A group of voting and civil rights organizations is suing Texas, saying the state used flawed data and unfair methods to flag and potentially remove eligible voters from its rolls.
The lawsuit, filed by the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) and other organizations, challenges a voter review process launched by the Texas Secretary of State’s Office in October 2025.
At the time, Secretary of State Jane Nelson said her office had compared the state’s voter registration list of more than 18 million registered voters against a federal immigration database — the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE system — and identified 2,724 registered voters as potential noncitizens. Counties were then directed to investigate those voters’ eligibility.
It’s unclear whether any voters have been removed from the rolls as a result of the state’s findings. The Texas Secretary of State’s Office declined to comment on Monday.
The groups behind the lawsuit argue the state of Texas relied on outdated or unreliable data that can wrongly flag people — especially naturalized U.S. citizens — as noncitizens. A 2025 report from the Brennan Center for Justice found the SAVE database can contain incomplete information and warned that states using it to maintain voter rolls raises concerns about accuracy and privacy, including the risk that eligible voters could be wrongly removed.
The lawsuit also alleges the state didn’t double-check its own records, like driver’s license data, which could confirm whether someone is a U.S. citizen.
“Voter purge efforts relying upon faulty citizenship data and conducted outside of the requirements established by Congress risk regulating American citizens born abroad to a second-class status where their right to vote is neither protected nor guaranteed,” the lawsuit read.
According to the complaint, counties were allegedly given little guidance last Fall on how to verify voters’ eligibility, leading to checks that weren’t conducted in a uniform way across the state. As a result, some voters were asked to prove their citizenship within a short timeframe or risk being removed from the rolls, according to court records.
The lawsuit asks a federal judge to stop the state from using the SAVE database and to require stronger safeguards to protect voters. It also seeks to restore any voters who may have been improperly removed.
The federal database in question was created in 1986 to verify the immigration status of people applying for federally funded benefits. This held true until about a year ago, when federal officials announced an overhaul aimed at turning it into a nationwide system for verifying noncitizen status.
This led to a separate class-action lawsuit challenging the expansion of the database, filed by a coalition of voting rights groups.
