Still the only voter ID anyone should need
The list of missteps in the Texas secretary of state’s review of the voter rolls for supposed noncitizens grew again Monday, when the office inadvertently added additional people to its already flawed list of voters flagged for citizenship checks.
Blaming a vendor for the mix-up, a spokesman for the secretary of state’s office confirmed new names were sent to certain counties for possible investigation because of a technical error. The mistake occurred while state election officials were analyzing new data from the Texas Department of Public Safety.
As with the state’s initial review of previous years’ data, the secretary of state obtained a list of individuals who had visited DPS offices during January and February and indicated they were not U.S. citizens. The goal was to match those names with individuals on the state’s voter rolls and eventually send that list of names to counties for possible investigations.
But the secretary of state’s office was not ready to send out those lists when some counties received them Monday.
“Just like we told the counties and the court last week, this list maintenance process is still on pause,” said the office’s spokesman, Sam Taylor. “The test data that some counties had mistakenly received earlier today was the result of an issue with our vendor, which we immediately addressed with our vendor and the counties.”
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Two counties confirmed to The Texas Tribune they had received the test dataset, which appeared to be riddled with the same errors in the state’s original list. Travis County received 146 names on Monday, but a “substantial number” had proved their citizenship when they registered to vote at DPS, said Bruce Elfant, who oversees the voter rolls in Travis County.
Travis County officials did not finish reviewing the Monday list because they got a call from the secretary of state’s office indicating it was sent by mistake.
“They said they sent the list in error and that we should disregard it,” Elfant said.
Williamson County also received a list Monday, only to be later told that “it was a mistake that shouldn’t have gone out,” said Chris Davis, the county’s election administrator.
Late on Monday, Keith Ingram — the chief of the secretary of state’s elections division — emailed county election officials asking them to “completely disregard the file” they received Monday.
The secretary of state’s mistake comes the same day lawyers with the attorney general’s office indicated in federal court that the secretary of state’s office was still working on the process for sending out the monthly lists.
See here for the whole saga. At least there’s a new villain for David Whitley’s apologists to blame. I don’t even know what else there is to say about this, but I will presume that Whitley’s charm offensive on Senate Democrats is going swell.
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