Domingo Garcia is not dead.
So, the prominent Dallas lawyer, politician and civil rights leader was surprised when he received a letter from the Dallas County Elections Department telling him he'd been flagged as a deceased voter, and was removed from the rolls.
"A lot of people want me dead," Garcia said in a social media video about the letter. "Pero no, los haters. Sorry guys, I'm still very much alive."
Garcia’s registration has since been reinstated. But his administrative death highlights the challenges election officials face in responsibly maintaining voter rolls while Texas moves toward stricter voting laws.
And it's not just Garcia — the Tarrant County Elections Administrator recently revealed more than 200 people were improperly identified as dead voters over the past year.
But it wasn't always that way. Texas used to be part of a voter roll maintenance network called the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, which multiple experts told KERA News was a more sophisticated system designed to prevent cases like Garcia's. The state left ERIC in 2023 amid claims from the right that it was run by Democrats.
The departure from ERIC shows how even routine voter roll maintenance has become increasingly politicized in the wake of President Donald Trump's unfounded claims about widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election.
Garcia's 'death'
So how did Garcia get flagged as a dead voter?
The Dallas County Elections Department told KERA in a statement Garcia’s cancelation was caused by an error in data from the Texas Secretary of State’s office. The department also said the Secretary of State is investigating its voter database vendor to resolve the issue.
"We are currently reviewing additional records that were included in the same file sent from their office," the statement read. "At this time, it appears at least one other voter may have been incorrectly marked as deceased."
But a spokesperson for the Secretary's office, Alicia Pierce, told KERA there was no error with the agency's software. Rather, Pierce said what happened is required by law.
Pierce explained the state flagged a "weak match" between Garcia's voter information and a state death record, which means Garcia's date of birth and at least the last four digits of his social security number matched with someone who died. Names are not considered in a weak match.
The state informed The Dallas County Elections Department of the weak match so it could investigate. The county sent Garcia a notice in the mail and gave him 30 days to respond or his voter registration would be canceled.
“When the voter did not respond, Dallas County Elections canceled the voter registration,” Pierce told KERA via email. Garcia said he didn’t get the notice. The Dallas County Elections Department did not respond to multiple requests for an interview with KERA.
David Becker — who helped develop ERIC and is now the executive director of The Center for Election Innovation & Research — said ERIC was designed to prevent false positives like Garcia’s case.
"There is no such thing as a weak match in ERIC because a weak match is not a match," Becker said.
The system uses more data, including the voter’s name, date of birth, social security number and driver’s license number, he said.
"And the reason for that is because the states don't want to get this wrong,” Becker said “They don't want exactly what happened here."
Voters can check the status of their registration at votetexas.gov.
Whatever happened to ERIC?
Texas joined the system in 2020, but it left in 2023 amid an exodus of at least eight other Republican-led states.
ERIC was made up of a bipartisan group of states at its height of 31 members in 2022. Today, that number has fallen to 21.
The Republican-led states left after the conservative outlet The Gateway Pundit falsely claimed ERIC was funded by Democratic megadonor George Soros, controlled by leftists and shared private voter data with other groups.
But supporters say ERIC was delivering results for Texas. The system flagged tens of thousands of voters who had moved or registered in another state, according to reporting from Votebeat.
Some states also took issue with ERIC's outreach program, which sought to get eligible people registered to vote.
"Republicans always kind of cast the stink eye towards these sorts of things, thinking 'wait a second, this looks like a plot to register Democrats,'" said Daron Shaw, a political science professor at the University of Texas.
ERIC suddenly became a partisan issue, Shaw said. That's led to a dueling dynamic between Republicans and Democrats.
"The Democrats are convinced that everything is a voter suppression effort, and the Republicans are convinced everything is a voter fraud effort," Shaw said. The criteria for staying on the voter rolls in Texas has "tightened," he added.
Ashley Harris, a voting rights lawyer at ACLU Texas, said that tighter criteria disenfranchises voters.
"The state is well aware that their procedures are flawed and, in many of these instances, are likely to incorrectly flag voters who are eligible to vote and should be registered to vote," Harris said.
And it’s not just mistaken deaths — the state has begun comparing its voter rolls with federal immigration data. The secretary of state's office used the data last year to flag about 300 voters in Dallas County as potential noncitizens. Voting advocacy groups have said that data is not accurate and have sued the state for using it.
Garcia dealt with a similar issue when he was president of the League of United Latin American Citizens in 2019 after Texas flagged nearly 100,000 voters as potential noncitizens.
"It took a lawsuit by LULAC and the blocking of the Secretary of State's confirmation to get those voters reinstated,” Garcia said, referring to former acting Texas Secretary of State David Whitley’s resignation after Democrats blocked his appointment.
While Garcia’s voter registration has been reinstated, he said he's worried voters in the upcoming November midterm elections won't know their registration has been canceled until it's too late.
"We should never ever disempower the right to vote from people," he said.
Dylan Duke is KERA's Breaking News Reporter. Got a tip? Email Dylan Duke at dduke@kera.org.
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