Voters must check if they’re still registered or if they have been placed on a suspended list, which could add “more barriers for their votes to count,” a Democratic state legislator said.
Texans who may have been wrongly removed from the state’s voter registration list or whose voter registrations have been suspended have little time to reverse course, Democratic state lawmakers and civil rights advocates warned Thursday, a few days after Republican leadership announced the purge of more than 1.1 million names from their voter rolls.
States are required by law to regularly update their voter registration lists to remove people who have died or moved or who are found ineligible to vote for other reasons. But Republican Gov. Greg Abbott touted the routine maintenance of the voter rolls in a series of election integrity bills he signed into laws in 2021.
“Texas’ strong election laws removed over 1 MILLION ineligible voters from our voter rolls,” Abbott wrote Monday on X.
Numbers released by Abbott’s office show that more than 134,000 voters purged from state voter rolls since September 2021 had confirmed they had moved elsewhere and that 457,000 others had died.
But most of the voters who were removed, more than 463,000, had been placed on a suspended list. Names on the suspended list are deleted if the state receives information that voters have permanently moved out of their registered addresses or don’t vote in two consecutive election cycles.
While the latest numbers of purged voters appear large, they are in line with routine maintenance of the voter rolls over the past several years.
But Democratic state representatives and Houston City Council members remain alarmed at the more than 2.1 million Texas voters who remain on the suspended list, mainly because county officials don’t have their current addresses on record.
With nearly 13% of all 17.9 million voters registered in the state on the suspended list, “this represents more barriers for their votes to count,” state Rep. Christina Morales said in Spanish at a news conference.
Charleae Vincent, a resident of Harris County, said she was placed on the suspended list even though she was a consistent voter.
Voters like Vincent receive new voter registration cards by mail every two years. As Vincent waited for her card, she instead got a letter saying she had been placed on suspended status.
When she investigated how it could have happened, Vincent found out that her voter card never made it out of the post office because the machine couldn’t read the address on the envelope, she said.
Often when people’s voter registration cards or jury summonses are mailed and returned as undeliverable, their names get added to the suspended list under the assumption that their addresses may be outdated.
Resolving the mishap was complicated, Vincent said. It involved her driving 27 miles and tracking people fact-to-face who could help remove her name from the list.
State Rep. Gene Wu called on “every single person who thinks that they are currently registered to check their registration today” to find out whether they have been added to the suspended list.
Voters with suspended status can still vote as long as they update their addresses online before voter registration in Texas closes on Oct. 7. That should get people removed from the list in time for Election Day.
