Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has filed a lawsuit against the Biden-Harris administration, challenging its refusal to verify the citizenship status of approximately 450,000 Texas voters who may be ineligible to vote.
Paxton’s suit names Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and USCIS Director Ur M. Jaddou, asserting that the federal government’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program does not meet Texas’s needs for confirming voter eligibility.
“While the majority of the voters on the list are likely citizens who are eligible to vote, Texans have no way of knowing whether or not any of the voters on the list are noncitizens who are ineligible to vote without additional information,” Paxton wrote in the announcement of the lawsuit.
The case hinges on Texas’s claim that these voters registered without state-issued identification, which has raised concerns among Texas Republicans about noncitizens potentially being included on the voter rolls. Paxton argues that Texas’s voter registration system lacks the DHS identifiers necessary to use SAVE effectively.
“For one thing, the SAVE program is designed to confirm a person’s lawful presence in the United States; it is not an adequate tool, on its own, for a state seeking to verify the citizenship status of an individual on the voter rolls,” Paxton wrote in the lawsuit.
“In addition, the SAVE service requires the use of, among other things, a ‘unique DHS-issued immigration identifier’ — information that is not maintained by, or readily available to, the Secretary of State of Texas or Texas’s voter registrars.”
