re: #181 Backwoods_Sleuth

Texas is facing two lawsuits over its ham-handed attempt to strip new U.S. citizens from the voter rolls, or at least to intimidate them away from voting. Latino voters and civil rights organizations are suing over the Texas secretary of state’s flagging of 95,000 registered voters as possibly being non-citizens who had registered to vote illegally. The people on the list had indicated they weren’t citizens when getting their driver’s licenses—but the vast majority had then been naturalized before registering to vote.

The whole effort was conducted in massively incompetent fashion, but reading Alexa Ura’s deep reporting on what happened, you can’t discount the malice that also had to be involved. According to Democratic state Rep. Rafael Anchia, when he asked Secretary of State David Whitley if he knew that anyone on the list had voted illegally, Whitley answered no. And when Anchia challenged him, “Well, isn’t it the protocol that you investigate and, if you find facts, you turn it over to the AG?” Whitley said he didn’t have an answer.

m.dailykos.com