Since May, Denton County has received about 17,000 challenges to local voter rolls, Elections Administrator Frank Phillips said.
True the Vote, a Texas-based conservative election-monitoring organization, has been sending complaints nationwide about inaccurate voter rolls with the goal of preventing voter fraud.
Founder Catherine Engelbrecht asks people to use a web-based app called IV3 that lets them research voter records and submit voter eligibility challenges to local election offices.
Phillips said the Denton County election office has faced three categories of voter eligibility challenges.
“They’re basically following three categories,” he said. “The vast majority of them are people that they believe had moved and no longer live at that address, because they did a national change of address with the post office. That is, overwhelmingly, the majority. They sent a few … where they think a person is deceased [claiming] that we still have on the rolls. … The third category … they’re questioning is if it’s a commercial address versus a residential.”
Wired magazine reported in 2022 that little is known about the IV3 app because it isn’t active in most states and requires users to submit personal information and images of the front and back of their identification. Wired analyzed the code and found the app “uses an ineffective and unreliable methodology to determine who should remain on the rolls.”
According to a news release, True the Vote says nearly 7,000 people have used IV3 to complete nearly 650,000 voter challenges in 1,322 counties across the U.S.
Phillips said the organization’s data is outdated, and he has disputed claims about voter roll inaccuracy.
“It looks like they’ve probably got their database, wherever they got it — I’m guessing at the end of last year because we mail out a bunch of registration cards in January, when those start coming back as undeliverable,” Phillips said. “That’s when we put people in suspense.”
Being on the voter suspense list “means your county does not know your address or it thinks you moved, often because a voter registration card sent through the mail is returned as undeliverable,” according to The Dallas Morning News.
“Probably 75% of what they [True the Vote users] submitted, we had already taken some type of action,” Phillips said. “We had already put them in suspense because we mailed … their voter registration card, and it came back to us, or some other kind of notification, or we already canceled them out of the system.”
He said voter registration records are fluid because people move constantly.
“It’s never a static document,” Phillips said. “If I printed you a voter registration database this morning, it would not be the same voter registration database when printed this afternoon.”
Critics have raised questions about True the Vote’s legitimacy, as Engelbrecht has been accused of using donations for personal gain and making questionable transactions.
The group also told a Georgia judge it doesn’t have evidence to support its claims of illegal ballot stuffing during the 2020 general election.
The Denton Record-Chronicle reached out to True the Vote and had yet to receive a response as of Tuesday evening.