Tuesday, the Texas secretary of state submitted additional information to the Justice Department “in an effort to ensure the state’s controversial voter ID law is implemented on time,” the Texas Tribune, a nonpartisan, nonprofit media organization, reports.
To ensure the state law would not negatively affect minorities, the DOJ requested information on the racial breakdown of the 605,500 registered voters who do not currently have state-issued photo ID, particularly those with Latino names. The department also requested more information on the voter education program that is supposed to inform Texans of the new voting requirement.
According to the Tribune:
“The state, though, does not collect race information from voter. So the secretary of state instead submitted to the Department of Justice a list of all the Hispanic surnames in Texas, as recorded by the U.S. Census Bureau. It offered to check that list against the list of registered voters to determine how many voters have Hispanic names. The DOJ refused to comment when asked last week if the state’s inability to provide the racial breakdown as requested would delay or even prevent the preclearance request.
The secretary of state also gave the Department of Justice a spreadsheet showing how many registered voters reside in each county as of Sept. 16. It shows how many voters did not provide an ID when they registered to vote, how many voters did not provide an ID but whose records matched an ID record in the DPS database (which means they have been issued an ID) and those who did not provide an ID and could not be matched with a DPS record.”