The Trib wrote about this in the best possible way, but the shrieking ghouls are out there in force doing what they can to whip up fear.
Still the only voter ID anyone should need
The Texas secretary of state’s office announced Friday it would send local election officials a list of 95,000 registered voters who the state says counties should consider checking to see whether they are U.S. citizens and, therefore, legally eligible to vote.
In an advisory released Friday afternoon, the office said it was flagging individuals who had provided the Texas Department of Public Safety with some form of documentation — including a work visa or a green card — that showed they were not a citizen when they were obtaining a driver’s license or an ID card. Among the individuals flagged, about 58,000 individuals cast a ballot in one or more elections from 1996 to 2018, the secretary of state’s office said.
It’s unclear exactly how many of those individuals are not actually U.S. citizens and whether that number will be available in the future. In its notice to counties, the secretary of state’s office said the names should be considered “WEAK” matches, using all capital letters for emphasis.
That means counties may now choose to investigate the eligibility of the individuals who were flagged, which would require them to send a notice asking for proof of citizenship within 30 days, or take no action. By law, the counties aren’t allowed to automatically revoke a voter’s registration without sending out such a notice.
It’s possible that individuals flagged by the state — who provided DPS with documentation that indicated they were authorized to be in the country — could have become naturalized citizens since they obtained their driver’s license or ID card. A spokesman for the secretary of state said officials are “very confident” that the data received from DPS is “current.”
In announcing the review of the rolls, Secretary of State David Whitley — who was appointed to the post last month after serving as deputy chief of staff to Republican Gov. Greg Abbott — immediately handed the data over to the Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican who said his office will “spare no effort in assisting with these troubling cases.”
But without additional verification, you can’t say these individuals all engaged in illegal voting, said Chris Davis, the head of the Texas Association of Elections Administrators.
“People get naturalized,” Davis said. “It’s entirely too early to say that.”
You should also read the Trib’s Twitter thread about this story, which sums it all up nicely.
First things first: This came out on Friday afternoon, which is usually the dumping ground for news that people want to bury. Do you think that if the Texas Secretary of State, a man appointed by Greg Abbott, had credible evidence of thousands of people voting illegally, this is how and when he would have announced it? Yeah, me neither.
Second, note the sentence that contains “about 58,000 individuals cast a ballot in one or more elections from 1996 to 2018”. That’s 23 years’ worth of elections. This doesn’t say 58,000 people last year – which, even if it did, would be about 0.7% of all votes cast. The average number per year is about 2,500, and that’s before we consider the possibility of false postives.
Why might there be false positives? See that line about “WEAK” matches. There’s likely to be a bunch of false positives based on the match criteria, which is mostly going to be name and county. Lots of people have the same name. Right here in Houston is another woman with the same name as my wife. We know all about her because we’ve gotten phone calls for years from creditors trying to track her down. That’s why the call from the SOS is for counties to look into the possibility that there may be non-citizens among the names, not for them to be removed immediately.
And finally, there’s the fact that despite DPS’ claims about this data being current, there’s no process to change one’s citizenship status with DPS if and when one gets naturalized at a later date. Some people have already spoken up on Twitter to say they voted after becoming citizens and thus might be on that DPS list.
Bottom line, this is a big old nothingburger. The Republicans are screaming about it – I’ve gotten multiple press releases over the weekend from the Republican Party of Texas about this – but they know full well there’s diddly squat to this. I’ll put it to you this way: Six months or a year from now, how many prosecutions for illegal voting as a result of this advisory do you think Ken Paxton will announce? The over/under on that is maybe ten, and I’m being generous. Mother Jones has more.
None of the media articles I’ve seen have mentioned the role of the TEAM system, which is the central component of the SOS management of voter registrations. TEAM was designed and implemented following the passage of HAVA, and all Texas voter applications and record updates since then (circa 2005) have been vetted through TEAM.
Crafty way by the GOP to create fake talking points for fund raising.
The biggest place for abuse is the mail in voting. In my opinion. Maybe Republicans should worry about registering voters first. Best way to win an election outnumber the other side.
Republicans should worry about how awful they are, especially Harris County Republicans and their recent Holocaust sentiments.
10? I will take the under.
Pingback: Civil rights groups push back on bogus SOS letter – Off the Kuff