Link to tweet

Link to tweet

was registering to vote and decided to check mine when she registered...

and yes, we both voted for BETO in Collin County.

Link to tweet

By Amy Gardner February 6 at 7:18 PM

When Texas officials announced in late January that as many as 58,000 noncitizens may have voted illegally in state elections over nearly two decades, top Republicans — including President Trump — quickly warned about the prevalence of voter fraud and the need to crack down on it.

But just as quickly, the numbers stopped adding up.

First, on Jan. 25, the secretary of state instructed counties to give voters 30 days to prove their citizenship before canceling their registration. Then, four days later, the office began calling local election officials to say that thousands of people on the list were in fact U.S. citizens, eligible to vote.

The episode is the latest in bungled attempts by states to show that huge numbers of noncitizens are registered to vote and have cast ballots in U.S. elections. In North Carolina, legislative leaders said in 2014 that more than 10,000 suspected noncitizens were registered to vote, but state election officials found that number was vastly overstated and determined that only 11 noncitizens voted that fall. In Florida in 2012, a list of 180,000 possible noncitizens ultimately led to the removal of 85 voters from the rolls. Similar claims have been made in Colorado, Indiana and Kansas ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/inaccurate-claims-of-noncitizen-voting-in-texas-reflect-a-growing-trend-in-republican-states/2019/02/06/af376fb0-2994-11e9-b011-d8500644dc98_story.html?utm_term=.755bee93eff8

AUSTIN (CBSDFW.COM/AP) ... Secretary of State David Whitley spoke publicly Thursday for the first time since his office questioned the citizenship of thousands of Texas voters since 1996 ...

Dallas resident Julieta Garibay was one of the people flagged as being a non-citizen voter. Garibay became an American citizen in 2018 and voted that same year. “I mean it’s outrageous because we have gone through the process. We are exercising our right to vote,” she told CBS 11 News. “It’s really outrageous that without even doing the duly work of investigating who’s on the list, why are they there. Just going out there and sounding a very false alarm.”

Whitley is facing Senate confirmation for his job. He deflected questions over whether his office made mistakes and had no update on how much the list has shrunk ...

https://dfw.cbslocal.com/2019/02/07/texas-secretary-of-state-flawed-noncitizen-voter-list/

Jeremy Wallace
Feb. 7, 2019
Updated: Feb. 7, 2019 1:31 p.m.

... Whitley declined to answer when asked directly if his office made any mistakes when it first declared 95,000 voters may be non-citizens. He said the data his staff used was the best available ...

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/politics/texas/article/Texas-Secretary-of-State-acknowledges-no-errors-13598367.php

Paul J. Weber, Associated Press
Updated 2:04 pm CST, Thursday, February 7, 2019

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Texas' election chief on Thursday defended giving prosecutors a list of 95,000 potential noncitizens on the state's voter rolls before vetting the information, which turned out to wrongly include scores of people who were naturalized before casting legal ballots.

Secretary of State David Whitley deflected sharp questions from Texas lawmakers over whether his office made mistakes in his first public comments since his office in January called into question the citizenship of tens of thousands of voters since 1996. Nearly 58,000 of those voters were said to have cast a ballot at least once, but those numbers quickly unraveled .

Within days, local officials found that the list wrongly included scores of naturalized citizens, setting off accusations from Democrats and Latino rights groups of attempted voter suppression and launching another heated voting rights battle in Texas ...

https://www.chron.com/news/texas/article/Texas-election-chief-defends-sharing-flawed-13597877.php

in the Voting Rights Act anymore.

Are Supreme Court judges ever held accountable when they say shit like;

"oh, it's ridiculous to think this Citizens United ruling will result in corruption and foreign countries bankrolling candidates"

or

"the pre-clearance is no longer needed because it did such a great job of eliminating racism in voting"

and the opposite turns out to be true?

Do they ever sit for interviews?

Rick Jervis, USA TODAY
Published 7:14 p.m. ET Feb. 6, 2019
Updated 12:28 p.m. ET Feb. 7, 2019

AUSTIN, Texas – The recent eye-popping claim by the Texas secretary of state’s office – that 95,000 registered voters in Texas may be ineligible because they’re not U.S. citizens – grabbed quick headlines and sprang into President Donald Trump’s Twitter feed, rekindling fears of rampant voter fraud by non-U.S. citizens.

Within a week, however, three lawsuits challenging the move and state officials erasing tens of thousands of names from that list have since raised questions about the validity and methodology of the claim.

The clash over Texas voters comes amid allegations by voting rights’ activists of nationwide efforts to purge voters of color from rolls and influence elections, including aggressively going after alleged non-citizens registered to vote.

Since 2013, Florida, New York, North Carolina and Virginia have conducted illegal purges, according to a recent study by New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice. The report also found that between 2014 and 2016, states removed almost 16 million voters from the rolls – or 4 million more than what was removed between 2006 and 2008. Many of those were improperly removed, the report said ...

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2019/02/06/voting-rights-purge-rolls-texas-gov-abbott-donald-trump/2789929002/

BY ALEXA URA FEB. 1, 201910 AM

... Whitley, the top election officer in the state, had handed over information about those registered voters to the Texas attorney general, which has the jurisdiction to prosecute them for felony crimes.

... as Anchia sat at the end of his green, glass-topped conference table, he wanted to know: Did Whitley know for sure that any of the names on his list had committed crimes by voting as noncitizens?

“No,” Whitley answered, according to Anchia.

“And I said, ‘Well, isn’t it the protocol that you investigate and, if you find facts, you turn it over to the AG?” ...

https://www.texastribune.org/2019/02/01/texas-citizenship-voter-roll-review-how-it-turned-boondoggle/

VANN R. NEWKIRK II
FEB 2, 2019

... Last week, Texas Secretary of State David Whitley’s office sent an advisory to counties involving a list of people who’d been identified as potential noncitizens with a matching voter-registration record. Activists and media criticized the list as inaccurate and misleading. But that didn’t stop GOP officials from using the list as definitive proof of rampant voter fraud, despite having no evidence that anyone had voted illegally. Their fervor seemed to add to the suspicion that the party has an endgame well beyond “ballot security,” and to the fear that new forms of voter suppression are just on the horizon ...

The secretary of state’s office referred the members of the list to Paxton, who sounded the alarm via Twitter. “VOTER FRAUD ALERT,” Paxton tweeted on January 25, “the [secretary of state] discovered approx 95,000 individuals identified by DPS as non-U.S. citizens have a matching voter registration record in TX, approx 58,000 of whom have voted in TX elections. Any illegal vote deprives Americans of their voice.” Said Paxton in a separate statement: “Every single instance of illegal voting threatens democracy in our state and deprives individual Texans of their voice.” Texas Governor Greg Abbott also tweeted about voter fraud that day, mentioning the case of Enrique Salazar Ortiz, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico in San Antonio who pleaded guilty to illegal voting in the 2016 election and to identity theft in October 2018, and who was apparently sentenced just the day before Whitley published his list.

Paxton, who has aggressively pursued isolated reports of voter fraud during his time in office, took care to only insinuate that the list referred to him was definitive evidence of mass voter fraud. President Donald Trump, however, managed no such nuance. “58,000 non-citizens voted in Texas, with 95,000 non-citizens registered to vote,” he tweeted Sunday. “These numbers are just the tip of the iceberg. All over the country, especially in California, voter fraud is rampant. Must be stopped. Strong voter ID!” ...

... the purges and new voting restrictions favored by Republicans in order to deal with “new” whispers of fraud uniquely and disproportionately disadvantage legitimate voters who tend to vote for Democrats. There’s advantage enough for the GOP in chasing the conspiracy forever, voting-rights advocates maintain, even if it never quite proves it exists.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/02/why-trump-talking-about-voter-fraud-texas/581881/