Three civil rights organizations have gone to federal court seeking records on why more than half a million Texas voter registration applications were held up this fall, Houston Public Media reported Wednesday.
The NAACP, its Texas chapter and the Texas chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens filed the suit in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas against Secretary of State Robert Howden and Department of Public Safety Director Freeman F. Martin. They allege violations of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, often called the Motor Voter law.
The case follows reports that registration transactions submitted through DPS were not sent to counties for processing until late September. A second technical problem left a backlog of about 15,000 unprocessed registrations as of Oct. 16, three days before early voting started.
What the groups want
Bradley Heard, a deputy legal director at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which represents the groups, said they asked the state for the records on Oct. 8 and wanted an answer within 10 business days. Instead, he said, the state told them it would not estimate the cost of producing the records until Nov. 6, three days after the election.
If counties have caught up, Heard said, the state should be able to show when the registrations were processed, how many and where.
