Verify Your Bexar County Voter Eligibility, Are You Still Registered?
As the last of the Primary Runoff elections have concluded, concerned voters must remain vigilant as to whether one is eligible and registered to vote. Verifying your Bexar County voter eligibility is crucial.
Accessing Bexar County Elections website, allows a voter to enter one’s street address and confirm if they are currently registered. The state of Texas’ verification site is www.votetexas.gov.
There have been recent efforts, in some states, to “purge” voters from the voter rolls, for various reasons. The two most common ones have been not voting within a certain timeframe or a voter being “unresponsive” to a state’s attempts to verify their status by mail.
Texas has seen legislation, in 2021, which focused on “unresponsive voters could be on a suspend list”, if voters had not cast a ballot within two years. If no response was received, to a notice for another two years, they would be kicked off the voter rolls.
To many observers, it appears that what government seems to be concerned about is “the perception of potential voter fraud, even if it doesn’t occur, and the possibility that it might occur in the future, even if it hasn’t occurred in the past, which leads to this type of reform”, per a Rice University professor.
Texas has had its own “purge” in 2019, that removed “tens of thousands of naturalized citizens from the voter rolls”, using outdated citizenship data, from the states Department of Public Safety. The Campaign Legislative Center sued Texas, resulting in a settlement that required the state to revise its program and stop cancelling naturalized citizens voter registrations, based on outdated records.
Last efforts to ascertain Texas’s compliance with the National Voter Registration Act came in 2022, after questions arose regarding Texas’s “stonewalling public monitoring” intended to ensure that all citizens have equal access to the ballot. Again the Campaign Legislative Center filed a federal complaint, challenging Texas’ flouting of its obligations under Federal Election law. U. S. citizens have the right to vote and “states cannot impose additional registration requirements, dependent upon a citizen’s nation of origin.”
Moving forward, it appears that public monitoring is necessary to enforce the constitutional guarantees and to protect against state programs that might otherwise deny certain U.S. citizens right to vote, in a discriminatory fashion. Under the NVEA, states are required to maintain accurate and current voter rolls, to ensure that all eligible applicants are properly registered.
In 2022, records reflected a massive disenfranchisement and racial disparities, in the primaries, as a result of the passage of Texas’s SB 1, which has come under close scrutiny, in federal lawsuits, which have found a part of that Legislative measure to be unconstitutional, in violation of the “materiality provision”, of Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Diligence and persistent actions, by citizens and community based organizations, will prove valuable in holding our governing bodies accountable in citizens having unfettered access to the ballot box and the power that it affords us.
Voting is necessary to be influential and to be recognized in this society.
Make A Difference: Register and Vote!
