Hard to keep track of them all.
Still the only voter ID anyone should need
The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) and other sued Thursday to stop a purge of Texas’ voter rolls that the Latino civil rights group and its allies say is discriminatory toward naturalized citizens.
The suit, filed in State District Court in Austin, names Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson as well as Brazoria, Collin, Dallas and Denton counties as defendants. Others joining LULAC as plaintiffs include Texas LULAC, LULAC Council 102 and voting rights group Common Cause.
The groups’ petition asserts that Texas’ reliance on the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program to remove potential “noncitizen” voters from the rolls violates the National Voter Registration Act’s prohibition on uniform and non-discriminatory voter list maintenance.
Last year, the state used the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services’ (USCIS) Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system to conduct what LULAC and its co-plaintiffs argue is an illegal voter purge.
However, Alicia Pierce, a spokewoman for the Secretary of State, told the Tribune that the Secretary of State’s office hadn’t reviewed SAVE’s flagged voters for citizenship before distributing the lists because it “isn’t an investigative agency.”
An investigation by the Texas Tribune and ProPublica shows that the system meant to identify noncitizens frequently flags foreign-born U.S. citizens in error.
According to the news outlets’ investigation, errors in the experimental implementation have been widespread, involving at least 87 voters across 29 Texas counties — and local officials suspect there are more.
“I really find no merit in any of this,” Bobby Gonzalez, the elections administrator in Duval County, told the Tribune. SAVE flagged three voters in Gonzalez’s South Texas county, all of whom turned out to be citizens.
Studies have consistently shown that noncitizens rarely register to vote and make up less than 0.01% of registered voters. Nonetheless, Trump and other right-wing allies have peddled a narrative that Democrats have allowed “millions” of illegal immigrants into the country so they can bolster their voting base.
The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law maintains that conspiracy theories of noncitizen voters have the potential to do real harm by jeopardizing the voting rights of eligible voters.
See here for a bit of background and past history. What we know is that while voter registration databases need regular maintenance, mass update attempts like these, even when done in good faith by caring and competent actors, often run into problems because databases are messy and more names and birth dates are duplicated than you might think. It’s just often hard to be sure that this John Q. Voter is the one you want, and failing to double- and triple-check that it is can lead to the wrong person being affected. Plus, with citizenship and immigration matters, statuses can and do change before updates can be made in relevant systems, thus providing data that is false now but will be accurate later if you just give it enough time.
And all that, as noted, is when everyone involved is trying their best to do the right thing, which the malevolent clowns in the Trump administration and all of the voter suppression brigade very much are not. So we need lawsuits to try to at least slow things down, and sometimes get them to stop or at least scale back. And that’s where we are here. Here’s more from the Campaign Legal Center and its partners, and LULAC, and the Texas Tribune.