A coalition of civil rights organizations has come together to sue Texas officials for trying to purge 100,000 legal voters with inaccurate data.
Read the lawsuit that was filed by The American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, the national ACLU, the Texas Civil Rights Project, Demos, and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law:
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“This exercise is a thinly veiled attempt to advance the voter fraud myth to justify restrictive voter requirements and suppress voting rights,†said Sophia Lakin, staff attorney with the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project. “We’re suing Texas for rolling out this error-ridden voter purge program that unlawfully targets and threatens the voting rights of eligible and duly registered naturalized citizens.”
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Texas Republicans used Trump’s immigrant lies as a cover for a voter purge
“Texas is stirring up anti-immigrant sentiment, undermining the public’s faith in our democracy, and preparing to purge thousands of eligible citizens from the rolls,†said Chiraag Bains, Director of Legal Strategies at Demos. “The Secretary of State is relying on information he knows to be out-of-date and unreliable. He is intentionally targeting new Americans and people of color in order to decrease minority voter participation, in flagrant violation of the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act. We’re asking the federal court to stop the state from undermining the fundamental right to vote.â€
It is not a coincidence that after former Rep. Beto O’Rourke came close to knocking off Ted Cruz and winning a seat in the US Senate, state and local Republican officials responded by trying decrease the eligible minority voting population in Texas.
As the Texas Tribune noted, Republicans in the state went looking for voter fraud, but then everything fell apart.
Republicans can’t win elections based on their ideas, so they try to shape the electorate in their favor by using voter fraud as a cover for voter purges.
It speaks volumes about the weakness of the Republican Party under Trump that the GOP is reduced to pulling this stunt in their biggest reddest state of Texas. If Republicans are that worried about Texas falling, the rest of the party can’t be far behind.
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Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
