How Texas election officials are dealing with a flood of challenges to voter registrations

Maria Crane // The Texas Tribune County election departments across Texas are trying to reassure voters amid a flood of formal challenges questioning whether their registrations are valid. Votebeat reports on the situation and what state and federal protections are in place. The challenges, filed by conservative groups and individual activists, seek to remove tens of thousands of voters from the rolls on the grounds that they don’t live in the county, are not citizens, or have died. Election officials say the challenges are complicating the work they’re already doing to keep their voter rolls updated. They want voters to know that they’re following state and federal laws that protect voters from being improperly removed from the rolls if someone questions their eligibility. Multiple election officials told Votebeat that the majority of the challenges they’ve received are against voters whose status their offices had already flagged through their daily voter list maintenance. In a few cases, the challenges start a process that could lead to careful removal of voters after the November election. “Even though a challenge is filed, doesn’t mean that you will be automatically dropped,” said Trudy Hancock, the Brazos County elections administrator. “There is a process in place to protect the voter who’s been challenged.” At this point in the election cycle, voters aren’t at risk of being dropped from the rolls because of a challenge. Under federal law, election officials can’t cancel a voter’s registration in the period 90 days ahead of Election Day, except for voters who voluntarily cancel their registration or who are convicted of a felony. Still, election officials are required to process the voter eligibility challenges they receive, and act on valid ones. Election administrators in Collin, Travis, Hays, Brazos, Tarrant, and Denton counties and others have been sifting through large volumes of these, which they began receiving in June, targeting thousands of voters. The large-scale challenge effort is being led by Houston-based right-wing group True the Vote, which has been working for years to purge the rolls of voters it perceives as ineligible ahead of the November presidential election. It’s part of a wave of challenges aimed at voters in several states, including such battlegrounds as Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania. The group is using an online tool called IV3 that matches voter data with change-of-address records from the U.S. Postal Service. Activists relying on that tool have been delivering stacks of challenges to election offices, or emailing election administrators with spreadsheets listing voters’ names. True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht did not respond to Votebeat’s request for comment. The effort has drawn criticism from election officials, courts, and voting-rights advocates. For one thing, they say, the postal database that True the Vote relies on is outdated and not a reliable source for determining voter eligibility. For another, they say, the effort gives credence to false claims that large numbers of people are voting illegally by exploiting deficiencies in registration records. A federal judge in Georgia found this year that True the Vote’s 2020 list of voters to challenge “utterly lacked reliability” and “verges on recklessness.” “The Court has heard no testimony and seen no evidence of any significant quality control efforts, or any expertise guiding the data process,” he wrote. Such efforts to challenge voters’ eligibility en masse are “inadequate to address voter eligibility by themselves and also redundant to the work already done by election officials,” according to research on the rise of mass voter challenges by Protect Democracy, a national nonpartisan group promoting fair elections and anti-authoritarian policies. The report added: “These efforts are based on unsubstantiated and false claims that the rolls are replete with dead voters, voters registered in other locations, and, most recently, noncitizens. Furthermore, they falsely imply that any inaccuracy in the voter rolls equates to or otherwise enables voter fraud. In reality, voter registration rolls are being continuously updated by election officials.” Most challenges are over residency questions The numbers are significant. In Travis County, one person has challenged the registrations of 12,000 people. In Brazos, a group of activists has challenged more than 1,000. Collin, Hays, and Tarrant counties each have seen challenges to the eligibility of more than 10,000 voters, officials told Votebeat. “The vast majority of them are challenging the residence of a registered voter,” said Bruce Sherbet, Collin County elections administrator. He added that other challenges included voters who may have listed a commercial address as their residence and voters who may have died. But Sherbet said his office has already taken action on most of the residency-based challenges through routine voter list maintenance, with some voters being placed on a “suspense” list until they confirm their address. A voter is placed on the suspense list when the county registrar’s office receives information that the voter no longer lives at that location. Election officials will send a notice to the voter asking them to update their registration information. If a voter stays on the suspense list for two federal general election cycles without casting a ballot or taking action to confirm their address, their registration is canceled. A voter who is on the suspense list can still vote. They can update their voter registration information before the voter registration deadline, which this year is Oct. 7. Or even at the polls, voters on the list can cast a ballot after filling out a Statement of Residence form. Until last year, Texas election officials had another resource to help them keep their voter rolls clean. The Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, served as a national clearinghouse for data about Texas voters who had moved or died, and helped state officials flag names for counties to investigate. ERIC data from June 2022 helped Texas identify 100,000 voters registered in multiple counties and another 100,000 voters registered in other states. But Texas ended its participation in ERIC, following a push by state Republican leaders responding to election conspiracy theories. Other GOP-led states also dropped out of ERIC in the period between 2022 and 2023. Officials with the Texas Secretary of State’s office last year said that instead of ERIC, they would try to obtain the data directly from state and federal agencies, and from other states. Texas Secretary of State officials declined to comment on whether the withdrawal from ERIC has had an effect on the volume of eligibility challenges counties are receiving. Checking each challenge has taken a lot of time and resources for some election officials in the midst of planning for the presidential election. In Brazos County, for instance, Hancock has spent weeks responding to a conservative group that has demanded that voters listed in its challenges be removed from the rolls. Hancock says it’s not as simple as that. Some registrations that may seem suspicious based on a limited data set may be perfectly legitimate. Many voters have the same name and even the same date of birth; some voters who don’t have a permanent address, such as someone who is homeless, can list an alternative address on their registration. In other cases, Hancock says, the group is also questioning voters on the rolls who haven’t voted in some time. “I can’t just take them off because they don’t vote,” Hancock said, adding she has no legal authority to do so. She also put together a presentation in July for county commissioners and the public to clarify how her office is handling the challenges she’s received What Texas laws say about voter registration challenges Texas doesn’t make it easy to get a voter disqualified through a challenge. Under state law, a voter can challenge another voter’s registration from their own county by submitting a sworn and notarized statement that identifies the targeted voter and the basis for challenging their eligibility. The sworn statement has to be based on the challenger’s “personal knowledge.” According to the Texas Secretary of State, a sworn statement can be used to challenge multiple voters. Some election officials said most challenges they receive don’t meet the basic requirements to be valid. John Oldham, the Fort Bend County elections administrator, told Votebeat he received nearly 400 challenges. Most lacked a sworn statement. And if the list of voters being challenged is derived from the USPS change-of-address database, Oldham said, “then to me that does not constitute ‘personal knowledge.'” According to a Texas Secretary of State advisory to county officials, if a voter registrar receives a valid challenge based on residence–for example, if the voter is registered at 100 Main Street, and the challenge alleges that the voter doesn’t live there–then the registrar will send the challenged voter a notice of address confirmation. The law says that the registrar can’t send an address confirmation notice for a challenge filed within 75 days before the November election, so this year, the deadline was Aug. 22. For challenges based on something other than residence, such as citizenship, the registrar has to hold a hearing and give notice to both the challenger and the challenged voter. Based on evidence presented at the hearing, the registrar decides whether to uphold or cancel the voter’s registration, the advisory says. Some election officials say they’re concerned about the potentially intimidating effect that an address confirmation or hearing notice can have, and the added burdens it can place on voters who are otherwise eligible. “No question it can be scary for a voter to receive any type of notice, even if it’s a notice of change of address,” said Chris Davis, the voter registration director in Travis County. “If we send a change of address notice, and we don’t hear back, the voter is put on suspense, but what if that notice got lost in the mail? That’s why we’re being really careful. A voter getting a confirmation notice that they need to fill out and send back is still a burden on them.” Some election officials are now taking additional steps to help voters make sure their registration is up to date ahead of November. In Hays County, election administrator Jennifer Doinoff is working with her staff to create a video that can direct voters on how they can check the status of their voter registration and more. “We also want voters to know what they can do to help us clean our voter rolls,” Doinoff said. “If they move, we want to show them how they can update their information. If someone in their family has died, we want to show them the forms they can fill out, and also what they can do when they receive their voter registration card in the mail.” The deadline to register to vote is Oct. 7. Texas voters can check their voter registration status at votetexas.gov or by calling their local voter registrar. You can find a list of county voter registrars here. This story was produced by Votebeat and reviewed and distributed by Stacker Media.