The office of the Texas Secretary of State announced the results of a lengthy effort to root out noncitizens on voting rolls — but made a staggering admission in the process about just how error-prone their crusade was.
“Last fall, the agency ran the names of the state’s 18 million registered voters through the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database a process that identified 2,724 potential noncitizens on the voter rolls,” said the press release on Tuesday. “Those registrations were referred to county registrars to conduct their own investigations pursuant to state law.In the weeks following this initial crosscheck, the Office of the Texas Secretary of State partnered with the Department of Public Safety to conduct a manual review of the 2,724 cases.”
“In addition, the agency asked counties to report back the results of their local investigations,” said the release. “This review narrowed the number of potential noncitizens. The additional review showed that 578 voters demonstrated citizenship. Of those, citizenship was proven for 506 because passport information was added to SAVE after the state’s initial run. The Office of the Texas Secretary of State advised counties to reinstate these registrations if they were removed.”
Secretary of State Robert Howden defended the efforts, saying, “By law and according to our Constitution, citizenship is a requirement to vote in Texas, and we have a duty to ensure that only eligible voters participate in our elections. We also have a responsibility to make sure eligible citizens can exercise their right to vote, which is why we are taking great care with this data and conducting additional layers of due diligence.”
But according to Guardian voting rights reporter Sam Levine, the hard numbers reveal a huge amount of inaccuracy.
“After running 18m voters through DHS database, TX identified roughly 2700 people who could be non-citizens,” he wrote. “Officials investigated those 2700 and wound up referring just 117 of them to the AG. Nearly 600 people flagged as non-citizens were actually citizens (staggering 21% error).”
Noncitizen voting, which has proven very rare in the face of all efforts to root it out, has been the justification for President Donald Trump’s SAVE America Act, a draconian crackdown on voting rights that has been stuck in the Senate for months with no prospects of passing.
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