Texas has entered into an agreement with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to use faulty data to purge Texans from the voter rolls ahead of the midterm elections.
Every American citizen, regardless of where they are born, should have the freedom to vote. But Texas’ latest actions threaten that freedom to vote for potentially thousands of naturalized citizens in the state and violates the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA).
Campaign Legal Center, on behalf of the League of United Latin Americans (LULAC) and Common Cause, is suing Texas to end this illegal voter purge program so that all Texas voters can make their voices heard.
Texas is illegally attempting to purge voters from its rolls.
On October 21, 2025, Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson sent a directive to county election administrators notifying them that the secretary had sent them a list of voters flagged by the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system, maintained by USCIS. These election administrators were then instructed to consider any flagged individuals as ineligible voters to be investigated.
The data in the SAVE system is unreliable. Its usage risks misidentifying naturalized American citizens and purging eligible voters.
States like Texas that rely solely on SAVE, with no further investigation to ensure the data is accurate, end up purging Americans from the rolls, oftentimes newly naturalized citizens, even though they have the freedom to vote just like any other American.
Recently naturalized citizens are disproportionately targeted because driver’s licenses and other databases, like those relied on by SAVE, are often outdated and may still flag them for removal, even though they have naturalized since that data was initially entered into these systems.
Section 8(b) of the NVRA states that voter list maintenance must occur uniformly and cannot be conducted in a discriminatory manner. However, Texas' use of unreliable and stale data to conduct voter purges disproportionately affects naturalized citizens.
Additionally, Texas’ choice to rely blindly on SAVE-provided data is particularly troublesome given Secretary Nelson’s failure to cross-check that data against the state’s own available data that could confirm citizenship through the Department of Public Safety (DPS) before putting voter registrations on the chopping block.
Texas’ use of the SAVE system without any investigation, including cross-checking its own DPS records to confirm citizenship where possible, puts naturalized Americans at a disproportional and improper risk of being illegally purged from the voter rolls.
Campaign Legal Center is challenging voter purge programs across the country.
We already have strict laws in place that ensure only U.S. citizens can vote in federal elections. Voter purge programs like the one in Texas only serve to stop Americans from making their voices heard.
In the first legal challenge to an ongoing purge based on SAVE-provided data, Campaign Legal Center is urging a federal court to block this voter purge program in Texas.
This lawsuit follows our effort to challenge a voter purge statute with similar flaws in Ohio ahead of the 2026 elections, as well as lawsuits in Alabama and Virginia filed prior to the 2024 presidential election.
These voter purges are illegal, and Campaign Legal Center will continue to fight them through litigation and advocacy to ensure all Americans have the freedom to vote. What we are seeing in Texas is part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to pressure states to use error-prone methods for cutting back their voter rolls.
Join us today as we work to preserve the freedom to vote for all Americans.