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More Questions About Texas’ Voter Purge Raised in Light of Repeated Errors & Concentration in Ethnic Districts

Posted byHoumanitarian

(Lise Olsen, Houston Chronicle)
State election officials repeatedly and mistakenly matched active longtime Texas voters to deceased strangers across the country – some of whom perished more than a decade ago – in an error-ridden effort to purge dead voters just weeks before the presidential election, according to a Houston Chronicle review of records.

Voters in legislative districts across Texas with heavy concentrations of Hispanics or African-Americans were more often targeted in that flawed purge effort, according the Chronicle’s analysis of more than 68,000 voters identified as possibly dead.

It’s unclear why so many more matches were generated in some minority legislative districts. One factor may be the popularity of certain surnames in Hispanic and historically black neighborhoods.

One mismatch threatened the voter registration of James Harris Jr., a U.S. Air Force veteran who has voted in every presidential election since the Richard M. Nixon era.

Harris, who is African-American and shares a name with a dead Arkansas man, last voted in Harris County in July. Yet, inexplicably, he weeks later received a letter asking if he had died – apparently because of the 1996 death of another James Harris, according to the newspaper’s review.

Harris voted early in the national elections without further incident – though he took along his voter card, passport and birth certificate just in case anyone wanted more proof he was alive. Harris told the Chronicle he hasn’t been able to shake the feeling that “someone has gone to a concerted effort and gone to a lot of time and research coming up with this matrix in a way of being able to knock people off of the voting rolls.”

His daughter got a dead voter letter, too. She shares her name and birthday with a Louisiana woman who died in 2010.

Rich Parsons, a spokesman for the Secretary of State’s Office, confirmed that officials compared information about all Texas voters – including many who had voted since 2010 – to long-dead people in the Social Security Administration’s death database, which dates back to 1973. So far, 6,491 voters identified have been purged, he said. […]
(Read more of this story at the Houston Chronicle)

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