Civil rights groups want data behind Abbott voter purge

SAN ANTONIO – The San Antonio Express-News reports that Charlotte Christman returned to her Houston home last month to a curious letter. Her voter registration, it said, was under suspension, and the 68-year-old would need to confirm that she still lived at her address. Christman mailed the card back and, for now, appears registered to vote this November. But after hearing Gov. Greg Abbott’s announcement on Monday that state officials had removed over 1 million Texans from voter rolls, she is rethinking her story. Was she being flagged for political reasons? Why had her address been questioned in the first place? “It’s very fishy that this is happening right before a presidential election,” said Christman, who votes Democratic. Abbott’s announcement, coming just weeks before the deadline for registering to vote in the November election, has prompted confusion by voting rights groups and some Texans who say they were surprised to learn recently that they had been flagged for potential removal by their local elections offices.

But most of the people identified by the governor appeared to have died or moved and not participated in recent elections, and the figures Abbott cited aren’t out of line with totals reported annually by the secretary of state’s office, according to a review by Hearst Newspapers. Civil rights advocates have pressed for access to the underlying data behind the purges, saying they are concerned that eligible voters could be ensnared. In a letter to Secretary of State Jane Nelson on Wednesday, they specifically raised concerns that eligible voters could be getting wrongly identified as noncitizens and that ongoing removals would violate a federal “quiet period,” which prevents removals from voter rolls in the 90 days before an election. Democratic lawmakers warned on Thursday that the removals could mirror a botched 2019 effort to remove noncitizens from the rolls, and they urged supporters to check the status of their own voter registration. State Rep. Gene Wu, D-Houston, blasted state leadership for not sharing the underlying data.