In Reality Check stories, Star-Telegram journalists dig deeper into questions over facts, consequences and accountability. Read more. Story idea? RealityCheck@star-telegram.com.
Recent stories of noncitizens registering to vote in the upcoming general election might have led some to believe the activity is rampant in North Texas.
But the number of voter registration applications rejected in Tarrant County because the person is not a U.S. citizen tells a different story.
So far this year, Tarrant County has received and processed around 53,000 voter registrations, according to county spokesperson Bill Hanna.
Of those, 18 have been rejected for not providing proof of citizenship, he said.
That number represents around 0.03% of this year’s voter registration applications in Tarrant County.
The idea that noncitizens were registering to vote en masse in North Texas flared up earlier this week after Fox News personality Maria Bartiromo posted on X Sunday that there was a “massive line of immigrants” registering to vote outside a driver license office in Weatherford.
“None of it is true,” a spokesperson for the Texas Department of Public Safety, which operates the office, told the Star-Telegram on Monday, adding that the idea that a line of nonwhite people waiting to get their IDs were unauthorized immigrants was “kind of racist.”
Brady Gray, chair of the Republican party in Parker County, looked into Bartiromo’s story on Monday and found that “there has been no large submission of registrants consistent with the claim .” He told the Star-Telegram on Wednesday, however, that his findings should not be taken as representative of Texas counties writ large.
Bartiromo mentioned Gray’s post on her morning show on Thursday, then doubled down on her friend’s wife’s account, citing other parts of the DPS spokesperson’s statement to the Star-Telegram: that there was a voter registration booth outside a Lake Worth DPS office on Friday, but not at the other two sites mentioned. She omitted the part of his statement that described her report as untrue.
“I’m told speaker Mike Johnson will move to attach the SAVE Act, which requires proof of citizenship to vote, to a continuing resolution to fund government when Congress returns in September,” she said.
Noncitizens are already prohibited from voting in federal elections by the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996.
Daniel Taylor, a volunteer registrar who was at the Lake Worth registration table on Friday, told the Star-Telegram on Thursday that anyone who says he registered noncitizens to vote is a “damn liar.”
Taylor, who speaks fluent Spanish, said people who are not citizens regularly tell him they are not eligible or that they are still only residents and cannot yet register to vote.
“I resent the allegations which were reported, particularly given that I am a 74-year-old American patriot who was standing in the 100+ heat to encourage his fellow citizens to do their civic duty,” he said in an email.
On Wednesday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton launched an investigation into instances of noncitizens registering to vote in the state. He said he already had several confirmed cases.
The AG’s Office did not respond to multiple requests for more details about the allegedly confirmed cases.
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On Thursday morning, a nonpartisan volunteer deputy registrar who had registered voters outside a Fort Worth DPS office for months was told by employees there that those activities were not permitted without permission from the regional director.
DPS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The volunteer deputy registrar preferred to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation from the AG’s Office, which he credited with the sudden prohibition of registrations outside DPS buildings.
Noncitizens registering to vote is a “non-issue,” according to Sarah Xiyi Chen, a senior supervising attorney for the voting rights division of the Texas Civil Rights Project.
Paxton’s investigation is “yet another example of Texas leaders villainizing immigrants in a harsh and unwarranted manner, she said in an emailed statement.
In the past, the TCRP has had to sue the state to stop it from “discriminatorily flagging tens of thousands of eligible voters” and denying them the right to vote, Chen said. The group has also sued DPS for not abiding by the National Voter Registration Act and leaving voters unsure of whether they registered to vote when renewing their licenses online, she added.
“The reality is that elections officials have processes to ensure only eligible voters cast ballots,” Chen said. “Organizations promoting voter registration have a right to educate the public about the importance of voting and assist eligible citizens to register to vote in accordance with Texas’s already strict voter registration laws.”
Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of Common Cause Texas, which works to expand voting rights in the state, compared the 18 rejected voter registrations in Tarrant County to the millions of Texans who are not registered to vote. Just under 18 million of Texas’ more than 30 million residents are registered to vote, according to census data cited by Austin’s NBC affiliate.
“It seems pretty clear that the bigger problem here is that way too many Texans just aren’t participating in our elections, and the thing that Ken Paxton is paying attention to is really a nonissue,” he said.
Correction: An earlier version of this story miscalculated the percentage of the county’s rejected voter registrations.
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