Since the last presidential election, voter registration numbers in Texas have dropped by more than 130,000. The state has 18.5 million registered voters — but the dip in the rolls is the biggest in more than a decade.
Jeremy Wallace, who covers Texas politics for the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News, said the dip runs contrary to recent trends.
“Over the last decade, we’ve seen a consistent growth of the voter registration rolls year after year after year,” he said. “What this really goes to is that the state is doing a much better job of cleaning their voter rolls. At least that’s how they’ve presented it to me.
“What they’ve been doing, if you’ve been following the Texas Legislature over the last few years, they’re trying to make county governments, who maintain the county lists, make sure that they are trimming people off the list who have passed away, who have moved, or whatever reason are no longer qualified voters.”
The state has made it so counties have to go through that list more regularly. But, Wallace said, the state has tried to learn from past mistakes when people were taken off the voter rolls erroneously.
“I talked to state Senator Paul Bettencourt, a Republican from Houston who does a lot of this legislation, and he recognizes it was just done wrong before,” Wallace said. “He said they’re getting better at doing it, they’re bringing in people who are really paying closer attention.”
» MORE: Texas flags more than 2,700 ‘potential noncitizens’ on voter rolls
Wallace said the state has a process to see if someone needs to be removed from the voter rolls.
“What that typically happens, like if you’ve moved away, they’ll send a postcard to see if it comes back through the mail. And so that puts you on a suspended list,” Wallace said. “And then if you don’t vote for two consecutive cycles, then they start taking you off the rolls.
“So there’s some safety valves in there to make sure that if you just didn’t put in your change of address or something like that, you’re still gonna have a chance to vote.”
With these changes in policy, Wallace said voting rights groups encourage everyone to double-check their voter registration at votetexas.gov.
» GET MORE NEWS FROM AROUND THE STATE: Sign up for Texas Standard’s weekly newsletters
And despite the decrease in the rolls in advance of the upcoming Nov. 4 election, Wallace said he expects to see record voter registration in Texas ahead of next year’s midterms.
“Texas is still growing really fast,” he said. “In places like Collin County, even as they had the vote rolls cleared off, they still added more voters. They actually added two voters in this time period, even as they were having people removed from the rolls.
“And so there’s still that growth going on, and I can guarantee you by the time we get to the next election, in the midterms election next year, we’re gonna set another record for voter registration. I have no doubt that we’re gonna get close to 19 million registered voters by the time the governor’s race gets into full swing next year.”
