Texas Republicans' Latest Attempt To Purge Voting Rolls
Prove you're not a felon in 30 Days or lose your right to vote.
Several people in Williamson County have received the notice above, with a few reporting on Facebook that they have never been arrested or convicted of a crime. It would seem that enough of these notifications have gone out that the Williamson County Elections Department has posted this to their social media:
Unsurprisingly, the comment section underneath this post has blown up, prompting the Williamson County Elections Department to change its settings regarding who can comment. It has also led the League of Women Voters of Williamson County to put out a statement (we’ll get to that in a moment).
In the comments, the WilCo ED cited this memo and told people they “were just following state law.”
Advisory 2024-18 is a memo the Secretary of State’s Elections Division sent to county registrars in June 2024, over the signature of Director of Elections Christina Worrell Adkins, reminding them that the National Voter Registration Act, which imposes a 90-day quiet period before federal elections, during which counties can’t run mass eligibility purges, except for a few carve-outs.
That 90-day period starts on August 5, exactly three weeks after the WilCo ED notified the public that it was conducting “list maintenance.”
Also, this memo was written for a moratorium calendar that doesn’t apply to July 2026. The advisory tells you WilCo is allowed to do this. It does not tell you why they’re doing it now, at this volume, off a matching system not precise enough to keep from mailing felony accusations to people who’ve never been arrested.
Who is running Williamson County Elections?
The person signing off on this whole operation is Bridgette Escobedo, WilCo’s Elections Administrator. The Williamson County Elections Commission hired her.
But here’s the thing about the “nonpartisan election administrator,” under Texas law, the Elections Commission that hires her is chaired by the county judge, and includes the county clerk, the tax assessor-collector, and the chairs of both political parties that cleared 5% of the vote in the last governor’s race. Both parties get a seat at that table. Only one has the majority and the gavel.
The county clerk is a Republican (per WilCo GOP). The tax assessor-collector is a Republican (per WilCo GOP). However, he is being replaced next week. This is an appointed position by the majority Republican Commissioners’ Court.
And Williamson County’s county judge situation right now is its own small chaos story. Bill Gravell, Republican, has held the seat since 2019, won re-election in 2022, and in March 2025 resigned mid-term to work for the Trump administration as the Small Business Administration’s Region 6 advocate. The Commissioners Court, itself Republican-controlled, replaced him in a split 3-1 vote with Steven Snell, the former Liberty Hill ISD superintendent, who has exactly zero electoral mandate from Williamson County voters and will serve as an appointee until he either runs or gets replaced in November.
So, the WilCo Elections Commission (R), which appointed the Elections Administrator is mailing perhaps tens of thousands of Williamson County residents letters threatening their voter registration over a data-matching process even they can’t clearly explain, and they answer to a county judge who’s never faced Williamson County voters for this specific term, appointed by a commissioners court that is entirely Republican, in a county whose top elected leadership just vacated its most powerful seat to go work for Donald Trump.
The actual law behind this was passed last legislative session.
Senate Bill 510, authored by Sen. Paul Bettencourt (R-SD07). It builds on a 2021 law, SB 1113, which allows the Secretary of State to withhold state election funding from a county registrar who drags their feet in canceling a voter’s registration after a notice of examination is sent. SB 510 widened that. Now the SOS can pull funding from a county if the registrar is slow in approving, changing, or scheduling hearings, in making challenge determinations, or in delivering a notice in the first place. Not just cancellations. Anything.
Williamson County has a financial incentive to move fast on this. A budget one. Sit on your list-maintenance dashboard too long, and the state starts holding back your Chapter 19 funds.
However, this is the first county we’ve heard of using this law to the extent that it’s prompted statements from both the local Elections Department and the League of Women Voters.
Is it possible, that WilCo is taking this law to the extreme? Or that other counties have remained quiet on it? Or that mainstream media has chosen to ignore (again)?
Bettencourt has made a career out of this particular flavor of “election integrity.” He ran Harris County’s tax office, moved to the Senate, and has spent the better part of a decade building the legal architecture for county-level oversight and enforcement, most recently going after Harris County again this spring over voter address issues under a law he also wrote.
A two-year-old advisory memo states that WilCo can run these matches at any time. A one-year-old funding law says WilCo better run them fast or lose money. And nothing on the books says WilCo has to run them accurately, or explain the matching process.
Of course, it’s more Republican voter suppression working as intended.
What to do if you get one of these.
If you receive a Notice of Examination in your mailbox, you have 30 days from the date the notice was mailed to respond, or your registration will be canceled automatically.
First, call your county elections department directly and verify the notice is real. Scams piggyback on exactly this kind of confusion, and county offices can confirm whether they actually sent it and walk you through what documentation they need. In Williamson County, that’s 512-943-1630. (In another county, you have to look it up.)
Second, if you believe the notice was sent to you in error, and if you’ve never had a felony conviction, this is squarely an error. Respond in writing before the deadline with whatever proof applies to your situation, and keep a copy of everything you send. Certified mail if you can swing it. Don’t take “I dropped it off” on faith with a government office that’s currently mailing felony accusations to people with clean records.
Third, if you think this happened to you in error, or if something about how or why you got flagged smells off, call the non-partisan Election Protection Hotline at 866-OUR-VOTE (866-687-8683, or 888-VE-Y-VOTA en español). The Texas Civil Rights Project staffs them, along with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and they exist specifically to address wrongful purges, intimidation, and barriers to registration. They can also help you figure out whether this is a pattern worth escalating, rather than just a one-off clerical mistake.
You can also file a formal complaint directly with the Secretary of State’s Elections Division. They have a complaint form on their website, and yes, the irony of filing a complaint about a process that cited the SOS’s own guidance memo is not lost on me. File it anyway. That’s how these things end up getting audited.
Do not assume this will sort itself out. Do not assume the county will catch its own mistake. The burden, as written, is on you to prove you’re not a felon, not on Williamson County to prove that you are.
107 days until the November election!
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Prove you are not a felon. Proving a negative is extremely difficult. What is adequate proof that you have not been convicted? Well, for one, it's a clean record. WilCo should have access to criminal background checks. So, if they checked the databases for criminal convictions, then they should tell the citizen what precisely showed up and provide instructions for running a criminal background check on themselves. The average person won't know how to do this.
Is this a case of the same of similar name? Tell the citizen that. That would entail providing identity information. BTW, we used to have very robust systems where counties did this themselves using publicly available information from multiple sources. They could still do this.
I imagine fees are involved in running a criminal background check on yourself. Is there a wait for the response involved? Would that wait for the criminal record go past 30days before purge? Does the average busy person have time to hassle with this? These are the kinds of bad faith procedural games that are calculated to suppress voting.
I would be interested to see if more of these notices are going to Democratic primary voters than Republican primary voters. Are more of these notices going to voters with Hispanic surnames? Are they going to more Black voters than white voters?
Had to know it was coming. That is why I tell people you have to be prepared and check your voter registration often. With a new inexperienced but partisan Sec of State anything can happen.