This week, Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced that since 2021 and the passage of Senate Bill 1—a controversial law that is still undergoing legal challenges—the state has purged more than 1.1 million people from voter rolls. As we discussed in our Recommendations for Improving Election Data Transparency report, maintaining voter files is critical to election administration. In most states, voters must register to vote and have active profiles on the state’s voter rolls to be able to vote. Voter file maintenance is a routine process and election administrators remove voters from registration lists for a myriad of reasons—but this massive purge in Texas raises alarms.
According to Governor Abbott, 463,000 of the 1 million voters who have been removed since 2021 were those on the “suspense list,” or voters whose addresses are unknown to county election offices. Most often, this means that mailers sent to these voters to confirm their addresses by election administrators were returned as undeliverable. However, science suggests that mailers alone are insufficient to effectively notify voters of pending registration cancellations. In Texas, suspended voters who remain on voter rolls are legally permitted to vote after filling out a statement of residence form or casting a provisional ballot. However, since Texas has removed suspended voters from rolls, if they try to vote on election day without re-registering, these purged voters will be turned away.
Over 65,000 voters were removed for failing to respond to a notice of examination, or a letter from the Secretary of State informing them that their registration status was being examined on the basis that they were not a citizen, under 18, were convicted of a felony, or were determined by a judge to be mentally incapacitated. Where do these notices of examinations come from? It could be other voters. In Texas, private individuals who are registered to vote are permitted to challenge the eligibility status of any other voter who lives in their county. To issue a challenge, however, the individual must sign a sworn statement that they have firsthand knowledge about a person’s ineligibility, and intentionally including any “misleading” information is a misdemeanor.
The organizations behind mass voter purges
This flood of challenges to election offices wasn’t just a series of coincidences. Earlier this month, the Texas Tribune reported that conservative groups “targeted tens of thousands of Texans over their eligibility to vote.” True the Vote, a conservative organization in Houston, is leading the charge, not just in Texas but also in other states like Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania.
The conservative group United Sovereign Americans filed a lawsuit against Pennsylvania’s voter rolls in June, the group claiming to have identified over 3 million errors in voter’s registration records. Election officials argue that the Pennsylvania suit fundamentally misunderstands how voting systems operate. Moreover, many of the challenges in the lawsuit came from another organization, Audit the Vote PA, which has a record of making inaccurate statements about voter rolls. This isn’t the only lawsuit filed by United Sovereign, but part of an intentional nationwide strategy: the organization has filed similar legal challenges in Maryland and is expected to bring suits in California, Ohio, Illinois, and other states in the coming months.
Activist groups in Michigan are accusing election officials of improper maintenance and are targeting voters in Democratic areas as well as “lower income, immigrants, and students.” In Waterford County, a suburb of Detroit, a local county clerk removed 1,000 voters after facing pressure from a conservative group. Fortunately, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson ordered voters to be reinstated before the primary took place. Unfortunately, attempts by conservative groups to incite aggressive voter purges in Michigan are nothing new—similar lawsuits failed in Michigan in 2019 and 2021.
To help these lawsuits, various conservative activist groups are banding together to teach supporters about how to use Eagle AI, a software program that compiles lists of voter records for activists to challenge. In Florida, activists using such techniques sent a list of about 10,000 voters to an election official who forwarded the list to administrators and told them to “take action.” True the Vote is using an online tool, IV3, that matches public voter data with change of address records from the US Postal Service. However, that postal data is outdated and unreliable and, at the beginning of the year, a federal judge in Georgia said the True the Vote’s 2020 list of voter challenges “lacked credibility” and “verges on recklessness.”
Texas election officials say that most of these challenges are filed against voters who have already been flagged through the process of routine maintenance. While there are legal protections in place to prevent the automatic removal of challenged registrations, election officials are required to investigate every challenge. Experts argue that these lawsuits are a “legal long shot” but serve their intended purpose—to gum up election administration and make people question the integrity of elections.
What you can do
First, make sure you can vote in November! You can use your state government website or visit Vote.org to check if you are registered to vote. Reach out to people in your community and suggest they check on their registration status, too—some people might be struck from the voter rolls without even realizing it. You can go here to see when the registration deadline is in your state.
You can also read more about the issue of election data transparency, including voter file maintenance, in our fact sheet and policy report. Building a healthy democracy doesn’t end on November 5—it must be an ongoing effort.