Kenneth Rivera, who graduated from the University of Houston in 2021 and now works in finance, had been reading about the one million people who had been purged from voter rolls in Texas. Less than two months away from the presidential election day, 12% of all voters (17 million) in the state, i.e., over 2.1 million voter registrations, have been in “suspense” and may be unable to vote.
It concerned Rivera and prompted him to check his status online on the Texas Secretary of State website. His registration, too, was put on “suspense.”
In Texas, the state law allows private individuals who are registered voters in counties to challenge the voter registration status of others in their county. Conservative groups like True the Vote and activists are being accused of trying to remove thousands of voters from the rolls, claiming the voters do not live in the county, are not citizens, or have died. The state’s voter protections require that all such challenges are made through written and sworn statements reliant on the accuser’s personal knowledge.
On the flip side, election officials are saying these challenges are introducing complications to their work on top of their duties to keep the voter rolls updated, assuring voters they cannot be improperly removed even when someone challenges their eligibility in accordance with state and federal laws.
Rivera, originally from Austin, moved to Houston for higher education and then to Dallas for a job in March 2022. He has to register afresh to vote every cycle by updating his address because “someone always challenges” his registration to vote within Dallas County.
“It’s really weird because I have the same address on my license. I’ve only moved once, so it’s just a really weird, a really weird process,” he told the Defender.
Upon receiving a voter registration challenge, the county has to send a “Confirmation Notice” to the voter whose registration has been challenged, requesting further information to confirm the accuracy of the information provided in their registration.
Rivera says he did not receive any such notice. He only checked his status after watching a television show that said Texas has been purging voters and putting registrations in suspense.
Your registration is in “suspense.” Now what?
Ending up on the “suspense list” does not mean a voter cannot cast a ballot. When one receives the notice of confirmation, they must fill it out and mail it back within 30 days to be removed from the list and vote in the next two general elections.
Or, the voter must vote from their old precinct, and the election judge will require them to sign a residence statement before voting.
Election officials told the Defender that people must update their addresses every time they move and re-register if they change counties. If they fail to do so, when the new card arrives every two years, their card will be returned because a voter registration card cannot be forwarded. This triggers a letter and is often ignored by voters.
According to the Texas Civil Rights Project, if someone receives a confirmation notice, they should not ignore it, forget about it, or throw it away. Instead, they should check the status of their voter registration either online or by contacting their county’s voter registrar and reply to the notice with the requested information within 30 days.
If they fail to do so, their name will appear on a list of nonresidents in their county and on the suspense list, with an “S” mark next to their name on the voter rolls.
If someone is moving, the Texas voter is required to update their register by filling out a new voter registration application.
Would these processes be too much of a hassle for young voters?
At a time when Texas is facing a decline in the number of young voters, Rivera feels it should be easier to register to vote. Among the state’s 409,000 18-year-old citizens per the U.S. Census Bureau, only around 40% of voters aged 18-24 were registered to vote in November 2022, the biggest decline since the previous midterm election in 2018. The number of voters who cast ballots was even lower, with only about half the registered voters in this age group voting.
Moreover, a Harvard Youth poll says the 2020 election cycle saw more voters under 30 than the upcoming one. Especially among Black youth, disenfranchisement, racism, and ongoing social injustices have made them skeptical about the democratic process.
“I feel like it should be so easy to register to vote. If you can renew your driver’s license online, you should be able to renew your voter registration online without having to go to an office or send anything in,” Rivera said. “Those kinds of things really disenfranchise people from exercising their right to vote because the more difficult it is to vote, the less likely people are to do it.”
Voting Rights Activist Stacey Abrams, who was the first African-American female major-party gubernatorial nominee in the 2018 and 2022 Georgia gubernatorial elections, says cynicism regarding voting is “inherited” and that every generation goes through it.
She has observed that the way political leaders address young voters is to lecture them or telling them people have laid down their lives so they could vote. It is by convincing them they have something to gain out of the electoral process.
“It is not a persuasive argument. Telling people that it’s your responsibility does not persuade people,” she said during a panel titled “Unsuppressed” at the Texas Tribune Festival. “What is persuasive is connecting the dots between the act of voting and the outcome you want.”
There are pervading issues that will only be resolved if voters decide to act upon them by voting.
“Voting is cumulative. Voting is medicine and if you don’t take our medicine, we get sicker,” she said. “What’s even worse is that if the other guys are the disease. We’ve gotta take that medicine over and over again and sometimes it’s more bitter and it feels worse than the disease itself. Your job is to contextualize it for your friends, not through lecture but through engagement.”
How is Harris County doing in terms of voter registrations?
Despite the myriad challenges to voting in Texas, the number of registered voters has been steadily rising for the last five years, from 2,504,659 in 2020 to 2,668,517 in 2024 (as of Sep. 11, 2024).
