AUSTIN, Texas — The state’s election director told lawmakers Monday that she’s seen no anomalies in Texas voter rolls ahead of the November election.
“We have strong, clean voter rolls,” Christina Adkins, the Director of Elections for the Texas Secretary of State’s Office, said during an interim hearing of the Texas House of Representatives Elections Committee.
During questions from both Republican and Democratic lawmakers about whether noncitizens are registered to vote, Adkins replied that her office uses weekly data from the Texas Department of Public Safety to verify voter citizenship.
“If somebody identifies in that transaction that they are not a U.S. citizen and provides the corresponding paperwork to show that they’re not a U.S. citizen and those individuals were previously registered ... We send that information to our counties for investigation,” Adkins said.
The Texas Secretary of State’s Office website also shares county data on canceled voter registrations.
“We look at that data pretty regularly to look for potential issues or anomalies,” Adkins said. “We have not seen any unusual activity. Everything has been consistent with what it has been for the last few years.”
Adkins said she’s talking with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice about getting more data on people on probation with felony convictions. A convicted felon in Texas isn't eligible to vote again until after they've served their full sentence, including any probation.
Earlier Monday, Gov. Greg Abbott announced the removal of 1.1 million names from Texas voter rolls. He says those include 134,000 people who moved away, 457,000 people who died and more than 528,000 people who never updated their voter registration and didn’t vote during the last two federal election cycles.
Jennifer Doinoff, the Hays County Elections Administrator, was also invited to testify at Monday’s hearing.
“Emerging issues in elections – boy, this is what keeps us up at night,” Doinoff said, referring to one of Monday’s agenda items.
Doinoff shared concerns about the difficulty of finding polling sites under state guidelines and protecting poll workers’ personal information from public information requests.
She hopes to see more law enforcement training on election law.
“The last thing we want to happen is to have a peace officer roll up to a polling location and give wrong information, and that happened in our county,” Doinoff said. “It’s happened in other counties.”
A big focus of Monday’s hearing was also the Texas Secretary of State’s audit into Harris County’s elections from 2021 and 2022.
Adkins testified that Harris County’s elections chief, County Clerk Teneshia Hudspeth, who did not run those previous elections, has fixed issues that included paper ballot shortages and equipment problems.
Adkins also said the four counties randomly chosen for the state’s next election audit are Bell, Brazoria, Real and Val Verde.
Oct. 7 is the deadline for Texans to register to vote in the Nov. 5 election. The 89th Texas Legislature reconvenes Jan. 14, 2025.