Texas secretary of state refers 33 potential noncitizen voters for criminal investigation

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Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson on Thursday said she has referred the names of 33 “potential noncitizens” who voted in the November 2024 general election to the state Attorney General’s Office for investigation.

Texas officials used newly obtained access to a federal database, managed by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, to check the citizenship status of people on the state’s voter rolls, Nelson said, adding that the data also helped Texas officials “confirm naturalization of dozens more.”

The announcement came after a Republican-led push in Texas and across the country to require proof of citizenship to register to vote, although documented cases of noncitizen voting are rare. A bill to require proof of citizenship from Texas voters failed to pass during the legislative session that ended this week.

The 33 potential noncitizens are a tiny fraction of the roughly 11.3 million Texans who cast ballots in the November 2024 general election. It’s not clear which counties the 33 voters are from, or how long they had been on the voter rolls.

Several states, including Michigan, Ohio and Georgia, have also reported referring small numbers of cases of potential noncitizens casting ballots for investigation following audits of voter rolls.

Texas Republicans are moving forward with a plan to ask voters to approve a constitutional amendment affirming that only U.S. citizens are permitted to vote — something already established under state law.

Months before the November 2024 election, Gov. Greg Abbott announced that 6,500 noncitizens had been removed from Texas voter rolls prior to 2024. The governor’s office later edited its own press release to describe those removed as “potential” noncitizens. A joint investigation by Votebeat, Texas Tribune and ProPublica later found Abbott’s numbers were inflated and, in some instances, wrong.

In reality, the state removed only 581 people as noncitizens over three years. The rest of the 6,500 had simply failed to respond to a notice asking them to confirm their citizenship, which doesn’t mean they weren’t citizens. The newsrooms’ investigation found that some eligible citizens had been flagged as potential noncitizens and removed from the rolls.

The state action echoed a scandal from 2019, when the Secretary of State’s Office announced that it had identified 95,000 registered voters as potential noncitizens and said that more than half of them had previously cast ballots. But the assertions didn’t hold up. Many of the voters in question turned out to be naturalized citizens flagged due to outdated data, and the state ultimately settled a related lawsuit by agreeing to new procedures.

Last fall, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and 15 other attorneys general sent a letter to then-Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, saying U.S. CIS had failed to respond quickly and helpfully enough to state requests for assistance verifying the citizenship status of people on the voter rolls.

In March, President Donald Trump issued an executive order directing the Department of Homeland Security to provide free access to the SAVE database to all states. Nelson’s news release on Thursday said that Texas was among the first states to receive it, “and recently joined a pilot program working with DHS, USCIS and DOGE to improve the database’s functionality.”

Natalia Contreras is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. She’s based in Corpus Christi. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

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