Five years later, Texas never found voter registrations of 95,000 noncitizens

Former Texas Secretary of State David Whitley’s attempts to check the citizenship status of 95,000 registered voters prompted multiple federal lawsuits and his resignation in 2019. 

Five years later, inaccurate claims about the citizenship of 95,000 voters in the Lone Star State are again circulating on Instagram.

"Tens of thousands of noncitizens have not just registered to vote, but have already voted in previous elections," a woman in an Instagram video says. "The state of Texas alone found that 95,000 noncitizens were registered to vote." 

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In January 2019, Whitley, Texas’ then-secretary of state, issued a statement saying his office discovered that 95,000 noncitizens had a voter registration record in Texas. Voter registrations of people on the list who failed to provide proof of citizenship would be canceled, the statement said. 

A previous PolitiFact article found that the list of 95,000 names was created by cross-referencing people registered to vote with the names of people who said they were not citizens when they got a driver’s license or state identification card. 

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In 2019 alone, 97,675 people became citizens in Texas, Department of Homeland Security data found. That means people on the list could have become naturalized after receiving their driver’s licenses. 

Days after Whitley issued the advisory, his office said that 25,000 of the names on the list were mistakenly added. 

In a February 2019 letter to lawmakers obtained by The Texas Tribune, Whitley apologized for errors in the list, writing, "In hindsight, however, before announcing the number of people who may not be eligible to vote, more time should have been devoted to additional communication with the counties and DPS (Department of Public Safety) to further eliminate anyone from our original list who is, in fact, eligible to vote."  

The incident led the Texas Senate to not confirm Whitley as secretary of state by the end of its 2019 legislative session; he resigned just before the session’s end.

"For those of us who’ve worked in Texas politics for years, it was a huge deal because you almost never see a gubernatorial appointee fail to get confirmed by the state senate," Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of Common Cause Texas, a voting advocacy group, told PolitiFact. "It goes to show just how wildly false their claim of 95,000 non-citizens being on the voter rolls was that it resulted in the Republican-dominated Texas Legislature refusing to confirm the nomination of the Republican governor." 

A lawsuit against Whitley was settled in April 2019 with an agreement that the then-secretary of state could not use the list to check voter’s citizenship status.

We rate the claim that Texas found 95,000 noncitizens registered to vote False.