Tarrant County is paying for new software to clean up its voter rolls, which could help elections staff stay ahead of thousands of voter registration challenges, according to the county elections administrator.
In Texas and other states, people can challenge other residents' voter registrations. The Houston-based nonprofit True the Vote has driven mass challenges across the country. The organization created an app called IV3 that makes it easy to compare public records and make thousands of challenges at a time, with the goal of preventing what True the Vote calls “election manipulation.”
At a meeting Tuesday, Tarrant County commissioners approved $46,000 for a year's access to skip-tracing software, often used by debt collectors.
The software will help identify people who may have died or moved away to keep the local voter rolls current, Elections Administrator Clint Ludwig told KERA News Thursday.
"This is kind of a way that we can check the information we have against the most current information available,” Ludwig said.
Skip-tracing gets its name because it helps find people who have skipped town, according to Thomson Reuters, a company that offers the service.
The software gives the county a wider range of public records to consult, Ludwig explained. His office already gets a report of everyone who has died in Tarrant County each month, but that doesn’t include Tarrant County voters who died somewhere else, he said. The skip-tracing software does include that information.
A small group of people in Tarrant County sent in more than 15,000 voter registration challenges from January to August last year, according to documents obtained in a public records request. More than half came from one person. One of the challengers told KERA News she was concerned about fraudulent voters impersonating dead people on the rolls — an extremely rare crime, according to PolitiFact.
Officials in Denton County, Collin County and other counties around the U.S. have reported similar floods of challenges.
Elections officials say many of the challenges rely on outdated information, and most of the registrations they flag have already been reviewed, KERA News reported last year.
Tarrant County’s new software is not necessarily a response to voter registration challenges, Ludwig said, but it will help his office get ahead of them, lessening the load on his staff.
“A byproduct of us being able to be more accurate would reduce those challenges, because now there's less sitting there to challenge," Ludwig said Thursday.
Ludwig emphasized this is not a voter purge. People don’t just get kicked off the voter rolls if someone challenges their registration. The elections office sends them an address confirmation in the mail, and if they don’t respond, they’re placed “on suspense,” Chris McGinn, executive director of the Texas Association of County Election Officials, previously told KERA News. People on suspense can update their address at the polls.
At Tuesday’s meeting, the software contract was bundled up in a single vote with several other items. Democratic County Commissioner Alisa Simmons was the sole “no” vote.
Right before she voted no, Simmons questioned Ludwig over whether the software was necessary. Ludwig suggested it could save the county money on voter registration checks in the long run, but Simmons pressed for hard numbers.
“How do you know it'll be cost savings? You've not done any analytics,” she said. “This is a feeling.”
"It’s not a feeling, commissioner. I mean, we received over 14,000 challenges from the public last year,” Ludwig said.
There’s been no influx of challenges again this year, Ludwig said Thursday, but he expects them to ramp up again ahead of the midterm elections in 2026.
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