Tennessee's Republican Secretary of State Accused of Intimidation for Telling 14,375 Voters to Prove Citizenship
Sam Levine Guardian UK
Republican secretary of state sends vaguely worded letter to voters weeks before primary
The office of the Tennessee secretary of state, Tre Hargett, a Republican, sent the letter to 14,375 voters on 13 June, weeks before early voting was to begin for the state’s August primary. “Our office has received information that appears to indicate that your voter information matches with an individual who may not have been a United States citizen at the time of obtaining a Tennessee license or ID card,” the letter says.
It goes on to remind the recipient that illegal voting is a felony in Tennessee punishable with up to two years in prison and a $5,000 fine. It requests that any person who received the letter who is a citizen provide proof, such as a US passport, birth certificate, naturalization papers or other document.
The letter offers no information about what happens if someone does not reply. It also offers no information on how their names were flagged for review. Doug Kufner, a spokesman for Hargett, did not return requests for comment.
“It is clearly intended to intimidate people into taking themselves off the rolls,” said Blair Bowie, a lawyer at the Campaign Legal Center, one of several non-profits that wrote a letter to the state expressing concerns about the mailing.
Jeff Preptit, a staff attorney with the Tennessee chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said his organization had heard from “countless voters” who were concerned about the letter.
“It is all new Americans who have received this letter,” he said. “It’s had the very distinct effect … of not only just confusing people, but causing fear, intimidating them, and making them feel as if they have done something criminally wrong for exercising their constitutional rights for registering to vote.
“I think that this is a classic example of targeting a constitutional classification of individuals to discourage them from exercising their constitutional right to vote,” he added.
The request comes as Republican elected officials across the United States have sought to spread fear of non-citizen voting in order to undermine the credibility of American elections. It is already illegal for non-citizens to vote in federal elections and it is exceedingly rare for non-citizens to vote.
Donald Trump and congressional Republicans have championed federal legislation that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote (the bill passed the US House on Wednesday). They also want states to compare their voter rolls with a federal database of non-citizens, something experts have warned is not a reliable way of detecting illegal voters. Elon Musk and other conservative influencers have also spread false claims about non-citizen voting.
In a letter to state lawmakers late last month, Mark Goins, Tennessee’s elections director, suggested that those who didn’t respond would not be purged before the 2024 election. Federal law prohibits systematic efforts to remove voters within 90 days of a federal election and Tennessee’s primary for federal offices is 1 August.
Goins said the list of voters flagged was based on a “snapshot” of non-citizens in the state’s driver’s license database. Officials compared full social security numbers in driver’s license records with the state’s voter rolls to flag non-citizens who might be registered. Goins acknowledged in his letter that there might be people on the list who were non-citizens when they got or last renewed their driver’s license who had since become naturalized and were therefore eligible to vote.
Other states have made similar efforts to purge non-citizens on their voter rolls with disastrous results. In 2019, Texas officials used motor vehicle records to flag what state officials said were nearly 100,000 non-citizens on its rolls. It quickly emerged that the analysis was based on flawed data and that more than 20,000 naturalized citizens were included on the list. The Texas secretary of state wound up resigning and a federal judge called the effort “ham-handed”.
In 2012, Florida relied on driver’s license data to flag what it said were 180,000 potential non-citizens on its voter rolls. The state ultimately removed 85 voters before abandoning the effort.