1/29/19
AUSTIN, Texas ― A Republican-led effort to investigate the validity of nearly 100,000 voter registrations will likely hit Latinos hardest. That’s precisely the point, says Domingo García, national president of the League of United Latin American Citizens. “Instead of the Republican Party appealing to the changing demographics of the Texas electorate, they’re engaging in voter suppression to stop Latino voters from voting because of the closeness of the election between Beto O’Rourke and Ted Cruz in 2018,” García told HuffPost. “And they fear closer elections coming up.” LULAC sued Texas on Tuesday to halt the voter fraud investigation. Texas Secretary of State David Whitley announced Friday that his office had identified about 95,000 registered voters as noncitizens. About 58,000 of them had cast a ballot over the last two decades. Those numbers came from an investigation that began a year ago, according to a news release. By Sunday, President Donald Trump had given the allegations of rampant voter fraud a massive megaphone, calling it “just the tip of the iceberg.” “Must be stopped!” the president said on Twitter.
The lack of evidence behind allegations that Attorney General Ken Paxton branded with the words “VOTER FRAUD ALERT” in a tweet has drawn condemnation from legal and advocacy groups. The secretary of state’s office upped the number of suspect noncitizen voters to 98,000 on Monday. There were immediate signs that the lists were flawed. Lisa Wise, the top election official in El Paso County, told HuffPost that a naturalized co-worker was on the list. By Tuesday, the secretary of state’s office had begun calling counties to alert them to mistakes on the lists it sent out, the Texas Tribune reported. For more than two decades, Republicans have held firm control over Texas government, often winning statewide races by margins of 20 percentage points or more. November’s midterm elections upended that dynamic. A surge in turnout across the state narrowed Republican Sen. Ted Cruz’s margin of victory to just 2.7 percentage points. Texas demographics make it all but certain that the list contains mostly Hispanic names. Several Spanish surnames are very common, and state authorities often incorrectly enter compound last names into databases, which critics say increases the likelihood of falsely matching a U.S. citizen’s name to a non-citizen's. Texas Republicans have been on a mission for over a decade to cast more scrutiny on voter registrations.
