Politics

Conservative Group Seeks Records About ‘Thousands’ Of Noncitizen Voters In Texas

Daily Caller News Foundation logo
Will Racke Immigration and Foreign Policy Reporter
Font Size:

A right-leaning legal nonprofit says it will sue Texas’ largest county if it doesn’t produce records in connection with thousands of noncitizens who somehow made it on to the county’s voter rolls.

The Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), an Indiana-based law firm that focuses on election integrity issues, sent Monday a notice to the Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector threatening a federal lawsuit if officials continue to withhold documents the group had requested about voters who had not met citizenship requirements for registration.

In December, PILF asked Harris County officials to turn over certain voter information, part of a broader campaign to investigate the improper registration of noncitizens in jurisdictions across the country. County officials denied the request, asserting that voter registration records were exempt from Texas open records laws.

SEN CORY BOOKER (D-NJ) REFERS TO ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS AS AMERICAN CITIZENS:

PILF has countered that Harris County is obligated to provide voter registration records under the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, which allows private citizens to inspect “records concerning the implementation of programs and activities conducted for the purpose of ensuring accuracy and currency of official lists of eligible voters.”

Logan Churchwell, PILF’s communications and research director, claims Harris County officials are “digging in their heels” to fight the group’s records request, despite their previous on-the-record admissions that noncitizen voting has occurred there. Compared to other Texas counties that have readily turned over voter registration documents to PILF, Harris County has been curiously uncooperative, he says.

“What’s particularly interesting about Harris is that you have multiple points in recent history where officials have gone on record and said, ‘Yeah, it’s happening, it’s a problem,'” Churchwell told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Under Texas law, county tax assessor-collectors also serve as voter registrars, and are responsible for ensuring that all voters meet eligibility requirements, including U.S. citizenship. At just over 4 million residents, Harris County is the most populous in Texas and the third largest in the country. About one quarter of all Harris County residents are foreign-born.

On at least two occasions, the Harris County voter registrar has publicly admitted that the county has problems keeping noncitizens off the voter rolls. In 2006, then-Voter Registrar Paul Bettencourt, a Republican, testified before a Congressional committee that voting by foreign nationals “has and will continue to occur.”

More recently, former Voter Registrar Mike Sullivan, also a Republican, told the Texas House Elections Committee in a 2015 hearing that county officials regularly discover hundreds of noncitizens on the voter rolls each month. Sullivan confirmed the annual tally of noncitizen registrants to be in the “low thousands” in Harris County alone.

ALSO WATCH:

The National Voter Registration Act gives private groups the ability to sue local jurisdictions that don’t comply with records requests made pursuant to the law. PILF says it is prepared to file a federal lawsuit within the next 90 days if Harris County doesn’t hand over the voter registration information it has requested.

“This isn’t a question about the existence of alien voting — but the scale,” PILF President and General Counsel J. Christian Adams said in a statement Monday. “We will go to federal court if we must to obtain these public records.”

Churchwell speculated that one reason Harris County regularly winds up with noncitizens on its voter rolls could be that third party registration groups target immigrants with poor English language ability who don’t understand voter registration laws. He called the situation a “double-edged problem” that could put immigrants in legal danger for violating state voting laws.

“We have an immigration problem, where immigrants who may not know as much as they should are getting trapped in this system, or we have people that are intentionally breaking the law,” Churchwell told TheDCNF. “And we can’t know any of that until Harris County does its duty and releases these records to the public.”

A spokesperson for the Harris County tax assessor-collector’s office was unable to comment on PILF’s document request, saying only that the matter had been referred to the Texas attorney general’s office for further review.

PILF says it intends to pursue further voter registration data in Texas’ major metro areas and border counties. Last month, it delivered to Bexar Country, which contains San Antonio, a similar notice to the one given to Harris County on Monday.

The group has used public records searches to uncover improper voter registration in several states including Virginia, where it found more than 5,000 noncitizens had been removed from voter roles between 2011 and 2017. About one-third of those registrants had voted in at least one election.

Follow Will on Twitter

Send tips to will@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Freedom of Speech Isn’t Free
The Daily Caller News Foundation is working hard to balance out the biased American media. For as little as $3, you can help us. Make a one-time donation to support the quality, independent journalism of TheDCNF. We’re not dependent on commercial or political support and we do not accept any government funding.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

PREMIUM ARTICLE: Subscribe To Keep Reading

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign Up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
BENEFITS READERS PASS PATRIOTS FOUNDERS
Daily and Breaking Newsletters
Daily Caller Shows
Ad Free Experience
Exclusive Articles
Custom Newsletters
Editor Daily Rundown
Behind The Scenes Coverage
Award Winning Documentaries
Patriot War Room
Patriot Live Chat
Exclusive Events
Gold Membership Card
Tucker Mug

What does Founders Club include?

Tucker Mug and Membership Card
Founders

Readers,

Instead of sucking up to the political and corporate powers that dominate America, The Daily Caller is fighting for you — our readers. We humbly ask you to consider joining us in this fight.

Now that millions of readers are rejecting the increasingly biased and even corrupt corporate media and joining us daily, there are powerful forces lined up to stop us: the old guard of the news media hopes to marginalize us; the big corporate ad agencies want to deprive us of revenue and put us out of business; senators threaten to have our reporters arrested for asking simple questions; the big tech platforms want to limit our ability to communicate with you; and the political party establishments feel threatened by our independence.

We don't complain -- we can't stand complainers -- but we do call it how we see it. We have a fight on our hands, and it's intense. We need your help to smash through the big tech, big media and big government blockade.

We're the insurgent outsiders for a reason: our deep-dive investigations hold the powerful to account. Our original videos undermine their narratives on a daily basis. Even our insistence on having fun infuriates them -- because we won’t bend the knee to political correctness.

One reason we stand apart is because we are not afraid to say we love America. We love her with every fiber of our being, and we think she's worth saving from today’s craziness.

Help us save her.

A second reason we stand out is the sheer number of honest responsible reporters we have helped train. We have trained so many solid reporters that they now hold prominent positions at publications across the political spectrum. Hear a rare reasonable voice at a place like CNN? There’s a good chance they were trained at Daily Caller. Same goes for the numerous Daily Caller alumni dominating the news coverage at outlets such as Fox News, Newsmax, Daily Wire and many others.

Simply put, America needs solid reporters fighting to tell the truth or we will never have honest elections or a fair system. We are working tirelessly to make that happen and we are making a difference.

Since 2010, The Daily Caller has grown immensely. We're in the halls of Congress. We're in the Oval Office. And we're in up to 20 million homes every single month. That's 20 million Americans like you who are impossible to ignore.

We can overcome the forces lined up against all of us. This is an important mission but we can’t do it unless you — the everyday Americans forgotten by the establishment — have our back.

Please consider becoming a Daily Caller Patriot today, and help us keep doing work that holds politicians, corporations and other leaders accountable. Help us thumb our noses at political correctness. Help us train a new generation of news reporters who will actually tell the truth. And help us remind Americans everywhere that there are millions of us who remain clear-eyed about our country's greatness.

In return for membership, Daily Caller Patriots will be able to read The Daily Caller without any of the ads that we have long used to support our mission. We know the ads drive you crazy. They drive us crazy too. But we need revenue to keep the fight going. If you join us, we will cut out the ads for you and put every Lincoln-headed cent we earn into amplifying our voice, training even more solid reporters, and giving you the ad-free experience and lightning fast website you deserve.

Patriots will also be eligible for Patriots Only content, newsletters, chats and live events with our reporters and editors. It's simple: welcome us into your lives, and we'll welcome you into ours.

We can save America together.

Become a Daily Caller Patriot today.

Signature

Neil Patel