The Texas secretary of state’s office will pay $450,000 in attorney’s fees to close a lawsuit related to its attempt to block nearly 100,000 people from voting due to their alleged lack of citizenship, according to a settlement.
“After months of litigation, the state has finally agreed to do what we’ve demanded from the start — a complete withdrawal of the flawed and discriminatory voter purge list, bringing this failed experiment in voter suppression to an end,” American Civil Liberties Union legal director for Texas Andre Segura said in a statement.
“We are glad that the state has agreed to give up this misguided effort to eliminate people from the voter rolls, and we will continue to monitor any future voter purge efforts by the state to ensure that no eligible Texan loses their voice in our democracy,” he said.
In January, interim Secretary of State David Whitley issued an advisory that said 95,000 people on Texas voter rolls had obtained driver’s licenses they could use for ID at voting sites but were not U.S. citizens.
Roughly 58,000 of that group had voted in at least one election since 1996. Whitley called on local officials to look into whether non-citizens had illegally voted. However, the list contained 25,000 people who had already proved their U.S. citizenship.
The state was subject to three lawsuits.
Whitley insisted the agreement still “accomplishes our office’s goal of maintaining an accurate list of qualified registered voters while eliminating the impact of any list maintenance activity on naturalized U.S. citizens.”
The state has until Wednesday to rescind the election advisory, and must tell county voter registrars and election administrators not to send additional voter files to the secretary of state’s office.
The settlement does not admit liability.
