The first time Bobby Robinson got kicked off Tarrant County’s voter roll, he thought it was a glitch.
That was in November. By early March, Robinson had been kicked off — and added back on — the county’s registry of voters two more times, he said. Today, his voter registration appears active online, but he’s not confident it’ll stay that way when it comes time to cast a ballot.
Robinson, 46, has been an active voter in Tarrant County since moving to the area around 2005, according to his county voting record reviewed by the Fort Worth Report. Although the removals didn’t prevent him from voting in recent elections, he worries the repeated mistake could indicate a breach in election integrity and security.
“If we were voting for ‘American Idol’ and my vote didn’t get counted, that’s different — but this is about elections,” Robinson said.
It’s unclear whether Robinson’s removal was a symptom of issues with the county or state’s software. Tarrant is an outlier among Texas counties for hiring a third-party vendor last year to help identify ineligible voters on the voter roll, political science experts told the Report.
Since contracting the outside vendor, the Tarrant County Elections Office mistakenly flagged at least one other voter’s registration: Fort Worth resident Andrew Sims-Kirkland, 39, who received a mailed notice from the county elections office asking him to confirm he was not dead.
Voters across Texas and the country have been mistakenly purged from voter rolls as President Donald Trump’s administration seeks to mass-verify voter citizenship status in an effort to prevent noncitizens from voting illegally. Many states, including Texas, have uploaded their voter rolls to a new federal database that has since been found to incorrectly identify U.S. citizens as noncitizens.
Sims-Kirkland said he was able to verify with the elections office that he is alive but worries that other voters could be unknowingly purged from the voter roll, in a year marked by several consequential elections, including the midterms.
So far this year, Tarrant County voters have elected a new state senator, flipping the historically GOP Texas Senate District 9 blue in a special election to fill a vacancy; chosen party nominees during the March primaries; and weighed in on local bond propositions and charter amendments in the May 2 local elections.
Tarrant County Republicans and Democrats alike have hailed the November midterm elections as pivotal in maintaining — or altering — the county’s historically red political profile. Long hailed as the nation’s largest urban red county, Tarrant County has trended purple in recent years, with voters narrowly supporting Democratic candidates at the top of the ticket.
Robinson and Sims-Kirkland are two drops in the bucket of Tarrant County’s 1.3 million registered voters. But voter registration errors are nearly always cause for concern, political scientists and voting rights advocates told the Report.
“It’s concerning when voters who are legally allowed to vote are being kicked off the voter rolls,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston. “There are a lot of ways in which this can happen. It can be human error, it can be computer error, but the bottom line is that the counties in the state have to do better at policing these voter rolls effectively.”
Tarrant County Elections Administrator Clint Ludwig did not return phone calls or emails seeking comment.
County spokesperson Colby Erichsen did not directly respond to emailed questions about Robinson’s or Sims-Kirkland’s registration, the county’s process for identifying and verifying who to remove from the voter roll or how many individuals have been removed. He said via email that county officials routinely verify voter rolls through state-mandated processes that include removing the names of people who have changed addresses or died.
“These procedures are essential components of (the elections office’s) ongoing list (of) maintenance responsibilities, designed to ensure that Tarrant County’s voter registration records remain as accurate and up‑to‑date as possible,” Erichsen wrote in an email April 24.
Voters question challenges
Robinson said he didn’t know he’d been removed from the voter roll until he was looking for a polling location during the November 2025 election that featured the Senate District 9 election and 17 constitutional amendments. When poll workers couldn’t find him in the voter registry, he cast a provisional ballot.
Robinson couldn’t understand how he had been removed from the roll, he said, because he had updated his address, driver’s and gun licenses, plus voter registration since moving to a new home two years prior. He’d also been summoned to jury duty, he said.
After a series of phone calls to the elections office in November, Robinson was assured he was back on the rolls, he said.
In January, Robinson tried to cast a ballot in the Senate runoff. Once again, a poll worker told him he wasn’t registered. After calling the county elections office, Robinson was able to cast a ballot, he said.
Subsequently a detective from the county sheriff’s office called wanting to ask Robinson for more information about his voting status situation. Robinson said the interview resulted in an ongoing investigation.
A spokesperson for the Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office did not return a request for confirmation that Robinson’s voter registration is under investigation.
When the March primaries came, Robinson thought for sure that his registration would be active. Wrong again.
“I had to call them to be like, ‘Now, this is like the third, fourth time, it’s getting kind of old. I don’t know what to do at this point. Who do I call?’” Robinson said, remembering his phone call to the county elections office in March.
Robinson said county elections officials were able to override the system so he was able to cast his ballot, and instructed him to call the Texas Secretary of State if his registration failed another time.
Alicia Pierce, a spokesperson for the Texas Secretary of State, declined to comment on Robinson’s or Sims-Kirkland’s situations, citing a need to gather information. Voters can check their registration status through the state’s website, she wrote in an emailed statement.
“If a voter is mistakenly removed, they can notify the voter registrar, and their registration will be reinstated with immediate effect,” Pierce wrote.
Repeated removal from the county’s voter roll, whether intentional or not, is troubling because even small obstacles can have “a chilling effect on overall voter participation,” said Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University.
“There’s some people who you can put as many barriers to voting in their way, and they’re always going to hurdle them. But then there’s another group of voters that with one minor barrier, that’s enough to keep them from exercising their right of suffrage,” Jones said.
Sims-Kirkland, the Fort Worth voter, is in the first category Jones mentioned. The funeral home director of 10 years votes in most general elections and some primaries, according to his voting record reviewed by the Report. He never experienced an issue with his registration until last month, when he received the letter saying his registration closely matched information for a deceased person and asking him to verify he was alive.
Sims-Kirkland brought the letter to the county elections office the next day and verified his identity. Voter registrar Linda Herod-Rivas told Sims-Kirkland the county system may have flagged him as a deceased voter because his name appears on so many death certificates because of his job, Sims-Kirkland said.
“And I said, ‘Well, maybe they need new software because I sign a lot of death certificates, and it should not show me as being the deceased if I’m the funeral director,’” Sims-Kirkland said.
When contacted by the Report on May 5, Herod-Rivas said she needed approval from a supervisor to speak to a reporter. She could not be reached after that.
Reason for changes unclear
Repeated removals from the voter roll and incorrect flagging of deceased voters potentially indicates faulty data or information processing by either the vendor managing the state’s voter roll or the one managing the county’s, Jones and Rottinghaus said in separate interviews.
“The efforts of the state to try to aggressively police these voter rolls can often lead to mistakes, and these are the kinds of mistakes that they might make,” Rottinghaus said.
Last summer, the Tarrant County Commissioners Court approved a one-year, $45,000 contract with Florida-based Interactive Data LLC to “aid the elections administration in identifying registered voters who have moved without notifying the office, use commercial addresses as residences or are deceased, enabling accurate determination of voter eligibility.”
Commissioner Alisa Simmons, who is running for the countywide judge seat, was the lone no-vote against the contract. She did not return requests for comment.
A spokesperson for County Judge Tim O’Hare, who is seeking reelection, did not return a request for comment on whether the judge was aware of Tarrant voters being mistakenly removed from voter rolls, or whether he is addressing the issue.
Neither Jones nor Rottinghaus have heard of another county outsourcing such work, although Rottinghaus said he’s not surprised that a county “strapped for time and money” would consider the option.
Interactive Data uses an “extensive database” that promises a “fuller picture of all consumers who have a footprint in the United States,” according to its contract with the county.
The company uses “advanced data analytics tools and technologies” to help its clients “uncover hidden connections, perform risk assessments and make informed decisions” throughout their investigations, according to the contract.
Megan Kappen, Interactive Data’s director of sales who is listed as the point of contact on the Tarrant County contract, did not return requests for comment.
In addition to reviewing the county’s voter rolls, Interactive Data’s recent contracts included gathering intelligence for the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office in Georgia to assist with investigations from 2023 to 2025; and cross-referencing addresses to find the owners of unclaimed goods for the Utah State Treasurer’s unclaimed property division from 2018 to 2026, according to county documents reviewed by the Report.
Traditionally, voters in Texas have remained registered to vote until their county receives formal notice that they have died or moved to a different county. But with a federal spotlight on elections integrity across the nation, Tarrant appears to be taking a more proactive approach to purging its voter roll, Jones said.
It’s unclear to Jones or Rottinghaus whether the errors with Robinson’s and Sims-Kirkland’s registration were due to the state’s software or the county’s, or a combination of both.
At least 87 voters across 29 Texas counties have been misidentified as noncitizens as states across the country use a Department of Homeland Security tool called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, according to an investigation by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune published in February.
Last month, the Texas Secretary of State removed Domingo Garcia, a prominent immigration attorney in Dallas, from the county’s voter rolls because state records showed Garcia was dead. The attorney is working to get his registration reinstated, according to WFAA.
Emphasizing the importance of voter integrity, Jones noted government-led efforts to crack down on alleged illegal voting can have an unintended impact on voter participation. How to weigh the pros and cons of that dynamic is a “philosophical issue” that state’s or county’s elections administrators may respond to differently.
“The more you work to make sure that people who shouldn’t be voting aren’t voting,” Jones said, “The more difficult you make it for people who should be voting to actually vote.”
Cecilia Lenzen is a government accountability reporter for the Fort Worth Report. Contact her at cecilia.lenzen@fortworthreport.org.
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