East Texas

By ROY MAYNARD
Staff Writer

Some East Texas lawmakers will serve on an Election Integrity Task Force to investigate voter fraud in Texas.

State Reps. Leo Berman, R-Tyler, and Betty Brown, R-Terrell, will co-chair the task force, formed by the Texas Conservative Coalition Research Institute.

Berman chairs the House Elections Committee. Other House members serving on the committee include Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola, and Dan Flynn, R-Van.

The announcement comes following a report from the state auditor casting doubt on the integrity of Texas’ voter registration rolls.

The audit examined state voter rolls for May’s election and compared the data to information from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice and the Bureau of Vital Statistics.

It found that just more than 49,000 voters — or four-tenths of 1 percent of the state’s 12.37 million registered voters — may have been ineligible. That includes more than 23,000 possible felons and almost 24,000 voters who may be dead. There were duplicate records for almost 2,400 voters.

“Our most important right in this country is the right to vote, but fraud is too often treated almost casually, if not indifferently,” Berman said.

“Loopholes and lax enforcement of voting laws have created a system that is susceptible to manipulation.”
The task force points out that in June, a Port Lavaca city councilwoman was convicted of illegally assisting non-citizens to register to vote. And in October, a Refugio County commissioner resigned and pled guilty to charges of vote fraud.

“Through the Election Integrity Task Force, we will develop a package of recommendations to help win back the public confidence in elections,” Rep. Brown said. “By enforcing existing election laws and creating new measures for voter verification, we can better guarantee that only legal, eligible voices are heard in elections.”

The task force will look into:

Increasing investigation and prosecution of voter fraud.

Purging voter rolls of non-citizens and the deceased.

Ensuring citizenship verification of all registered and newly registered voters.

Requiring photo identification at the polls.

“Clean elections are imperative for a representative democracy to work,” Flynn said. “Voting is one of the most important rights and privileges of a free society, and we intend to ensure that only eligible voters’ voices are heard.”

Berman says his House Elections Committee will also be active, although the Legislature doesn’t go back into regular session until 2009. He has asked House Speaker Tom Craddick to approve the topic for interim study, and committee hearings could begin as soon as January.

“I’ll be calling in this audit team to learn more about their findings,” Berman said. “The fact that voter fraud exists in Texas to any extent is unacceptable to the voting public and must be stamped out.”