No one should be surprised by this.
Still the only voter ID anyone should need
Fourteen Texas voters caught up in the secretary of state’s botched review of the voter rolls for supposed noncitizens had their registrations canceled but have since been reinstated, state officials told a federal judge Friday.
The Texas Attorney General’s Office informed the San Antonio court judge as part of the ongoing litigation over the state’s error-riddled review, through which almost 100,000 individuals were marked as possible noncitizens. Seven counties marked the voting registration of 14 individuals as canceled because the voters had failed to respond to letters that demanded they prove their citizenship.
Counties were canceling voters’ registrations as recently as Wednesday — well after federal District Judge Fred Biery halted the review effort on Feb. 27 and ordered local officials to hold off on removing any voters from the voter rolls without his approval.
The cancellations affected voters in Coke, DeWitt, Matagorda, Montague, Victoria, Willacy and Zavala counties.
In some cases, voters hit the 30-day deadline they were given to provide their local voter registrar with proof that they are U.S. citizens and therefore eligible to vote, according to a review by the secretary of state’s office. Two voters in DeWitt County were canceled on Feb. 4 before the end of that 30-day period because their notices were returned as undeliverable. In Willacy County, officials “mistakenly” removed an individual from the voter rolls on Feb. 20 before the end of that period.
See here for some background. You may say, it’s only fourteen voters and they’ve all been reinstated, so what’s the harm? I say none of this should have happened in the first place, and the fact that it did shows that when all is said and done there will remain a substantial risk of valid registered voters being disenfranchised despite having done nothing wrong. Our state leaders are dedicated to the point of zealotry to their self-appointed mission of ensuring that no illegal votes ever get cast. Should they not be equally concerned about illegal removals from the voter rolls?
I don’t care what Steve McCraw says, the bottom line is this is the Secretary of State’s fault. David Whitley set this ball in motion, and every resulting screwup is on him. All of us deserve a Secretary of State with a much higher level of basic competence than what Whitley has demonstrated.