State of Texas sued by government watchdog for 'unlawfully discriminating against and intimidating voters'
Texas unconstitutionally discriminated against nearly 100,000 people by supplying local authorities with a list that claimed their voter registrations might be illegal, according to a lawsuit filed in federal court by non-partisan government accountability watchdogs.
On Friday, the Campaign Legal Center (CLC) and the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) filed a 21-page lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas alleging that Texas Secretary of State David Whitley and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton violated both the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act by issuing an inaccurate advisory based on outdated information.
The complaint alleges that Whitley and Paxton unlawfully targeted 95,000 recently-naturalized Texans who had previously indicated they were not citizens but who are currently registered to vote. The problem, according to LULAC and CLC, is that those prior non-citizen declarations were made at the time the people included on the list applied for their first driver’s licenses in the Lone Star State. Since then, however, many of those same people have become citizens and therefore eligible voters.