I have three things to say about this.
Still the only voter ID anyone should need
County election departments across Texas are trying to reassure voters amid a flood of formal challenges questioning whether their registrations are valid.
The challenges, filed by conservative groups and individual activists, seek to remove tens of thousands of voters from the rolls on the grounds that they don’t live in the county, are not citizens or have died.
Election officials say the challenges are complicating the work they’re already doing to keep their voter rolls updated. They want voters to know that they’re following state and federal laws that protect voters from being improperly removed from the rolls if someone questions their eligibility.
Multiple election officials told Votebeat that the majority of the challenges they’ve received are against voters whose status their offices had already flagged through their daily voter list maintenance. In a few cases, the challenges start a process that could lead to careful removal of voters after the November election.
“Even though a challenge is filed, doesn’t mean that you will be automatically dropped,” said Trudy Hancock, the Brazos County elections administrator. “There is a process in place to protect the voter who’s been challenged.”
At this point in the election cycle, voters aren’t at risk of being dropped from the rolls because of a challenge. Under federal law, election officials can’t cancel a voter’s registration in the period 90 days ahead of Election Day, except for voters who voluntarily cancel their registration or who are convicted of a felony.
Still, election officials are required to process the voter eligibility challenges they receive, and act on valid ones. Election administrators in Collin, Travis, Hays, Brazos, Tarrant, and Denton counties and others have been sifting through large volumes of these, which they began receiving in June, targeting thousands of voters.
The large-scale challenge effort is being led by Houston-based right-wing group True the Vote, which has been working for years to purge the rolls of voters it perceives as ineligible ahead of the November presidential election. It’s part of a wave of challenges aimed at voters in several states, including such battlegrounds as Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania.
The group is using an online tool called IV3 that matches voter data with change-of-address records from the U.S. Postal Service. Activists relying on that tool have been delivering stacks of challenges to election offices, or emailing election administrators with spreadsheets listing voters’ names. True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht did not respond to Votebeat’s request for comment.
The effort has drawn criticism from election officials, courts and voting-rights advocates. For one thing, they say, the postal database that True the Vote relies on is outdated and not a reliable source for determining voter eligibility. For another, they say, the effort gives credence to false claims that large numbers of people are voting illegally by exploiting deficiencies in registration records.
A federal judge in Georgia found this year that True the Vote’s 2020 list of voters to challenge “utterly lacked reliability” and “verges on recklessness.”
“The Court has heard no testimony and seen no evidence of any significant quality control efforts, or any expertise guiding the data process,” he wrote.
Such efforts to challenge voters’ eligibility en masse are “inadequate to address voter eligibility by themselves and also redundant to the work already done by election officials,” according to research on the rise of mass voter challenges by Protect Democracy, a national nonpartisan group promoting fair elections and anti-authoritarian policies.
The report added: “These efforts are based on unsubstantiated and false claims that the rolls are replete with dead voters, voters registered in other locations, and, most recently, noncitizens. Furthermore, they falsely imply that any inaccuracy in the voter rolls equates to or otherwise enables voter fraud. In reality, voter registration rolls are being continuously updated by election officials.”
1. True The Vote sucks. They are horrible people, doing horrible things, lying all the time. I hope they spend their lives being attacked by mosquitoes.
2. It’s never a bad time to check your voter registration status. Look yourself up on your county website or call your county elections office if you have any questions. If you haven’t changed addresses, even temporarily, you’ve probably not got anything to worry about. The main problem with TTV’s approach is that they mix up people with the same name and/or birth date, so if your name is remotely common you could be caught up in their deceit. These are the challenges that county officials are best at detecting, but again, it’s never a bad time to double check.
3. If you have moved, even temporarily, make sure you or someone at the address where you are registered can respond to any mail from the elections office that may be sent to verify your location. That’s the situation that can legitimately trip you up, though again it’s usually only an issue for people who are not regular voters. Check with the people like that in your life and it should be fine.
Check your voter status:
https://teamrv-mvp.sos.texas.gov/MVP/mvp.do