Texas didn’t just use massively flawed data in an attempted voter purge. It used massively flawed data that it knew was massively flawed and it did so at the urging of Gov. Greg Abbott’s office.
Early in 2019, Texas officials announced that they’d found nearly 100,000 noncitizens on the state’s voter rolls. Except, it turns out, that claim was based entirely on having found people on the voter rolls whose driver’s licenses listed them as noncitizens … and in the years between getting their licenses and registering to vote, most had become naturalized citizens.
Emails made public Tuesday as part of a lawsuit over the botched purge show that it started before the 2018 elections. In May of that year, the Department of Public Safety sent the secretary of state’s office the driver’s license information. In late August, Department of Public Safety officials said in internal emails that “The governor is interested in getting the information as soon as possible.” The secretary of state’s office, though, was hesitating, because officials there knew the driver’s license data wasn’t enough. They wanted the information needed to run the names on the driver’s license list against a Department of Homeland Security database to be sure that the voters targeted for purging were actually noncitizens who couldn’t legally vote.
Yet somehow, between late August and January, the secretary of state’s office gave up on that whole “use an accurate list to be sure you’re not targeting tens of thousands of citizens in a voter purge” thing and just went ahead with the driver’s license data. And Gov. Abbott’s office claims that “This is patently false. Neither the Governor, nor the Governor’s office had spoken with DPS until after the issue surfaced,” so apparently we’re to believe that, on top of everything else, Department of Public Safety officials imagined Abbott’s interest in the issue.
Texas, meanwhile, is refusing to comply with a request for information on the incident from the House Oversight Committee.