The top election official in Texas said that his office discovered that nearly 95,000 non-U.S. citizens are registered to vote in the state and that about 58,000 of them have voted at least once.
Texas Secretary of State David Whitley said that his office identified potentially tens of thousands of illegal votes.
Voting in an election when the voter knows he or she isn’t eligible to vote is a second-degree felony in Texas. Whitley said his office sent the data to the Texas Attorney General’s Office to investigate and prosecute those who illegally voted.
“Texas voters ... should not have their voices muted by those who abuse the system,” he added.
The information came from Department of Public Safety records, which the ssecretary of state’s office now plans to use to cross-reference with the state’s statewide voter registration database on a monthly basis to root out potential non-U.S. citizens who have registered to vote.
What is not clear from the DPS records is whether someone who was a noncitizen when he or she applied for a driver’s license has since naturalized.
When noncitizens are identified, the office will notify the county in which the person is registered. If the person who has been identified doesn’t respond with proof within 30 days then their registration will be canceled.
“Our agency has provided extensive training opportunities to county voter registrars so that they can properly perform list maintenance activities in accordance with federal and state law, which affords every registered voter the chance to submit proof of eligibility,” Whitley said.
Groups that advocate for everyone possible to vote admitted that illegal voting does happen, but said it doesn’t happen very much.
Meanwhile, Attorney General Ken Paxton confirmed that his office received the information from Whitley’s office.
From 2005 to 2017 the office prosecuted 97 people for voter fraud violations, and in 2018 alone, it prosecuted another 33 defendants for election fraud violations.
Under Texas law, noncitizens who are in the United States legally can obtain driver’s licenses—but only citizens are eligible to vote.
Texas law does not require verification of a voter’s statement that they are a citizen, leading to the thousands of people illegally voting.
Illegal Immigrant Sentenced for Voting
The news came during the same week that an illegal immigrant from Mexico who admitted to voting was sentenced to 30 months in prison.Ortiz used a stolen identity to vote in the 2016 presidential election. The name on the stolen ID was Jesse Vargas Jr.
Vargas himself left the area as a teenager but someone has used his identification to vote in local elections “since at least 1994,” including in the 2008 Democratic primary, Bexar County elections administrator Jacque Callanen told the Express-News.
A public defender told District Judge Fred Biery that the Vargas identity was used by four men in total and that Ortiz had just used it in the 2016 election.
Ortiz began using the name several years ago after buying it from a man in a bar for $20, she added.
The fake identification was detected by the State Department in December 2016 after Ortiz mailed in a passport renewal application for a passport that he had been using fraudulently for 10 years. He was arrested in August 2017.
When asked in court whether he knew what he was doing was illegal, Ortiz said he did.
“Unfortunately, yes, I knew it was,” Ortiz said.