Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson announced this week that a new review of Texas’ voter registration rolls matched against a federal citizenship database identified that more than 2,700 possible non-citizens among the 18.6 million people eligible to vote.
The finding by Nelson’s office, which under the state constitution maintains statewide voter registration records, are not conclusive. Instead, the names will be sent to elections officials at the county level, who are tasked with determining if any are non-citizens and whether to remove them from the rolls.
“Everyone’s right to vote is sacred and must be protected,” Nelson said in the news release. “We encourage counties to conduct rigorous investigations to determine if any voter is ineligible — just as they do with any other data set we provide.”
Nelson said the data released by her office matched voter registration rolls with data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services for the first time. She said the Trump administration has given states “free and direct access” to the federal agency’s records, which she said is more reliable than state data.
The number of potential non-citizens on the registration rolls is hardly indicative of widespread abuse. The 2,724 names account for just 0.01% of all the Texans who were registered to vote in the November 2024 election. Still, Nelson posted a letter from Trump on X praising her for using the federal database.
The Secretary of State’s office provided a county-by-county list of potential non-citizen registrants. Harris, the state’s largest county, had the most with 362. Dallas had 277, Bexar had 201, Tarrant had 145 and Travis had 97. Of the state’s 254 counties, 85 of them had zero names on the list.
Counties must give the voters 30 days to show proof of citizenship before they can be removed from the rolls. Last year, an investigation by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and Votebeat found that at least nine U.S. citizens were wrongly flagged and had their voter registrations canceled because they did not respond to the letters.
Alicia Pierce, a spokesperson for the Secretary of State’s Office, said anyone removed from the rolls who can show proof of citizenship “will be immediately reinstated.”
However, names of any non-citizens who have been showed to have cast ballots will be turned over the the Texas Attorney General’s office for prosecution.
Past state efforts to purge noncitizens from the voter rolls have been botched.
In 2019, Secretary of State David Whitley ignited a firestorm when he announced that his office had determined that about 95,000 non-citizens were registered to vote and some 58,000 of them had cast ballots in the 2018 elections. It was soon determined that the figures cited were reached using flawed methodologies and included among the names were people who had become naturalized citizens and therefore were legally eligible to vote.