A handful of people in North Texas are responsible for challenges to many thousands of voter registrations, piling extra work on elections staff who already update the voter rolls regularly, county officials and experts say.
Similar challenges are being made throughout the state and across the nation. And experts say that a driving force behind many of those challenge is True the Vote, a conservative nonprofit based in Houston that has peddled what many describe as baseless theories about election fraud. True the Vote has led the charge to “clean” the voter rolls, although elections officials say that already happens every day.
True the Vote did not respond to requests for comment.
Questioning whether people are eligible to vote has played prominently in this year’s presidential election season, with many supporters of former President Donald Trump embracing his claims that millions of people have voted illegally.
In Texas, registered voters can challenge voter registrations in the same county. And they’re using online tools that compare voter rolls to other public records, to make thousands of challenges at a time.
In Tarrant County this year, 11 people have brought more than 15,000 challenges, according to data KERA obtained through a public records request. More than half of those challenges came from one person.
County election officials say the challengers rely on outdated information — and virtually all the cases they’ve flagged have been handled. For example, if someone’s address appears to have changed, county officials say it’s likely that efforts to confirm where they live already are underway.
“Voter roll maintenance is a daily thing that we do in our office anyway,” Tarrant County Elections Administrator Clint Ludwig said.
People don’t get kicked off the rolls just because their registration is challenged, but experts say that does create extra work.
Disproven claims about widespread election fraud motivate these mass challenges, said Clint Swift, a data scientist who studies the issue for the nonprofit Protect Democracy.
“The narrative is really that we have to doubt our elections,” he said.
Dealing with thousands of challenges
In August, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott announced that one million people have been removed from Texas’ voter rolls since 2021.
“Election integrity is essential to our democracy,” Abbott said in a statement. “I have signed the strongest election laws in the nation to protect the right to vote and to crackdown on illegal voting.”
Removing people from voter rolls is not an indication of illegal voting. More than half the people Abbott cited had either died or confirmed they had moved.
And elections officials had flagged the voting status for nearly all of the rest. Simply put, they had to verify their current address to vote again.
Cleaning voter rolls isn’t anything new. It’s required by federal law. Elections offices can better prepare for elections when the list of registered voters is accurate, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.
Employees in Tarrant County, for example, receive a constant stream of information about deaths and address changes.
“It is a lot of stuff,” Ludwig said.
The voter rolls are never static, Denton County Elections Administrator Frank Phillips recently told the Denton Record-Chronicle.
“If I printed you a voter registration database this morning, it would not be the same voter registration database when printed this afternoon,” he said.
True the Vote’s IV3 web app invites people to compare voter rolls to other publicly available data, like the National Change of Address database maintained by the U.S. Postal Service, Swift said.
In Denton County, IV3 users were responsible for 17,000 voter registration challenges, Phillips said.
Ludwig with Tarrant County wasn’t sure if his county’s 15,000 challenged voters came from IV3, but a lot of the challenges used the same language, he said.
On top of regular maintenance, elections offices have to send out voter registration cards every odd-numbered year.
If the address is bad, or the person has moved, that card bounces back to the county elections office, and that voter is placed on the suspense lis t, Ludwig said.
Being on the suspense list doesn’t mean you can’t vote. Election workers have to send an address confirmation notice. If a person doesn’t respond to a notice, they can update their residence at the polls.
By the end of 2023, as part of its every-odd-year list maintenance, Tarrant County had sent out almost 1.3 million voter registration cards.
Then came January, and the flood of voter registration challenges, Ludwig said.
“We’re putting people on suspense, and now we’re getting all these challenges of people that we’d already put on suspense,” he said.
Dallas County got 2,000 to 3,000 challenges this summer, Dallas County Voter Registration Manager Rivelino Lopez said. The vast majority were already in suspense or canceled.
The same was true in Collin County, Deputy Elections Administrator Kaleb Breaux said. His office has gotten about 13,000 challenges —more than 12,000 from one person.
“On about 80 to 85% of the voters that they’re challenging, an action has already been taken on that voter’s record — and by that, I mean that voter’s record is already in suspense,” Breaux said.
The high percentage of redundant challenges is an indication that True the Vote’s data files are outdated, Phillips said.
Election workers in Collin County mostly just have to do a “quick search” to confirm a challenged person is already on his department’s radar, Breaux said.
The searches pile up. In Tarrant County, Ludwig has a total staff of 43 people, he said.
“My voter registration staff clearly isn’t very large,” Ludwig said. “It does take a lot of time to process all these.”
People don’t get kicked off the rolls just because they’re challenged. There’s a process elections offices have to follow, said Chris McGinn, executive director of the Texas Association of County Election Officials.
“They just don’t take the word of anybody walking in and just dropping names,” he said.
When someone is challenged, they get treated like someone whose voter registration card bounced back. The elections office sends them an address confirmation notice, and if they don’t respond, they’re placed on the suspense list.
People on suspense aren’t removed from the voter rolls unless they don’t respond to an address confirmation notice and don’t vote in the next two federal general elections.
Federal law also prevents people from being removed from the voter rolls in the 90 days before an election, except under select circumstances, like a felony conviction or death.
What’s making challenges easier
Voter registration challenges come from a time before elections offices had extensive digital records, according to Swift.
People could go to the elections office and explain, “My son went off to college, or he moved off to XYZ place, or my parents are deceased,” he said.
But in a world with electronic records, online tools like IV3 make it easier for people to challenge voter registrations en masse.
“They match that to see if any of the folks that are on the voter lists have put in for a change of address, that’s the most common,” Swift said. “They may also match to voter files outside the state.”
The records IV3 compiles are the same records elections offices have access to, except without unique identifiers, like Social Security numbers, Swift explained.
That means an IV3 user might think they’re looking at one person with two different addresses — but they’re actually looking at two different people with the same name who live in different places.
“We can’t differentiate between one John Smith in Texas and another, or one John Smith in Texas and a John Smith in Arizona,” Swift said.
Susan Valliant lives in Arlington and serves as a Tarrant County GOP precinct chair. She challenged 41 voter registrations this year, and she said she used IV3 to do it.
“They just have a whole list of tons of names that the addresses don’t match any more,” she said.
Valliant believes the voter rolls are “so dirty,” and that leaving people on there could lead to voter impersonation – like someone using a dead person’s ID to vote under the dead person’s name.
Voter fraud is rare, and the issue of voter impersonation is “virtually nonexistent,” according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
In 2014, a Washington Post analysis found 31 “credible” instances of voter impersonation since 2000 — and even that’s probably an overcount, the author wrote.
Some consider these big voter registration challenges to be a form of voter intimidation. In Georgia, a voting rights group sued True the Vote, alleging the organization violated the Voting Rights Act for challenging hundreds of thousands of voter registrations.
In January, U.S. District Judge Steve Jones ruled True the Vote’s actions did not amount to illegal voter intimidation, but he criticized the group.
“In making this conclusion, the Court, in no way, is condoning TTV’s actions in facilitating a mass number of seemingly frivolous challenges,” Jones wrote in his opinion.
True the Vote’s list “utterly lacked reliability” and “verges on recklessness,” he wrote.
Texas could change the rules to prevent mass challenges, Swift said. He pointed to Minnesota, where people can only challenge one voter at a time.
The state could also narrow the requirements for challenges, he said.
In Texas, a challenger has to have “personal knowledge” of the person they’re challenging, but the definition of personal knowledge is fluid, Breaux from Collin County said.
“It really just depends on which county you’re asking, if they deem this is personal knowledge,” he said. “Some counties do. Some county attorneys have given guidance to election departments that it is personal knowledge. Some haven’t. As an elections department, we’re kind of caught in the middle.”
Valliant, the GOP precinct chair who challenged voter registrations in Tarrant County, said citizens should have the right to file mass challenges.
“If there is a question that needs to be addressed, if that person doesn’t live at that location anymore, then of course that needs to be challenged,” she said.
KERA reporter Marina Trahan Martinez contributed to this report.
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Caroline Love is a Report For America corps member for KERA News.
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