On the last day to register to vote, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton requested federal data to confirm the citizen status of more than 450,000 of Texas’ registered voters.
Paxton on Monday sent a letter to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services requesting the data. According to The Texan, Paxton had sent a letter to Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson to help clean voter rolls of noncitizens in September.
According to KUT News, the group of 450,000 registered voters is made up of people that did not use a state-issued driver’s license or ID card when they registered to vote.
It is still unclear what Paxton will do if the federal government is unable to confirm the citizenship status of the voters, as the state is barred from removing people from the voter rolls in less than 90 days before a federal election.
This is one of Paxton’s latest attempts to find ineligible voters.
“Texans are increasingly concerned about the possibility of non-citizen voting, and I have a responsibility to uphold the integrity of our elections,” he said.
Paxton has been echoing the Republican discourse on the possibility of widespread election fraud, however, he has failed to provide evidence to support his claims. Moreover, scholars have expressed that there is no reason to believe that there is election fraud.
Bethany Albertson, a political scientist at UT Austin, told The Texas Newsroom that the “talk around voter fraud doesn’t match the reality.”
In an op-ed, Washington Post associate editor Karen Tumiulty wrote that “voter fraud is exceedingly rare,” but the impulse to undermine the election’s integrity is still very common. “Some of those most determined to undermine it are the people who claim to be the guardians,” she wrote.
In August, Gov. Greg Abbott said that Texas had removed over one million ineligible people from the Texas’ voter rolls. He said around 6,500 were noncitizens, less than 1%.
