KERA reporter Caroline Love has spent much of the past year reporting on politics and elections. She recently looked at a concerted effort to remove thousands of Texans from voter rolls. And that led to a surprising discovery.
Millions of Texas voters are in “suspense,” which can be the first step towards getting kicked off the voter rolls. And many suspended voters have no idea.
I was one of them.
I recently reported a story with my colleague Miranda Suarez about thousands of people in North Texas who are having their voter registrations challenged. The elected officials I interviewed said a lot of these people are already in suspense.
That got me thinking about my voter registration status. I went to the Texas Secretary of State’s site to check — and it turns out I’m a suspended voter.
How did that happen?
The Suspense Process
Chris McGinn, the CEO of the Texas Association of Elections Administrators, said voters are put in suspense when their local elections department can’t confirm their address.
“They send voter cards and voter updates by mail,” McGinn said. “Those cards and updates or notices are not forwardable, so they return back to the elections office, and then the elections office start this process of suspense.”
I thought back to when I moved to my new apartment about a year ago, and I remembered that I got something in the mail from the Dallas County Elections Department.
I looked at it. I thought, that looks important. I need to respond.
I put the card in my growing pile of mail that’s important enough to keep but not important enough to open. And I got busy and promptly forgot about it until I checked my voter registration status several months later.
Getting Out of Suspense
Thankfully, McGinn said it’s not too late for voters like me who are in suspense who want to correct their address before the election. He said voters who are in suspense aren’t removed from the voter rolls until two federal election cycles have passed.
“They have multiple years to go through before they're actually purged, as we call it, from the rolls,” McGinn said.
That means I still have time to get my voter registration status changed to active. So, I headed over to the elections office. It took less than five minutes to fill out the paperwork to update my address.
LaRhonda Jackson with Dallas County Elections told me they’ll send me another voter registration card in the mail.
I went in person to the elections department to update my voter registration address. But Jackson said you don’t have to do that.
“You can print out this form online as well, but you’ll have to mail it back in,” Jackson said.
You can also pick up a copy of the form at your local library, or email the county voter registrar.
Voters in suspense have until Monday , Oct. 7, to fix their status — it’s also the deadline to register to vote. Jackson said the Dallas County elections department should be open until 10 p.m. that night.
Don’t have the time to correct your status? Jackson said voters in suspense can fill out a provisional ballot. They just need to have ID and proof of address.
But I won’t have to do that.
Thanks to the help of the Dallas County elections Department, I’ll be able to fill out a regular ballot during early voting later this month.
Early voting starts for the upcoming election starts Oct. 21 and continues through Nov. 1. Election day is Nov. 5.
Got a tip? Email Caroline Love at clove@kera.org.
Caroline Love is a Report For America corps member for KERA News.
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