North Texas counties say they’re looking into hundreds of registered voters who may not be U.S. citizens — a tiny proportion of all people on the local voter rolls, according to state data.
Out of the more than 18 million registered voters in Texas, 2,700 are potentially noncitizens, Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson announced in a press release this week. Any voter registrations that raised concerns have been sent to individual counties for investigation.
In Dallas, Tarrant, Denton and Collin counties, the flagged voters represent a fraction of all registrations. The state flagged:
- 277 voters in Dallas County
- 145 voters in Tarrant County
- 84 voters in Denton County
- 109 voters in Collin County
That's 0.01% to 0.02% of registered voters in those counties, based on March 2024 voter registration data.
"Though it’s not a big number on the face of it, I do see the importance of having well-maintained voter rolls,” Collin County Elections Administrator Kaleb Breaux said.
The next step is to review the flagged registrations, Breaux explained. If someone's citizenship status isn’t clear, elections staff will send out a notice giving that person 30 days to prove their citizenship or be removed from the rolls. People can also bring proof to a polling location to get reinstated, Breaux said.
Nelson's office compared the state’s voter rolls with information from a national database called SAVE, which was originally designed to verify people’s immigration status for federal benefits, The Texas Newsroom reported.
Texas is one of the first states to use the SAVE database to check voter eligibility, after the Trump administration improved its searchability and made it free for states to use, according to The Texas Tribune.
Critics of the SAVE voter registration checks say they’re worried about privacy and accuracy. The League of Women Voters sued the Trump administration this month, saying the citizenship lookup tool could mislabel citizens as noncitizens and take away their right to vote.
SAVE's results are “sometimes based on incomplete or outdated information,” and while its citizenship information can be useful, it shouldn’t be used to make any final judgments, the nonprofit think tank Brennan Center for Justice argued in a July report.
Breaux’s office is also checking to see if people’s registrations should have been accepted in the first place. For example, if someone marked they were not a U.S. citizen on their voter registration form, but an elections worker let it through by accident, their registration would be cancelled immediately, Breaux said. The elections office will send a cancellation notice to their address on file.
Breaux isn’t sure yet if anyone falls into that category, he said. In Denton, 13 of the 84 flagged voters checked “no” on the box asking if they're a U.S. citizen, Elections Administrator Frank Phillips told the Denton Record-Chronicle.
It's not abnormal for the state to give counties a heads-up about potential noncitizens on the rolls, but normally it’s “just a couple of voters,” Phillips told the paper.
“It is important to remember that these voters have the opportunity to show that they are U.S. citizens,” Phillips said.
Noncitizen voting is illegal, but it's rare, researchers have found — despite President Donald Trump’s claims that undocumented people could sway elections against him.
Trump congratulated Nelson for using the SAVE database, in a letter Nelson posted on X Wednesday. Trump claimed many states “are currently failing to enforce basic and necessary election laws.”
“As we prepare to celebrate 250 glorious years of American independence next July, we must continue working together to protect our birthright of freedom and usher in the golden age of America,” Trump wrote.
Honored to be recognized by our President as one of the first Secretaries of State to step up and protect the integrity of our elections by using the federal SAVE database. pic.twitter.com/doVttqnX77
— Secretary Jane Nelson (@SecJaneNelson) October 22, 2025
Republican Tarrant County Judge Tim O’Hare has made election integrity one of his priorities since he took office in 2023. He praised Nelson’s work in a statement posted on social media Wednesday.
“Safe and secure elections are a key pillar to a free society,” he wrote. “Illegal aliens and other noncitizens will not be allowed to vote in Tarrant County and will be held to account for breaking any Texas or federal laws.”
People who don’t have citizenship and have a Texas voting history will be referred to the Texas Attorney General’s Office, according to Nelson.
In Tarrant County, they will also be referred to the Election Integrity Task Force, O’Hare said. That’s a controversial partnership between the local district attorney’s office and the sheriff’s office.
As of last year, the task force had looked into 82 voter fraud complaints, none of which resulted in criminal charges, County Administrator Chandler Merritt said.
KERA News reached out to O’Hare’s office, the Tarrant County DA’s Office, and the Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office for comment. When KERA News reached out to the Tarrant County elections administrator, he directed us to the county’s spokesperson, who directed us to O’Hare.
Dallas County Elections also did not respond to a request for an interview before this story’s deadline.
Last year, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott claimed more than 6,500 noncitizens had been removed from voter rolls since 2021. An investigation from The Texas Tribune, ProPublica and Votebeat found that number was probably inflated. It also found some U.S. citizens had been misidentified as noncitizens and removed from the rolls when they didn’t answer letters about their citizenship status.
Nelson’s office sent 33 cases of potential noncitizen voting to Attorney General Ken Paxton’s Office in June, using the SAVE database, according to a press release.
Got a tip? Email Miranda Suarez at msuarez@kera.org.
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