Hunchin' of the voting party: Has Texas got an illegal voter problem?

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced on January 25, 2019, that Texas Secretary of State David Whitley had identified 95,000 non-citizens on Texas voter rolls, and it appears that 58,000 of these people have voted in an election from 1996 to 2018.

President Trump repeated this claim on Twitter and offered it as evidence that illegal immigrants are voting in U.S. elections, which means that the need for a border wall is urgent. Several bloggers and media personalities further sounded the alarm.

It does sound pretty bad. It’s a terrible blow to those who argue that voter fraud is rare and that illegals don’t vote in large numbers. This isn’t a handful of votes we’re talking about; it’s 58,000! If true, this is a significant problem.

Texas is on the border, of course, and so it has a large population of Mexican and Central American immigrants—both legal and illegal. It also has one of the strictest voter ID laws in the nation.

How could this happen?

Green cards and visas

First, it’s important to understand the underlying claim, which has been distorted as it has been repeated.

Attorney General Paxton and Secretary Whitley did not claim that these voters are illegal immigrants. Instead, they used the term “non-citizens.”

Nobody on this list is an illegal immigrant, it turns out. The list includes only non-citizens who are Lawful Permanent Residents (LPR) or visa holders.

LPRs are citizens of another country who have been granted the right to reside permanently in the U.S., through a lengthy application process. (An LPR is said to have received a “green card” when his or her application to become an LPR is approved, because the LPR identification card was green when the term was coined.)

Once an LPR has resided in the U.S. for five years, he or she is allowed to apply for U.S. citizenship.

A visa holder is anyone who has permission to be in the U.S. There are various types of visas (from permanent immigrant visas to short-term tourist visas). Some visa holders become LPRs, while some do not.

In Texas, LPRs and certain visa holders are allowed to apply for a provisional Texas driver’s license. Illegal immigrants are not.

LPRs, visa holders, and other legal resident non-citizens are not allowed to register to vote in Texas, however.

How they got the numbers

The Texas Secretary of State’s office asked the Texas DMV to supply a list of LPRs and visa holders who had gotten Texas driver’s licenses between 1996 through 2018.

The Secretary of State’s office then took that list of names and compared it with the list of registered voters in Texas from the same time period. This search returned 95,000 matches of people who once held Texas driver’s licenses as LPRs/visa holders and who were also registered to vote in Texas at some point.

Of this list of 95,000, it appears that 58,000 have cast a vote in at least one election.

A critical eye

Voters’ rights and immigrant advocates in Texas argue that some of the cases may be mistaken identity. In other words, the names may be substantially similar, but the voting record may belong to a person with a similar name and address who is a U.S. citizen.

Further, the report does not account for the fact that more than 50,000 LPRs in Texas become naturalized U.S. citizens every year. For example, an LPR who got a Texas driver’s license in 1996 could have become a citizen in 2001, and may have registered to vote at that time. The period in question spans 22 years (1998-2012), and the matches were not compared with a list of naturalized citizens from that period. Visa holders may become LPRs and then apply for citizenship after five years’ residence as an LPR.

Under Texas law, election officials must mail a notice to voters 30 days prior to their voter registration being revoked. The voter then has this 30-day period to show proof that his or her voter registration is valid. (In this case, the voter would submit immigration paperwork to prove citizenship.)

A similar 2012 matching report in Colorado did not lead to discoveries of voter fraud or other illegal voting, and no changes were made based on that report.

Until the Texas matches are verified (by allowing those suspected of voting illegally to provide proof of citizenship and by asking county voting officials to verify identities), it is premature to say that 58,000 people voted illegally in elections in Texas from 1996 through 2018.