Today, a pre-litigation notice letter was sent to the Texas Secretary of State on behalf of a number of Texas citizens. This letter from Battleground Texas cites clear evidence that the State of Texas is violating its federally mandated responsibility to ensure that all eligible Texas citizens get the opportunity to register to vote during their interactions with the Texas Department of Public Safety.
With bipartisan support, Congress passed the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) in 1993 to increase the number of citizens registered to vote in federal elections. It is often referred to as the “motor voter” law because it requires states to treat a driver’s license application or renewal as a voter registration application if the applicant chooses to register to vote. If the applicant is already a registered voter, the State must update the existing voter registration with any new information supplied on a driver’s license application, renewal, or change of address form.
The NVRA is intended to making voter registration convenient and efficient by making it available when people are accessing other government services. The NVRA has in many ways been a great success, but unfortunately in some places its requirements are ignored and only a small number of voters are getting registered through motor vehicle departments, like the Texas Department of Public Safety (“DPS”). Even more concerning, as the stories in the notice letter demonstrate, DPS and election officials in Texas are often failing to properly process the information eligible individuals provide during their DPS transactions about voter registration; so people think they have registered to vote only to find out on Election Day, when it is often too late to address the mistake, that they are not actually registered vote through no fault of their own.
We hope that the Texas Secretary of State and officials at DPS take this letter seriously and work to fix the problems so that registering to vote can be easy, simple and accessible for millions of Texas citizens, achieving the purpose of the NVRA.
Project Vote is a national nonpartisan, nonprofit 501(c)(3) that works to empower, educate, and mobilize low-income, minority, youth, and other marginalized and under-represented voters. Project Vote has been working for years on getting states to comply with their obligations under the NVRA and would be thrilled to see some progress made in Texas by the DPS.