Teas claims of voter fraud are really attempt to suppress Hispanic vote
from the Article:
"This latest (and likely erroneous) claim from Texas is part of a larger pattern of vote suppressors making outlandish claims of voter fraud – only to have them thoroughly and exhaustively debunked. It would be funny if such claims weren’t being used to deprive eligible citizens of their right to vote."
First, let’s examine what exactly Texas Secretary of State David Whitley did to come up with his exaggerated numbers. He has yet to provide much more than a breathless statement to the press, but we do know he compiled his list of supposed non-citizens by comparing driver’s license application records against the state’s voter registration database. We’ve seen this game before. Here’s why it doesn’t pass the smell test:
- It is very likely that many if not most of these people became naturalized citizens since the last time they renewed their driver’s license.
- Large-scale database matching has been proven to be notoriously unreliable.
Point one: the data Whitley used only shows if someone wasn’t a citizen the last time they renewed their driver’s license. But Texans only have to renew their licenses every six years. And since 55,000 Texans take the oath of citizenship every year, it stands to reason that many of these phantom non-citizen voters are now citizens. In fact, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, there were 348,552 Texans naturalized in the last six years. So even if we assume that all of the matches made by the Secretary of State are accurate, it is likely that many if not all of the 95,000 people identified have since been naturalized.
- Similar claims made by states in the past—including Texas—have been debunked.
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