More than 1.2 million Texans are on something called the voter suspense list. That is more than 6% of the state's 18 million registered voters, and it is happening barely two months before the November 3 election.

The Dallas Morning News first reported the number, and it is not evenly spread. Dallas County has more than 129,000 suspended voters. Tarrant County has more than 73,000. Collin County and Denton County have nearly 56,000 each.

Many of the people on that list have no idea they are on it.

What "suspense" actually means

Being on the suspense list is not the same as being removed from the rolls. Here is the honest version.

Your county puts you on suspense when it cannot confirm your address. Usually that happens because a voter registration card or a jury summons came back in the mail marked undeliverable. New registration cards go out every two years to whatever address the county has on file. If you moved, or if the mail carrier got it wrong, or if you live somewhere the post office has trouble with, you can end up on the list without doing anything at all.

You can still vote while you are on it. You fill out a form called a statement of residence at the polling place. If you moved to a different county, it gets harder — you may have to vote in your old county or cast a provisional ballot that only counts if officials can find you on the rolls.

But the list is also the front end of a pipeline. Stay on suspense through two general elections without voting or updating your address, and you get cancelled.

The deadline to fix it is October 5. That is the same day registration closes for the November election. You can check and update your registration on the Texas Secretary of State's website, by mail, or in person at your county elections office. You will need your driver's license or ID number, your Social Security number, and your voter ID number.

If you live in Texas, stop reading and go check. Then come back, because the rest of this is about the two Republicans on the November ballot and what they have done with lists exactly like this one.

Greg Abbott turned removals into a press release

In August 2024, Greg Abbott put out a news release announcing that Texas had removed more than a million people from its voter rolls since he signed the state's 2021 election law. He listed the categories. The biggest single category in it was the suspense list — the same list 1.2 million Texans are sitting on right now. More than 463,000 of the removals he counted were people on that list.

The first item on his list was 6,500 noncitizens.

That is not what his own office had found. A joint investigation by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and Votebeat obtained the report the secretary of state's office actually gave the governor. That report identified 581 people as noncitizens — not 6,500.

So where did the rest come from? The secretary of state's office had separately told the governor's office how many people were dropped for not answering a letter asking about their citizenship. Abbott's release added the two numbers together and called the total noncitizens. By subtraction, roughly 5,900 of the 6,500 were people who never responded to a piece of mail.

Two days after the release went out, Abbott's office quietly edited it to insert the word "potential" in front of "noncitizens." The original number was already everywhere by then.

At least nine of them were American citizens

The reporters did not stop at the arithmetic. They tried to reach more than 70 of the people caught in the sweep, and confirmed at least nine U.S. citizens in three Texas counties who were wrongly labeled noncitizens or dropped from the rolls.

• Jakylah Ockleberry, 21, of Travis County, was born in Texas. She produced her birth certificate and asked the reporters, "How would something like that happen?"
• Justin Comer, 29, was born in Harris County and grew up in Montgomery County. He got flagged in 2023 by a jury-summons response that recorded him as not a citizen; he assumes he clicked the wrong button answering it online. "I've lived in Texas my whole life," he said. "It was never a question for me."
• Diana Colon of El Paso County was born in Puerto Rico, which makes her a U.S. citizen by birth. She was removed after she apparently failed to answer a question about her citizenship. Her reaction: "That's crazy."

Nobody in this story committed fraud. They got mail they didn't answer, or a clerk checked a wrong box. That is the same kind of mix-up that puts people on the suspense list — an address the state can't confirm, a letter that didn't come back.

Ken Paxton spent a decade hunting the same problem and barely found it

The other man on the ballot in November is Ken Paxton, the attorney general running for U.S. Senate. He has built his career on chasing voter fraud.

The numbers on that career are thin. Paxton's office spent more than 22,000 staff hours on voter fraud in 2020 and resolved 16 prosecutions. Every one was a Harris County resident who put a false address on a registration form. Not one of them went to jail.

The ACLU of Texas found that at least 72% of the prosecutions his unit brought since 2015 appear to have been against Black and Latinx Texans, and at least 45% against Black and Latina women.

And Paxton has said out loud what he thinks is going on. In August 2024 he told a radio show: "There's a reason Joe Biden brought people here illegally. I'm convinced that that's how they're going to do it this time, they're going to use the illegal vote." He also claimed immigrants were being handed Social Security numbers at the border. There is no evidence of that, and no evidence that noncitizens cast ballots in any significant numbers.

What that looked like at one woman's front door

On the morning of August 20, 2024, Paxton's office executed search warrants in Frio, Atascosa and Bexar counties. One of them was served on Lidia Martinez, 87, a San Antonio native and a LULAC volunteer of 35 years who registers seniors to vote.

Up early as usual to water her plants, she answered a knock at her door at 6 a.m. She said nine officers with badges, riot shields and a warrant came in. She asked to change out of her nightgown and was told to sit in her dining room instead, with two officers standing over her, while the rest went through her house for four hours.

"They searched everything. My underwear, my brassieres, my nightgowns, everything. They went into my garage. They opened up my car. They went through my whole car, my whole garage, my refrigerator, my kitchen cabinets, everything."

For about half an hour she was made to stand outside where her neighbors could see her, still in her nightgown. Nobody would tell her what they were looking for.

They left with her appointment book, her cellphone, her laptop, her blank voter registration cards, and her certificate for completing a voter registration course.

Her family asked her to quit volunteering, because they were afraid she would go to jail.

"They're trying to stop us from registering voters, and helping, especially the seniors. If I don't go out there, and their voter registration is expired, some of them are in wheelchairs. They don't have a way to be going to the elections office."

The warrant on her home authorized seizing every electronic device in the house, opening election-related documents, and swabbing for DNA. At another home that morning, officers woke a family with two young daughters and searched for seven hours, leaving with nearly 65 cellphones and 41 computers and storage devices.

Paxton is also the man who voted six times from a Collin County address he appears to have moved out of, while running a tip line for Texans to report suspicious voting. Collin County, where he is registered, has nearly 56,000 people on the suspense list. Denton County, where reporting places his actual home, has nearly 56,000 more.

Then Texas handed the whole list to Washington

On December 23, 2025, the Texas Secretary of State's office gave the U.S. Justice Department the state's entire voter registration file — roughly 18.4 million voters, with dates of birth, driver's license numbers and the last four digits of Social Security numbers.

The Justice Department had asked all 50 states. Thirteen agreed to hand the data over voluntarily. Texas was one of them. The department has sued 23 states and Washington, D.C. for refusing. The stated purpose is to help states find and remove ineligible voters.

Texas is not alone in volunteering. In Pennsylvania, state treasurer Stacy Garrity would not say Trump lost in 2020 and said she would "absolutely" be more cooperative with the federal request for that state's rolls. And the same Justice Department has been warning local election officials they could face criminal prosecution over noncitizen voters — a problem research shows is vanishingly rare.

Why this election, specifically

Paxton is on the November ballot against Democratic state Representative James Talarico, and The New Republic notes Talarico holds a narrow polling edge. Abbott is on the same ballot, running for another term as governor.

A suspense list is not a purge, and 1.2 million suspended registrations are not 1.2 million lost votes. Most of those people can still vote if they show up and fill out a form. But every extra step is a place where someone gives up, and the two Republicans on the ballot have spent years showing what they do with a list of names the state says it cannot verify.

What the record shows

Greg Abbott announced that Texas had cut more than a million people from its voter rolls, and told the public 6,500 of them were noncitizens when his own office had confirmed 581 — a number he corrected only after it had circulated for two days. Reporters found at least nine American citizens among the people swept up. Ken Paxton's office burned 22,000 staff hours in 2020 to resolve 16 address cases, sent officers to search an 87-year-old volunteer's house for four hours, and he is now registered to vote at an address he appears to have moved out of. Texas gave 18.4 million voters' personal data to the Justice Department in December. And 1.2 million Texans have until October 5 to make sure their registration is in order.

Source

Reporting from the San Antonio Current by Stephanie Koithan and The New Republic. Photo: San Antonio Current.