Harris County has cancelled nearly 8,000 voter registrations this year for a reason the state lists simply as “investigation,” about three times as many as during the same months last year, according to an ABC13 analysis of state records.

County and state election officials say the increase reflects routine voter-roll maintenance that Harris County had to put off while it ran back-to-back elections, then caught up on after the March primary.

What the records show

Every month, the Texas Secretary of State publishes a report showing how many voter registrations each of the state’s 254 counties cancelled, and why. ABC13 analyzed all 161 of those reports, from March 2013 through July 2026, the most recent one posted.

According to those reports, Harris County cancelled 7,942 registrations for “investigation” from January through July 2026. That compares with 2,530 over the same months of 2025, and it’s the highest January-through-July total since 2014.

The increase began in March. Harris County averaged about 300 of these cancellations a month in January and February, according to the state’s reports. It recorded 1,211 in March, 1,337 in April, 1,496 in May, 2,001 in June and 1,269 in July.

Statewide, “investigation” cancellations were in their usual range. Harris County accounted for about half of them, 49%, up from about 19% over the same months last year.

What the county says

In a written statement, the Harris County voter registrar’s office said an “investigation” begins when it receives information that a registration may need review. That can come from the Secretary of State, from county sources such as jury records, or from challenges filed by other voters.

The Secretary of State regularly sends the county lists of voters who may have died, have a disqualifying felony conviction or have been declared mentally incapacitated by a court, the office said.

“Following the March primary election, our office was able to dedicate additional staff and resources toward investigating voter registration records flagged for review by the SOS,” the statement said.

The county said every voter under review is sent a notice, and a registration is cancelled only if the voter doesn’t respond within 30 days, as Texas law requires.

The office said it could not provide a breakdown of the cancellations by reason before the election because it must review each response individually. It said it would provide that data after the election.

What the state says

The Secretary of State’s office pointed to two factors. Harris is “the largest population county in the state,” spokesperson Alicia Pierce said in an email. And because of a special election for Congress in January 2026, she said, “there was a limited window for Harris County to conduct large-scale list maintenance when other counties were able to do so.”

That election was the Jan. 31 runoff for the unexpired term in the former 18th Congressional District.

Pierce noted that the National Voter Registration Act prohibits large-scale list maintenance in the 90 days before an election with federal candidates on the ballot.

The state has not posted its August or September cancellation reports. Pierce said she wasn’t sure when they would be posted and that election offices may be delayed as they prepare for Nov. 3.

The non-citizen numbers

Non-citizen voting has been a central issue in this election. The state’s monthly reports track it as a separate cancellation reason.

According to those reports, Texas counties cancelled 27 registrations for non-citizenship in all of 2025, and 8 from January through July 2026. Harris County recorded none from the start of 2024 through July 2026.

The Secretary of State’s office said that category reflects people who indicated on a jury summons that they are not citizens, or who contacted their elections office to say so.

Last fall, the office ran the state’s more than 18 million registered voters through SAVE, a federal citizenship database. According to the state, the check flagged 2,724 people as potential non-citizens and sent their names to county election offices to investigate. Counties cancelled the registrations of those who did not respond to a notice within 30 days, the Texas Tribune reported.

The state has not said how many people were removed as a result. But statewide “investigation” cancellations jumped to 9,303 in December 2025, about five times a typical month, according to the state’s reports. Asked why, Pierce said cancellations often rise after a statewide election, like the constitutional election in November 2025, and that “some of the investigations from the SAVE database may be part of this number,” since notices sent in October would have expired in time to show up in December.

In a Sept. 15 news release, the Secretary of State’s office said 578 of the flagged voters had shown they were U.S. citizens, 506 of them because their passport information was added to SAVE after the state’s initial check. The office said it advised counties to reinstate those voters if they had been removed. It also said it had referred 117 cases to the Texas Attorney General’s office for investigation.

The same day, the Attorney General’s office and federal prosecutors announced charges against seven people in Tarrant County, accusing them of voting while not U.S. citizens, according to the Texas Tribune.

The Harris County voter registrar’s office said it “did not erroneously cancel anyone flagged by the SAVE database.” It did not say how many SAVE-flagged voters it cancelled.

How often is fraud prosecuted?

The most recent statewide count ABC13 could find comes from the Attorney General’s office, which told the Texas Tribune in March 2023 that it had successfully prosecuted 155 people for election fraud since 2005.

Over about the same period, Texans cast nearly 67 million votes in November general elections alone, according to Secretary of State turnout records. That’s about one prosecution for every 430,000 votes, not counting primaries or local elections.

That count does not include cases handled only by local district attorneys. A 2021 ruling by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals also limited the Attorney General’s ability to prosecute election crimes on its own, until lawmakers voted in 2025 to expand that authority.

How to check your registrationGo to VoteTexas.gov and click “Am I Registered?”If you aren’t on the list at your polling place, Texas law lets you cast a provisional ballot.Harris County says an election judge can call its office to verify your registration at the polls.If you think your registration was cancelled by mistake, the Harris County voter registrar’s office asks you to call 713-274-VOTE (8683).

How we did this: ABC13 downloaded all 161 monthly Cancellation Trend Reports from the Texas Secretary of State’s website and extracted every county’s figures using two independent methods, which matched on all 440,797 values. The reports’ categories changed over the years. The state’s voter registration system was also overhauled in July 2025, after which cancellations recorded as “Duplicate – State” fell from about 32,000 a month to about 200; the Secretary of State’s office did not say whether the overhaul changed how those are recorded.

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