Hi, y’all!

With the primary election now behind us, I’d like to hear about your experience at the polls.

The election across the state appears to have run smoothly this week, although in Fort Bend County in East Texas, a technical malfunction may have prevented some voters from casting a ballot on Election Day. I’m trying to get to the bottom of what went wrong and what election officials are doing to ensure it doesn’t happen again ahead of the November election.

How did things go where you live? Is there anything I should keep an eye on? Shoot me a message at [email protected].

In other news, last year we reported that the state had used a federal database to verify the citizenship status of the more than 18 million Texans on the voter roll. As a result, it flagged more than 2,000 registrants as potential noncitizens. Soon after, county election officials found that many of them had registered at the Texas Department of Public Safety while obtaining a driver’s license or a state ID. The agency requires proof of citizenship or lawful presence.

But the state told me last fall that it didn’t check the list of potential noncitizens against those driver’s license records before sending it to county officials to investigate. At the time, officials with the Texas Secretary of State’s Office didn’t elaborate on why they hadn’t done so.

During a meeting with county election officials earlier this month, the Secretary of State’s Office’s elections division director said the state is now checking the list of more than 2,000 potential noncitizens against driver’s license records to confirm their status. I obtained an audio recording of the meeting. You can read the details and more on why the state didn’t check the data in my new story.

I’ll be following up on this and other voter registration issues in Texas, so stay tuned.

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The Big Story

Texas is cross-referencing its list of potential noncitizen voters with driver’s license records

The state last year used the federal SAVE database to identify potential noncitizens on the voter roll. They’re now checking if some flagged voters already provided proof of citizenship to the Texas Department of Public Safety.