Editorial: Election is too close for officials to continue efforts to remove voters

The presidential election is less than two months away. Ballots are set and election officials already are preparing for the massive endeavor that enables voters across the country to decide who will occupy the White House and both chambers of Congress.

Every vote counts. That is why the efforts of state officials in Austin, and in other states currently held by Republicans, to disenfranchise voters is especially alarming.

It needs to stop — now.

Republican officials in Texas and other states continue to work to eliminate registered voters in the name of voting integrity, pushing the canard that illegal immigrants are flooding ballot boxes with votes supporting Democratic Party candidates.

Those arguments are false. Non-citizens are not entitled to vote — and never have been. Unqualified people generally are weeded out when registration forms are processed, and reports of noncitizens attempting to vote are rare.

Still, the argument, and efforts to reduce the legal voting population, persist.

Gov. Greg Abbott last week announced a new purge of voter rolls, removing more than 1 million names from the lists. Previous purges have led to judicial orders that they be restored, as many qualified voters had been removed.

The impending election leaves little time for any litigation that might produce such an order now, and qualified voters who were wrongly removed might not even know they were removed, much less have time to re-register before the Oct. 7 deadline for the Nov. 5 election.

Other states have taken similar actions.

Officials committing these acts most recently have been emboldened by a Supreme Court ruling in August regarding an Arizona purge of some 41,000 registered voters. While the court ordered the state to restore the voters pending better verification, it agreed that the state can impose stronger citizenship verification checks.

That puts most credentials at risk; while documents used to evaluate voting applications would determine citizenship, the issue isn’t directly addressed in most applications. It’s never been deemed necessary because of the verification process.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has added to the madness, ordering raids of the homes of Latino and other minority campaign workers, especially those who had held voter registration drives. Paxton’s office said investigators were looking for proof of “election fraud and vote harvesting” — something that would occur at the polling sites, not at people’s homes.

Paxton also has filed a lawsuit against Bexar County seeking to stop election officials from mailing voter registration applications to residents in order to make the process more convenient and facilitate the process.

Such harassment appears to be little more than an effort to scare people from continuing their voter registration efforts, and perhaps even to discourage voting itself.

The proper reaction, however, should be just the opposite. People who know they are doing nothing wrong have no reason to fear terrorist tactics, even from their own government officials. Efforts to disenfranchise voters should be met with greater resolve to encourage voting, and continue their efforts to help more people register if they are legally entitled to do so.

More importantly, they should encourage all registered voters to cast their ballots — whether state officials want them to or not.

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