AUSTIN, Texas — It seems some of the 95,000 people who were flagged for possibly registering to vote illegally, are in fact citizens.
Election officials in Travis and Williamson counties tell KVUE that staff from the Secretary of State's Office called Tuesday and alerted them to the error. On Wednesday, a Williamson County official said they've found that more than half of the names on their list of possible non-citizen registered voters are actually citizens. Travis County has been able to remove 634 names from the list they received of potential voter fraud cases.
On Friday, Jan. 25, after a year-long investigation the Texas Secretary of State sent an advisory to counties stating the office compiled a list of people who may have registered to vote illegally. Staff found approximately 95,000 names of people who told DPS they were not citizens at the time they applied for a Driver's License or Identification Card. Those same people also had voter registration cards. The Secretary of State said among those people, about 58,000 of them voted in at least one election.
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The advisory stated a list of names would be sent to each county for local officials to investigate. Williamson County received its list over the weekend with 2,033 names. Travis County officials received a list Monday with 4,547 names.
Tuesday, Secretary of State office staff called counties to inform them of a mistake in the list.
On Wednesday, KVUE learned that more than half of the 2,033 names on the Williamson County list of possible non-citizen registered voters were removed, according to Chris Davis, a Williamson County elections administrator.
A Travis County official has confirmed to KVUE they have removed 634 names from the list received by the Secretary of State.
According to Travis County leaders, they were told there are two categories of people whose names shouldn’t be on the list.
The first category of people whose names need to be removed is people who registered to vote when they got their Driver’s License. When that happens, the Secretary of State's Office verifies if the person is eligible to vote, then sends their information to the county. So some people who were validated as citizens are on the list of 95,000.
Travis County leaders say once these names are taken off the list, it will bring the number down significantly.
The other category of names on the list that shouldn't be are people who were not citizens when they got a Driver’s License, but later became naturalized citizens and afterward, lawfully registered to vote.
The Secretary of State's Office released the following statement about the names wrongfully appearing on the list:
“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.”
County leaders say the lists they were given from the state are in a text file, not a spreadsheet, so going through the list to try and remove names is taking quite some time.