Texas Voter Purge System Relies on Bad Federal Data, Suit Says

Texas’ bid to purge noncitizens from its voter rolls relies on bad data from the federal government that will wrongly lead to the removal of eligible voters, the League of United Latin American Citizens says in a new lawsuit.

The purge violates the National Voter Registration Act because it will remove eligible voters “while ignoring data in the state’s own possession that shows these results to be inaccurate,” the voting rights group alleges in the Thursday complaint.

The lawsuit filed in the US District Court for the Western District of Texas follows a move from Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson to identify non-US citizens in the state’s voter rolls. In October 2025, Nelson announced that her office had compared the state’s voter registration list against the US Citizenship and Immigration Services’ SAVE database to identify 2,724 potential noncitizens who are registered to vote in Texas.

Those voter files were provided to Texas counties to conduct their own investigations into the eligibility of those voters. Some counties implemented the purge program without comparing the citizenship files against the state’s own records, the lawsuit said.

The federal system on which Nelson relied “is known to contain unreliable citizenship data that will systemically burden non-US born citizens,” the lawsuit said.

LULAC, which brought the lawsuit after it said Nelson failed to fix the alleged violations, is asking the court to stop her and four defendant counties from continuing to instruct election administrators to use the state’s purge program.

LULAC is represented by Campaign Legal Center and the Law Office of Dicky Grigg PC.

The case is League of United Latin American Citizens v. Nelson, W.D. Tex., No. 1:26-cv-00729, 3/26/26.