Elections dept. to look into list of potential 4K non-citizens who may have voted in EP
The elections department administrator for the County of El Paso told ABC-7 she will examine a list of more than 4,100 residents of El Paso County who voted, and possibly, are not U.S. citizens.
Late last week, Texas Secretary of State David Whitley questioned the citizenship status of 95,000 voters, who he claims voted as non-US citizens over several decades. Those findings are based on an 11-month long investigation. After DPS checked its list and updated voter information, the original list has since been reduced to a possible 58,000 “non-citizens” who may have voted in Texas.
The American Civil Liberties Union, along with a dozen other voter and minority rights groups, sent state election officials a letter calling the state’s method for identifying non-citizens “deeply flawed” and warning that local officials who took voters off their rolls based on those records risk violating federal law.
El Paso County Elections Administrator Lisa Wise, busy preparing for a special election for district 79 in the Texas Hosue of Representatives, told ABC-7 she has an explanation for the possibility that a U.S. citizen who voted may show up as a “non-citizen” in the Texas Department of Public Safety’s database.
“If you were to go to the DPS and register, or get a driver’s license, or get a an I.D., and you marked non-citizen on there. And since then, you became naturalized, gone through the process, you would still show up in this list because the DPS still has that (outdated) paper work, but yet we registered you at a naturalization ceremony,” said Wise.
This means people who obtained a driver’s license or some form of identification with DPS while they were legal residents never went back to DPS to update their information when they became naturalized U.S. citizens. That is why they could be showing up on the DPS list, said Wise.
When asked what Wise would do if any names of people who voted still turn up as being non-citizens, the supervisor of elections told ABC-7 those name will be turned over to the County Attorney’s office.
“They can decide how they want to handle that,” said Wise.
