Texas has notified (living) voters that they are “potentially deceased.”

Last year, the Texas Legislature passed a bill to ensure dead people were kept off its voter rolls. States have long been required to maintain clean voter rolls, so such updating isn’t new.

But Texas went further, giving the secretary of state authority to conduct voter roll purges using relatively loose criteria like shared names and birthdate.

The result is that live voters have received notice that if they don’t respond within 30 days, they’re assumed dead and will be removed from the voter rolls.

The state’s largest voting district, Harris County, has sent such letters to about 4,000 “potentially deceased” voters.

“Several hundred responded that said, ‘Yeah, I’m still alive,’” said Fred King, communications manager for the Harris County Voter Registrar and Tax Office.

Election experts say that’s not surprising. “The problem is that there is a much higher incidence of sharing names and birth dates than people realize,” said David Becker, director of election initiatives at the Pew Center on the States.

Just one example: there are are 21,078 people in Texas named Alvarado.