Chances are you've been dizzied by all the numbers being tossed about on ineligible voters in Texas.
Political advocacy group Direct Action Texas said last August there were 280,000 registered voters in Texas who were not citizens. The group also claimed there were 4 million registered voters in the state who "do not match up to anyone in (the Department of Public Safety) database or other databases available to (government) analysts."
On Friday, the Texas Secretary of State's Office announced that its year-long investigation revealed 95,000 suspect voter registrations, and that 58,000 of them had voted sometime in the prior 22 years.
Announcing that 95,000 names on the voting rolls were "weak matches" to other state records is, itself, a pitifully weak statement full of sound and fury signifying nothing. And then the state had to admit to county officials across the state Tuesday that an unspecified number of names should not have been on that list to begin with.
As Tarrant County officials began sifting through the revised list of 4,700 names here flagged by the Secretary of State, county elections administrator Heider Garcia set just the right tone: "There's a lot of work to be done before any conclusions can be reached."
We hope that, like any math student, state officials will show us their work. How did they get to those numbers? How many are undocumented immigrants, for instance, and how many are legal residents who either deliberately or inadvertently overstepped their bounds by registering or voting?
Two precepts should guide any discussion and debate that follows:
_ Illegal voting numbers should not be exaggerated, especially to score political points. There's no evidence, to this point, that illegal votes swung an election. And those 95,000 red-flagged registrants haven't even been proven to have voted illegally.
However, that brings us to the fact that:
_ No amount of voter fraud is acceptable. Period. An illegal vote is a theft from the body politic, one that dilutes the legal vote and cancels out the vote of a citizen.
We appreciate the Texas Civil Rights Project's concerns about voter roll purging; voter suppression would be absolutely unacceptable. But most things in life benefit from renewal, and voter rolls are certainly among them. In addition, legal voters have their civil rights too, including having their vote count and not be canceled out _ i.e., suppressed _ with ineligible ballots.
In short, the numbers of illegal votes may be underestimated or overestimated, often for political considerations. But the sanctity of the vote cannot be overstated.
Texas takes voting integrity as seriously as anyone in these 50 states. Illegally casting a ballot is a second-degree felony with a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison. One woman, Rosa Maria Ortega of Grand Prairie, was actually sentenced in early 2017 by a Tarrant County jury to eight years in prison for two acts of illegal voting, though she has been free on bond even after the 2nd District Court denied her appeal.
However harsh her sentence, it must also be noted that, after voting illegally as a green card holder four times in Dallas County, Ortega voted in Tarrant County five times, even after being told in writing she was ineligible.
Whatever the real illegal voting numbers are, let there be no doubt that Texas takes its football, its barbecue and its voting integrity most passionately.
