Thousands of North Texas Voter Registrations Challenged by Just a Few People

County officials and experts say a few people in North Texas are responsible for challenging thousands of voter registrations, adding to the workload of election staff who already regularly update voter rolls.

Similar challenges are being addressed throughout the state And all over the country. And experts say a driving force behind many of those challenges is True the Vote, a conservative nonprofit based in Houston that has sold what many describe as unfounded theories about election fraudIt's true that Vote has taken the lead in “cleaning” the voter rolls, though election officials say this is already happening every day.

It is true that Vote did not respond to requests for comment.

The question of whether people have the right to vote played a major role in this year's presidential election season, with many supporters of former President Donald Trump aligning themselves with the question. his claims that millions of people voted illegally.

In Texas, registered voters can contest voter registrations in the same provinceAnd they use online tools that compare voter rolls with other public data to file thousands of objections at once.

In Tarrant County, 11 people filed more than 15,000 challenges this year, according to data obtained by KERA through a public records request. More than half of those challenges came from a single person.

County election officials say the challengers are relying on outdated information — and that nearly all of the cases they’ve flagged have been resolved. For example, if someone’s address appears to have changed, county officials say it’s likely efforts are already underway to confirm where they live.

“Maintaining the voter rolls is a daily activity in our office anyway,” said Tarrant County Elections Administrator Clint Ludwig.

People are not simply removed from the list because their registration is disputed. However, according to experts, it does create extra work.

Debunked claims of widespread election fraud are the basis for these massive challenges, said Clint Swift, a data scientist who studies the issue for the non-profit Protect democracy.

“The story is basically that we need to doubt our elections,” he said.

Dealing with thousands of challenges

In August, Republican Governor Greg Abbott announced that one million people have been removed from Texas voter rolls since 2021.

“Election integrity is essential to our democracy,” Abbott said in a statement“I signed the strongest election laws in the country to protect the right to vote and crack down on illegal voting.”

Removing people from the voter rolls is not an indication of illegal voting. More than half of the people Abbott named were either deceased or confirmed they had moved.

And election officials had flagged the voting status for almost everyone else. Simply put, they had to verify their current address to vote again.

Cleanup of voter rolls is nothing new. It is required by federal lawAccording to the Electoral Council, polling stations can better prepare for elections if the list of registered voters is accurate. U.S. Commission on Election Assistance.

For example, employees in Tarrant County receive continuous information about deaths and address changes.

“It's a lot of stuff,” Ludwig said.

The voter rolls are never static, Denton County Elections Administrator Frank Phillips said recently told the Denton Record-Chronicle.

“If I were to print out a voter registration database for you this morning, it would not be the same voter registration database that was printed out this afternoon,” he said.

True the Vote's IV3 web app invites people to compare voter rolls with other publicly available data, such as the National Change of Address Database is operated by the US Postal Service, Swift said.

In Denton County, IV3 users were responsible for 17,000 voter registration problems, Phillips said.

Ludwig from Tarrant County wasn't sure if the 15,000 challenged voters in his county were from IV3, but he said many of those challenged used the same wording.

In addition to regular maintenance, election offices must also be regularly voter registration cards every odd year.

If the address is incorrect or if the person has moved, the card will be returned to the provincial election office. and that voter is placed on the waiting listt, said Ludwig.

Being on the suspension list does not mean you are not allowed to vote. Election workers are required to send an address confirmation message. If someone does not respond to a message, they can report their residence at the polls.

By the end of 2023, Tarrant County had mailed out nearly 1.3 million voter registration cards as part of its odd-year rollup.

Then came January and the flood of voter registration problems, Ludwig said.

“We're making people more exciting, and now we're getting all these challenges from people that we've already made exciting,” he said.

Dallas County received 2,000 to 3,000 challenges this summer, Dallas County Voter Registration Manager Rivelino Lopez said. The vast majority were already pending or canceled.

The same was true in Collin County, said Deputy Elections Administrator Kaleb Breaux. His office has received about 13,000 challenges — more than 12,000 from one person.

“About 80 to 85 percent of the voters that they challenge, there's already been action taken on that voter's voting record. By that I mean that voter's voting record has already been called into question,” Breaux said.

The high percentage of redundant challenges is an indication that True the Vote's data files are outdated, Phillips said.

Election workers in Collin County usually only need to run a “quick search” to confirm that a contested person is already on their department’s radar, Breaux said.

The searches are mounting. In Tarrant County, Ludwig has a total staff of 43 people, he said.

“My voter registration staff is obviously not very large,” Ludwig said. “It takes a long time to process all of this.”

People aren't kicked off the list because they're challenged. There's a process that election offices have to follow, said Chris McGinn, executive director of the Association of County Election Officials of Texas.

“They don't just take someone's word for it if he just names them,” he said.

If someone is challenged, he is treated as someone whose voter registration card has been returned. The election office sends him an address confirmation message and if he does not respond, he is placed on the suspense list.

People in suspense will not be removed from the voter rolls unless they fail to respond to an address confirmation message and do not vote in the next two federal general elections.

Federal law also prevents people from being removed from voter rolls in the 90 days before an election, except under certain circumstances, such as a felony conviction or death.

What makes challenges easier?

According to Swift, the challenges in voter registration date back to a time before election offices had comprehensive digital data.

People could go to the polling station and explain, “My son went to college, or he moved to XYZ place, or my parents died,” he said.

But in a world of electronic registration, online tools like IV3 make it easier for people to object en masse to voter registrations.

“They're matching that to see if any of the people who are on the voter rolls have filed for a change of address, which is most common,” Swift said. “They can also match to out-of-state voter files.”

The data IV3 collects is the same data that election offices have access to, but without unique identifiers such as social security numbers, Swift explains.

This means that an IV3 user thinks he is looking at one person with two different addresses, but in reality he is looking at two different people with the same name living in different places.

“We can't differentiate between one John Smith in Texas and another, or between one John Smith in Texas and another in Arizona,” Swift said.

Susan Valliant lives in Arlington and works as a Chairman of the Tarrant County GOP constituency. This year, she has contested 41 voter registrations and she said she used IV3 to do so.

“They just have a whole list of names whose addresses no longer match,” she said.

Valliant believes that the voter lists are “so dirty” and that leaving people on them could lead to voter impersonation – such as someone using a deceased person’s ID card to vote under that deceased person’s name.

Election fraud is rareand the issue of voter impersonation is “almost non-existent,” according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

In 2014 a Washington Post Analysis found 31 “credible” cases of voter impersonation since 2000 — and even that is likely an overestimate, the author wrote.

Some see these major challenges to voter registration as a form of voter intimidation. In Georgia, a voting rights group has sued True the Vote, alleging the organization violated the Voting Rights Act by filing an objection hundreds of thousands of voter registrations.

In January, U.S. District Judge Steve Jones ruled that True the Vote's actions did not amount to illegal voter intimidationbut he criticized the group.

“In reaching this conclusion, the court in no way condones TTV's actions that enabled it to file a large number of seemingly frivolous objections,” Jones wrote in his opinion.

It is true that Vote's list is “completely unreliable” and “borders on recklessness,” he wrote.

Texas could change the rules to prevent mass challenges, Swift said. He pointed to Minnesota, where people can only challenge one voter at a time.

The state could also relax requirements for challenges, he said.

In Texas, a challenger must have “personal knowledge” of the person he is challenging, but the definition of personal knowledge is fluid, said Breaux of Collin County.

“It really depends on what county you ask, whether they consider this personal knowledge,” he said. “Some counties do. Some county attorneys have advised the election departments that it is personal knowledge. Some don't. As an election department, we're kind of in the middle.”

Valliant, the GOP precinct chairman who challenged voter registrations in Tarrant County, said citizens should have the right to file mass appeals.

“If there is a question that needs to be answered, for example if that person no longer lives in that location, then of course that needs to be challenged,” she said.

KERA reporter Marina Trahan Martinez contributed to this report.

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Have a tip? Email Caroline Love at clove@kera.org.

Caroline Love is a Report for America corps member for KERA News.

KERA News is made possible by the generosity of our members. If you find this reporting valuable, please consider make a tax-deductible donation today. Thank you.