On Tuesday, the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas announced that they are filing suit against the Texas Secretary of State for wrongly flagging registered voters as possible “non-citizens” — without disclosing what criteria they are actually using to make this assessment.
The lawsuit, which is also joined by the Campaign Legal Center and the Mexican-American Legal Defense Fund, names Secretary of State John Scott, and seeks injunctive relief for Texas voters.
This lawsuit comes after a December report by the Texas Tribune, outlining the state’s previous disastrous efforts to hunt for non-citizens on the voter rolls.
“The state flagged nearly 100,000 voters for citizenship checks and set them up for possible criminal investigation based on flawed data that didn’t account for immigrants who gained citizenship,” wrote Alexa Ura. “After it became clear it was jeopardizing legitimate voter registrations, it was pulled into three federal lawsuits challenging its process. Former Secretary of State David Whitley lost his job amid the fallout. And the court battle ultimately forced the state to abandon the effort and rethink its approach to ensure naturalized citizens weren’t targeted.”
The secretary of state’s office is insisting that the new audit of the voter rolls is complying with a 2019 settlement that limited the number of voters they can investigate — but according to that report, problems have persisted.
“Scores of citizens are still being marked for review — and possible removal from the rolls,” noted the report. “Registrars in some of the state’s largest counties have found that a sizable number of voters labeled possible noncitizens actually filled out their voter registration cards at their naturalization ceremonies. In at least a few cases, the state flagged voters who were born in the U.S.”
This comes amid other renewed GOP efforts to restrict the voting process in Texas. Lawmakers passed a broad package of cutbacks to voting access in 2021 making it far harder to cast an absentee ballot, and Republicans are attempting to recruit thousands of volunteers to police Black and Hispanic polling places.