Sanity has prevailed in the great Texas quest to find "potentially deceased" people, dead or alive.
It started last year in the Legislature when lawmakers passed a bill described as an effort to clean up local voter registration rolls and prevent voting fraud.Legislators wanted the secretary of state and county voter registrars to check their voter rolls against the Social Security Administration's list of dead people.Dead people can't vote, and nobody should be voting for them.But county voter registrars, who in Tarrant County and many other places are also the county election administrators, were buried in work to redraw voting precincts according to the Legislature's redistricting maps.Court action delayed and finally changed the redistricting maps, so the local work also was delayed.Secretary of State Hope Andrade sorted through the Social Security Administration's dead people list and found the names of about 80,000 people to be checked for aliveness.Many of those names came up as "strong matches" of dead people's Social Security numbers. But many others were "weak matches," meaning part of the Social Security number matched but not all of it.County officials culled the strong matches and eliminated many names from the voter rolls. Those that they could not be sure of, the "potentially deceased," were sent letters.People who got the letters but were not dead were given just 30 days to speak up or be stricken from the voter rolls. In Tarrant County, the deadline was set as next Tuesday.That means some live people could have problems voting in the Nov. 6 general election.Confusion reigned. Some very-alive voters filed a lawsuit in Austin.Now, Andrade and the attorneys in that suit have reached a settlement: County voter registrars can take as long as they need to produce accurate rolls.Victory for live voters.Have more to add? News tip? Tell us
