Voting rights groups were disturbed by Tennessee’s top election office’s request in letters to over 14,000 registered voters to provide proof of citizenship, which they saw as potentially intimidating.
The letters, dated June 13, included advice on how to update voter information and cautioned that it is unlawful for noncitizens to vote in Tennessee.
Doug Kufner, a spokesman for the Secretary of State’s office, stated in a statement on Tuesday that the list was created by matching voter lists with information from the state Department of Safety and Homeland Security.
Kufner characterized the information obtained from the state’s homeland security department as a “snapshot” of an individual’s initial communication with that department. Some people may not have been citizens of the United States at the time they received a driver’s license or ID card, but they “likely did not update their records” after becoming citizens, according to him. In Tennessee, a driver’s license needs to be renewed every eight years.
“Accurate voter rolls are a vital component to ensuring election integrity, and Tennessee law makes it clear that only eligible voters are allowed to participate in Tennessee elections,” Kufner stated.
However, the letter doesn’t say what would happen to those who don’t update their data, such as whether or not those who don’t reply will be removed from the voter registers. Emails asking if voters were in danger of being deleted were not immediately answered by Kufner.
Rather, the letter warns that voting without authorization is a crime that can result in up to two years in prison.
Advocates for voting rights started to sound the alarm when images of the letter appeared on social media. Democrats have long attacked the Secretary of State’s office for their positions on matters pertaining to voting in the state that is dominated by Republicans.
“The fact legal citizens of the United States and residents of Tennessee are being accused of not being eligible to vote is an affront to democracy,” state Rep. Jason Powell, a Democrat from Nashville stated. “These fine Tennesseans are being burdened with re-proving their own voter eligibility and threatened with imprisonment in a scare tactic reminiscent of Jim Crow laws.”
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On Tuesday, Powell and Representative John Ray Clemmons, both Democrats, urged Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti to look into the matter.
One of the letter recipients, according to Democratic Representative Gloria Johnson, a Democrat from Knoxville, was a “respected scientist in Oak Ridge” who had naturalized and registered to vote in 2022.
The initiative is somewhat similar to the implementation of a broad Texas voting statute approved in 2021, in which thousands of Texans, including some citizens of the United States, got letters informing them that they may be removed from the voter registers due to suspicions that they may not be citizens.
After a previous search for illegal voters identified over 100,000 registered voters but mistakenly included naturalized people, Texas officials recently settled a lawsuit in 2019.
Notably, only approximately 80 persons had been identified as potentially ineligible to vote up until that point, according to a federal court who ordered the search to stop a month after it started.
