AUSTIN, Texas — This week, there was more fallout over the list sent out by the Texas Secretary of State of people registered to vote whose citizenship status is being questioned.
Secretary David Whitley announced he would send a list out on Friday, January 25. Many counties got the lists over the weekend. By Tuesday, January 29, his office was calling elections officials across the state to say some people on the list are, in fact, citizens.
In Texas This Week, Ashley Goudeau sits down with Bruce Elfant, Travis County Tax Assessor-Collector and Voter Registrar, to discuss the latest developments.
Ashley Goudeau: First and foremost, the notice, the advisory that was sent to elected officials across Texas from the Secretary of State's Office. Talk to us about what exactly that advisory said.
Bruce Elfant: "Well, we received an advisory late Friday afternoon that we would be receiving a file from the Secretary of State over the weekend that would contain the names of people that they were concerned were not citizens who appeared on the voter roles."
Goudeau: And it got a lot of attention because this list was about 95,000 people in Texas. The Secretary of State's Office indicated that they believed about 58,000 of those people voted and it quickly, quickly turned political.
Elfant: "Well, we have some concerns about that. When you're talking about the integrity of our elections, we need to be very careful about that and it's absolutely justified that the State, if they have concerns about voters on our voter roles, send that to the election officials around the state. We need to investigate it and determine what the facts are, but to be, you know, suggesting that we have widespread voter fraud in Texas before we have the facts, I thought was premature and irresponsible."
Goudeau: And now when you got this notice initially, you said you questioned how this could even possibly be, right?
Elfant: "Well, sure, because the way the system works now is local registrars register voters, all that information is sent electronically to the Secretary of State's Office, they're the agency responsible for vetting these registration applications. 'Are they 18? Are they a resident? Have they cleared all of their felony convictions and paid their debt to society so they can get their rights back? And are they citizens?' They do the vetting. They turn around and send the files back to the counties; 'these are the ones you can put on the rolls, these are the questionable ones, do more research.' That's how it works. So, when I first saw this, I said, you know, 'How can so many people have gotten through the Secretary of State's vetting process?' So, we were concerned to begin with. And then Monday, when we got the list and started looking just at the first couple of pages we thought, you know, 'A lot of these have come from the Department of Public Safety. So, DPS is telling us that they're not citizens, but DPS sent them to us as eligible citizens.' And then we got the guidance on Tuesday that suggested we should take out the ones we received from DPS. We've done that, and there was over 600 that we've taken out to this point."
Goudeau: So, let's be clear about when we talk about coming from DPS. The way the Secretary of State's Office even made this list, to our understanding, is they took names that were on the voter rolls and compared them to names from DPS of people who were non-citizens when they got their driver's license.
Elfant: "Right, and that's a snapshot in time. People went and got their driver's license, they weren't citizens at that point. That's perfectly legal, you don't have to be a citizen in Texas to have a driver's license. But that's a snapshot in time. Scroll forward for a lot of these people who became citizens and then subsequently registered to vote. That's what we're trying to determine now is how many of those subsequently became citizens and shouldn't be on this list."
Goudeau: So, to your understanding, does DPS do anything to verify citizenship before they send those lists of potential voter registration cards to you all?
Elfant: "I do not know that."
Goudeau: And so, when we think about what safe guards are in place, what I think is kind-of interesting here and gets lost, is the Secretary of State sent out this list, but they're the ones who were supposed to catch it.
Elfant: "That's correct, that's correct. That's why so many election administrators around the state were so stunned that there could be this many that slipped through the State's vetting process."
Goudeau: Are you confident in the state's vetting process?
Elfant: "Not today, I'm not. I don't fully understand the state's vetting process, we haven't been briefed as to all that they do to vet them. But, hopefully, this is going to be a teaching moment for everyone and when we get past this, we will have a have a vetting process that the state and the counties can have confidence in."
Goudeau: You and other election officials from across the state have advocated for quite some time having an online voter registration system, saying that that could help catch some things. Talk to me about your thoughts on that now that all of this has happened.
Elfant: "I'm so glad you brought that up. Texas is one of 10 states that doesn't allow its citizens to register to vote online. What that means is that every application we receive in our office is paper. And on the voter registration deadline last October, our office received 40,000 applications in a single day that had to be read and transcribed and put in the system in a very short period of time to get ready for early voting. And if anyone thinks that we got every one of those cards right, we're able to read everybody's handwriting, that's just not possible. We do the best we can, but that is a wasteful, inefficient and inaccurate system. Arizona was the first state that had online voter registration. Seventy percent registered to vote online in Arizona, and the Pew Research Center came in and found that the people who registered electronically, their data was five times more accurate than the people who registered on a piece of paper. That makes all the sense in the world. Texas is not one of the states that allows its citizens to register online. It's costly, it's inefficient and it's inaccurate and it's so last century. And so, I'm hopeful that the Legislature -- so many of our leaders proclaim that we want to operate the state more like a business -- I hope they'll bring the voter registration process into the 21st century. What business would operate like this?"
Goudeau: What's interesting is while we're hoping for a bill like that to be filed, a bill was filed in the midst of all this information coming from the Secretary of State that would require a citizenship check. But isn't that something that should already be happening?
Elfant: "Well, that should be happening through the Secretary of State's vetting process already. There have been bills in the past that would require people when they register to vote to literally show the volunteer deputy registrar citizenship papers, and I don't think that's an appropriate way to go about this. The electronic vetting at the state level should be enough and appropriate."
Goudeau: When we talk about the integrity of elections, it's important to everyone no matter what side of the aisle you sit on or if you're in the middle. This is our democracy we're talking about. And, you know, I think there's always been this conversation that voter fraud is a problem. It's not quite as big of a problem as some make it to be though, right?
Elfant: "I mean, voter fraud is not non-existent, but it's so small. The number of cases of confirmed voter fraud in Texas is, you know, maybe in the dozens or in the hundreds certainly, for a long period of time. It's very small. I think the state -- well, until now -- I thought the state had done a good job in vetting this, and that was the reason that we have such low voter fraud. Now, I'm not sure. We'll have that conversation going forward. But confirmed cases of voter fraud are very small. It doesn't mean we don't need to be vigilant about it. We do. And anything that the state suggests that we can do at the local level to increase our awareness and our vigilance against voter fraud, we certainly want to do. We want to do together, and we want to do it in a thoughtful, methodical process. This one seemed to be rushed."
Goudeau: This investigation that the Secretary of State's office indicated has been going on for about a year. But we know that during the November election, there was some controversy in Travis County. A so-called media outlet, independent media, said they went into Travis County and had several elections officials, deputy registrars and such tell people that they could vote if they weren't citizens. Talk to me about that. How does that weigh into all of this?
Elfant: "I don't know a lot about it. I know it's being investigated. We're going to take any claim seriously. In that case, you have to consider the source and that source has not been particularly reliable in the past."
Goudeau: What does this say to those people -- because Travis County is one of the largest counties, you got the most people on your list. You guys, I know I've spoken with Williamson County officials, they say 'we're going to take our time, we're going to go through this list, figure out who really is questionable before we take action.' But that has not been the case in other parts of Texas. Some people are already receiving letters.
Elfant: "Well, I think it's so much more important to get this right than to get it fast. And I know I'm getting media calls everyday, 'Tell us what you've done, when are you going to be finished?' We're going to be finished when we're going to be finished. We've put out some guidance to the public about the steps that we're taking. It's tedious. We have to check each individual application, we're talking about 4,500. And we're going to take all the time we need to make sure that we've done this properly and that people can trust that what we've done is accurate."
Goudeau: Is there anything else you'd like to add about all of this?
Elfant: "We take voter fraud very seriously. Any allegation of voter fraud is something that we're going to take seriously. And we're going to take the time that we need, and we want the public to know that none of this is substantiated yet. If we find instances of voter fraud, we're going to be very aggressive in addressing it and at the end of the day, if we find that this is much ado about very little, we're going to let the public know that too."
The original advisory that was sent out from the Secretary of State's Office noted that the names on the list should be treated as "WEAK matches."
It's also worth noting a group of civil rights organizations sent a letter to the Secretary of State, asking him to rescind the list or risk legal action.
When asked about the calls made to elections officials this week, the Secretary of State's Office provided us with this statement:
“As part of the process of ensuring that no eligible voters are impacted by any list maintenance activity, we are continuing to provide information to the counties to assist them in verifying eligibility of Texas voters. This is to ensure that any registered voters who provided proof of citizenship at the time they registered to vote will not be required to provide proof of citizenship as part of the counties’ examination.”
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