections have found “vanishingly little” evidence of mass voter fraud.
However, Rodriguez said there is a need to help people get registered to vote, noting that his organization continues to receive calls from unregistered people asking for help.
TPR's Brian Kirkpatrick and Dan Katz contributed to this report.
