Reports circulating today that nearly 100,000 non citizens have been on Texas voter rolls and some 58,000 of them voted in elections from 2008 to 2018 are a misleading summary of the Texas Secretary of State's report, officials stress to News Radio 1200 WOAI.
The report prompted a Sunday tweet by President Trump claiming that it shows '58,000 non citizens voted in Texas' and saying it proves that 'voter fraud is rampant.'
The Secretary of State's office has been working on a comprehensive report to check on individuals who at one point were not U.S. citizens when they obtained the documents they used to comply with the Texas Voter ID law.
"Among the individuals flagged, about 58,000 cast ballots in one or more elections," the report said.
But the Secretary of State says this is not evidence that the individuals voted illegally or broke the law.
The information will now be provided to local elections administrators for further investigation.
The Secretary of State stressed that the documents presented by the individuals showed they were legally present in the U.S., but may not have been a citizen eligible to vote, at the time the document, like a driver's license, was obtained; but is not an indication of the individual's status when the vote was cast.. In many cases, for example, the individual may have been naturalized before casting a ballot and presented that valid driver's license as ID. The report does not indicate that any of these individuals was in the country illegally at the time, or used doctored or forged documents, nor does it claim that the 58,000 voted illegally.
The Secretary of State says a person may be on this list for something like a name change or a person putting down a name that differs from a name on the voter roll.. The report calls these 'weak matches.'
Local registrars must have conclusive proof that a person is ineligible to vote due to non citizenship status before a name can be removed from the roll of registered voters, and civil rights groups urged that local officials not use this report to conduct a "purge" of voter rolls.
Even if all 58,000 do turn out, following investigation by county elections officials, to have voted illegally, which is highly unlikely, and every single one of them had voted for the same candidate, which is even more unlikely, and all 58,000 voted in the same election, in 2018 (the report said the 58,000 cast ballots in elections between 2008 and 2018), that would turn out to be just .7% of the 8.2 million votes that were cast in the statewide election in Texas in 2018, far less than the amount needed to change any of the outcomes.
1200 WOAI news reported last week that an illegal immigrant living in Elmendorf did in fact vote in the 2008 and 2018 elections, using an improperly obtained U.S. passport as a voter ID.. That person has been sentenced to 30 months in federal prison.