Texas Follows Florida Voter Purge Push For Immigration Documents

By Raisa Camargo, Voxxi

Texas joined the ranks of at least a dozen other states across the country in an attempt to access immigration databases to purge non-citizen voters from the voter rolls in time for November’s election.

Secretary of State Esperanza “Hope” Andrade requested on Wednesday access to a federal database containing more than 100 million immigration records in a letter she sent to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

This comes in light of an embattled courtroom fight last week over the constitutionality of the controversial Texas voter ID law that requires voters to have specific identification. During closing arguments, the Texas State Attorney said the methodology used in the voter database is “hopelessly flawed” and not a valid process to protect against fraudulent cases. Critics say the Texas voter id law — like the voter purge — is an attempt by Republican legislators to suppress Latino and Black votes months before the presidential election.

Texas Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, chairman of the Mexican American Legislative Caucus (MALC), said Republicans are driving Texas “off the constitutional cliff.”

“If the state has no confidence in its own data and cannot even tell us an accurate number of who does and does not have the necessary identification to vote, what are we to expect when state and federal datasets are to be matched for the sake of purging the voter rolls?” said Fischer in a statement.

More than 300,000 valid voters were notified they could be removed from Texas rolls from November 2008 to November 2010. The most common reason was because they were mistaken for someone else or failed to receive or respond to generic form letters, according to an analysis by the Houston Chronicle.

One in 10 Americans lack the necessary government-issued photo IDs that now are required in Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Sixteen percent of Hispanics don’t have the required ID.

The voter purge is the latest line of defense from GOP-controlled state legislatures, who say they want to help reduce “vulnerability” by verifying the citizenship of people on the voter rolls.

DHS granted Florida last week permission to compare immigration database records. Elections leaders in Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, New Mexico, Ohio and Utah have requested similar permission. Five of the states – Colorado, Iowa, Michigan, New Mexico and Ohio – are considered battleground for the presidential election.

“No one is arguing that non-citizens should be voting in our elections. However, given the complications of working with incomplete state and federal datasets, we are concerned that many Texas voters may be mistakenly purged from the voter rolls,” he said in a statement. “We should be cautious when every Texan’s constitutional right to vote is at risk.”

MALC will seek voting rights counsel and litigation team to discuss Texas’ utilization of the federal database, its proposed methodology for matching names, and all procedures that will be put in place to prevent the disenfranchisement of any eligible voter, the release said.

This article was first published in Voxxi.

Raisa Camargo is a staff writer at Voxxi.