Updated with Secretary of State Jane Nelson’s Response
As Texas prepares for the 2024 General Election, Attorney General Ken Paxton has made election integrity a central focus of his efforts.
In a letter addressed to Secretary of State Jane Nelson, Paxton urged the state’s top election official to take decisive action in verifying the citizenship of certain registered voters.
The letter comes in response to ongoing concerns about federal limitations that hinder Texas’ ability to confirm the citizenship of individuals registering to vote. According to Paxton, federal laws have imposed significant restrictions on states, making it increasingly difficult to verify citizenship for voters, despite it being illegal for non-citizens to cast a ballot.
“Texas has acutely felt the pain of nearly four years of the Biden-Harris administration’s disastrous open-border policies,” Paxton wrote, emphasizing that the influx of illegal immigration and restrictive federal laws regarding voter verification have left states like Texas with limited tools to ensure that only eligible citizens are voting.
Paxton also highlighted that the federal government has a statutory duty to assist states in identifying non-citizen voters. He urged Nelson to exercise her office’s authority to demand this assistance.
To that end, Paxton attached a proposed letter for Nelson to send to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, requesting their help in verifying the citizenship of a “relatively small percentage” of voters registered through methods that do not confirm citizenship.
That list contains approximately one million people.
On Wednesday afternoon, Nelson issued her own letter to the USCIS Director Ur M Jaddou, which differed in language from the version Paxton offered:
I hereby request your assistance in verifying or ascertaining the citizenship or immigration status of certain individuals on the State of Texas’s voter rolls. The Office is in the process of compiling a list of individuals on Texas’s voter rolls whose citizenship cannot be verified using existing state sources. Please inform my staff immediately of the appropriate procedures for the Office to provide you with identifying information for these individuals. I ask that you provide all of the requested citizenship
information by October 2, 2024.
