(The Center Square) – Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson has requested information from the Biden administration “to provide citizenship data to help Texas maintain secure voter rolls.”
“Texas demands this information. The federal government must stop hiding the ball. We must have clean elections where only eligible voters cast votes,” Gov. Greg Abbott said in a statement supporting Nelson’s request.
On Wednesday, she sent a letter to the director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services requesting citizenship and immigration status information to ensure noncitizens are not voting in Texas.
The letter cites federal and state law prohibiting noncitizens from voting and laws requiring Texas to perform voter roll maintenance. Federal law requires the USCIS to provide information “regarding the citizenship and immigration status, lawful or unlawful, of any individual.” It also requires the Immigration and Naturalization Service to verify or “ascertain the citizenship or immigration status of any individual within the jurisdiction of the agency for any purpose authorized by law, by providing the requested verification or status information.”
“In other words, states may request citizenship information, and USCIS must provide it,” the letter states.
Nelson requested current citizenship or immigration status information from USCIS for certain individuals who are registered to vote in Texas but have not yet validated their citizenship through DPS or another state agency in Texas. Once her office receives the information from USCIS, it will provide data to county voter registrars to prevent non-citizens from voting, consistent with federal and state law, she said.
She requested assistance in verifying or ascertaining the citizenship or immigration status of certain individuals registered to vote in Texas, saying that her office “is in the process of compiling a list of people on Texas’ voter rolls whose citizenship cannot be verified using existing state sources.” She asked for the information to be provided by Oct. 2.
On the same day, Attorney General Ken Paxton sent a letter to Nelson encouraging her to request the information, saying his office “stands ready to assist you in this effort however we can.” The letter was also sent to the governor and lieutenant governor.
“Federal law has made it nearly impossible for states to verify the citizenship of voter-registration applicants,” Paxton said. “Although it is a crime for a non-citizen to register to vote, federal law restricts states from requiring proof of citizenship, and state agencies like those we lead have limited means to verify voter citizenship in many cases.”
He also sent a draft letter to UCIS for Nelson to consider sending. The letters appear to be nearly identical in content although hers has a different paragraph order and is shorter.
It remains unclear why the letter was sent just two months before the November election or if previous requests were made and USCIS didn’t respond. It also remains unclear when and if the Secretary of State’s Office under Nelson or previous secretaries requested citizenship and immigration information in previous election years.
Nelson’s press office did not respond to requests for comment.
The letter comes after Nelson’s office, working with county governments, removed more than 1.1 million names from the voters rolls, including more than 6,500 potential noncitizens, The Center Square reported. Among them, approximately 1,930 have a voter history, according to the data, and their information was sent to the Texas Attorney General’s Office for investigation and potential legal action.
