Texas Voter Suppression: SB 1, Roll Purges, and the 2025 Map

Voter suppression in Texas refers to a long sequence of state laws and practices — from Jim Crow-era poll taxes to today’s strict mail-ballot ID rules, aggressive voter roll purges, criminal prosecutions of individual voters, and congressional maps federal judges have called racial gerrymanders — that courts and civil rights groups have repeatedly found to burden Black, Latino, and Asian Texans more heavily than white voters. If you are trying to understand what the current rules are, which ones are being challenged, and how any of this affects your ability to cast a ballot, this guide walks through each piece in turn.

How Texas Restricted the Vote Before 1965

Two tools did most of the work for most of the twentieth century.

Texas adopted a poll tax in 1902, charging between $1.50 and $1.75 to register. The tax priced many Black and Mexican American Texans out of voting and stayed on the books for more than sixty years. The 24th Amendment ended it for federal elections in 1964, and the Supreme Court struck it down for state elections in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections in 1966.¹

The white primary was the second. Texas made it state law in 1923, limiting primary participation to “citizens of Anglo heritage.” Because the Democratic nominee effectively won every general election in the one-party South, barring Black and Mexican American voters from the primary barred them from the real decision. The Supreme Court struck down the white primary in Smith v. Allwright in 1944.¹ Unlike several other Southern states, Texas did not use literacy tests or grandfather clauses.

Federal Oversight and the Shelby County Decision

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 gave the federal government power to monitor elections in states with histories of racial discrimination. Congress extended the Act’s Section 5 preclearance requirement to Texas in 1975, meaning the state had to get federal approval before changing any election law. Congress acted because Texas, at the time, led the nation in several categories of voting discrimination against Mexican Americans.²

That federal check ended in 2013, when the Supreme Court ruled 5–4 in Shelby County v. Holder that the preclearance formula was invalid. Within hours, Texas officials began implementing voting restrictions that preclearance had previously blocked.¹ Every major rule change discussed below took effect, or became enforceable, after Shelby.

The Photo ID Requirement

Texas passed Senate Bill 14 in 2011, one of the strictest voter ID laws in the country. It accepted a narrow list of photo IDs: a Texas driver’s license, a state-issued personal ID or election identification certificate, a concealed handgun license, a U.S. military ID, a citizenship certificate with photo, or a U.S. passport. Student IDs and government employee IDs were not accepted.³

More than half a million eligible Texas voters lacked the required identification, according to evidence in the resulting litigation. Nearly a quarter of Texas counties had no Department of Public Safety office where residents could get an ID. The nominally free Election Identification Certificate required supporting documents that could cost money and be hard to obtain, and as of March 2016 only 653 of these free certificates had been issued statewide.³

In July 2016, the Fifth Circuit ruled 9–6 in Veasey v. Abbott that SB 14 violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, finding that its drafters “were aware of the likely disproportionate effect of the law on minorities” and “nonetheless passed the bill without adopting a number of proposed ameliorative measures.”⁴

Texas responded in 2017 with Senate Bill 5, which created the current workaround. If you do not have an accepted photo ID, you can cast a regular ballot by signing a Declaration of Reasonable Impediment under penalty of perjury, citing one of seven specified reasons such as lack of transportation, disability, or a lost ID. The Fifth Circuit upheld SB 5 as a sufficient remedy in April 2018, ending the Veasey litigation.⁵ That Declaration of Reasonable Impediment framework is the rule in force today.

Senate Bill 1 and Mail Ballot Rejections

Governor Greg Abbott signed Senate Bill 1 on September 7, 2021. It is the most consequential piece of election legislation Texas has passed in recent years and the center of the state’s active voting rights litigation.⁶

What SB 1 Changed

The most important change for voters is the mail ballot ID matching rule. You now have to include a partial Social Security number or a state ID number on both your mail ballot application and the ballot’s carrier envelope, and the number has to match the one originally used when you registered.⁷

SB 1 also banned drive-through voting unless the voter qualifies for curbside voting due to a disability, capped early voting hours between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. (ending the 24-hour voting locations Harris County had opened in 2020), restricted when a presiding election judge may remove a partisan poll watcher, imposed new disclosure requirements on anyone assisting a voter, restricted paid voter assistance, and raised the penalty for a false statement on a voter registration application from a Class B to a Class A misdemeanor, with a state jail felony if compensation is involved.⁷⁶

The Rejection Numbers

The mail ballot effects showed up immediately. During the March 2022 primary, counties rejected roughly 12,000 mail ballot applications and more than 24,000 mail ballots, a rejection rate near 12 percent, compared with about 1 percent in the 2020 presidential election.⁸ Of about 215,000 mail ballot requests, around 30,000 voters had an application or ballot rejected under the new ID matching rules, and nearly 90 percent of those voters never ended up casting a ballot.⁹

Rejection rates varied by race. Asian voters had 19 percent of their applications or ballots rejected, Black voters 16.6 percent, and Latino voters 16.1 percent, compared with 12 percent for white voters. Asian and Latino voters were each more than 50 percent more likely than white voters to be rejected specifically for failing SB 1’s ID requirements.⁸ A Brennan Center analysis found no statistically significant racial difference in rejection rates for non-SB 1 reasons like late-arriving ballots, meaning the disparity was concentrated in the new rules.⁹

The effects outlasted the primary. Voters whose applications were rejected in March 2022 experienced a 16 percentage-point decrease in turnout in the November 2022 general election, and remained less likely to vote in the March 2024 primary. Many switched from mail to in-person voting, absorbing higher time and travel costs. Eighty-five percent of the affected voters had cast ballots in each of the three previous general elections.⁹

Where the SB 1 Lawsuits Stand

Five lawsuits were consolidated in the Western District of Texas as La Union del Pueblo Entero v. Abbott, and the U.S. Department of Justice filed its own challenge in November 2021 alleging violations of Section 208 of the Voting Rights Act and Section 101 of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.¹⁰¹¹

U.S. District Judge Xavier Rodriguez ruled against the state several times. In August 2023 he found the mail ballot ID matching rule violated the Civil Rights Act’s materiality provision. In September 2024 he struck down restrictions on compensated canvassers. In October 2024 he blocked the mail ballot assistance restrictions as a Section 208 violation. In March 2025 he found portions limiting assistance to disabled voters violated the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.⁶¹¹

The Fifth Circuit has been more receptive to Texas. It stayed the materiality ruling in December 2023, and in August 2025 a panel reversed the Section 208 ruling, holding that the Voting Rights Act does not preempt state laws like SB 1’s compensation ban. The panel applied a “presumption against preemption,” reasoning that states possess historic authority over election administration and that Section 208’s right to an assistor “of the voter’s choice” does not eliminate all state regulation. Judge James Graves dissented.¹² MALDEF petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court for review in January 2026, and that petition is pending.¹³ The remaining claims continue in district court; the litigation is ongoing as of mid-2026.¹¹

Voter Roll Purges

The 2019 Citizenship List

In 2019, the Texas Secretary of State’s office compiled a list of more than 90,000 registered voters it suspected of being noncitizens, drawn from Department of Public Safety data. The methodology flagged anyone who had identified as a noncitizen when obtaining a state ID or driver’s license, with no accounting for voters who had since naturalized.¹⁴ A top election official later acknowledged the office had overstated the number of flagged voters by roughly 25,000.¹⁵

A federal court halted the purge in February 2019. Texas settled LULAC v. Whitley in April, agreeing to scrap the lists, instruct local officials to take no further action, notify affected voters that their registrations were secure, adopt a reworked methodology for future screenings, and pay $450,000 in costs and fees.¹⁵ Secretary of State David Whitley resigned on May 27, 2019, the last day of the legislative session, after Democratic senators blocked his confirmation.¹⁴

Removals Since SB 1 and the SAVE Lawsuit

In August 2024, Governor Abbott announced that more than 1.1 million people had been removed from Texas voter rolls since SB 1’s passage. Most of the removals were administrative: more than 457,000 deceased voters, more than 463,000 placed on the suspense list for failing to update their information across two election cycles, and roughly 134,000 who had confirmed they moved. More than 6,500 were identified as noncitizens and more than 6,000 removed for felony convictions.¹⁶ A coalition including the ACLU and the Campaign Legal Center raised concerns that some removals may have violated the National Voter Registration Act’s ban on systematic purges within 90 days of an election.¹⁷

In October 2025, Secretary of State Jane Nelson directed county election administrators to use the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database to flag registered voters for investigation and potential removal. The directive flagged 2,724 voters as “potential noncitizens.”¹⁸ In March 2026, the Campaign Legal Center filed LULAC v. Nelson on behalf of LULAC and Common Cause, alleging the program relies on unreliable and stale data, fails to cross-check against DPS citizenship records before initiating purges, and violates the NVRA’s requirements for uniform, non-discriminatory list maintenance. Plaintiffs argue the program risks improperly removing naturalized citizens, echoing the flaws of the 2019 effort.¹⁹ The case is active with no rulings as of mid-2026.²⁰

Prosecutions of Individual Voters

Texas has brought high-profile criminal cases against individuals accused of voting illegally. Critics argue they intimidate eligible voters far more than they address fraud.

Crystal Mason, a former tax preparer from Tarrant County with a prior felony conviction, cast a provisional ballot in the 2016 general election. She testified she did not know she was ineligible to vote while on supervised release. She was convicted of illegal voting in 2018 and sentenced to five years in prison, and served 10 months in federal prison for violating her supervised release. In 2024, a Texas appeals court threw out her conviction, and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals found insufficient evidence that she “actually realized” she was ineligible. The district attorney appealed anyway, saying his intent was to “send a message” to “would-be illegal voters.”²¹

Hervis Rogers of Houston drew national attention in 2020 after waiting seven hours to vote in the presidential primary. In July 2021, he was arrested and charged with two felony counts of illegal voting for casting ballots in 2018 and 2020 while on parole, facing up to 40 years in prison. The case was later thrown out on appeal. Rogers has said he will never vote again.²¹²²

The 2025 Congressional Map

Texas has faced more redistricting challenges than any other state in the current cycle, with nine cases in total.²³ The current fight centers on a mid-decade redraw.

In July 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice sent Governor Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton a letter calling four majority-minority congressional districts, all held by Democrats (the 9th, 18th, 29th, and 33rd), “unconstitutional racial gerrymanders.”²⁴ President Trump publicly requested a “very simple redrawing” to gain five additional Republican seats, and on July 30, 2025, Texas House Republicans unveiled a map that could expand Republican control to 30 of the state’s 38 congressional seats.²⁵ Senator Alex Padilla and other Democrats requested a Hatch Act investigation into coordination by White House and DOJ officials, and the Office of Special Counsel confirmed it has opened one.²⁶

Texas adopted the new map in August 2025. On November 18, 2025, a three-judge federal panel in El Paso blocked it, finding “substantial evidence” that Texas had “racially gerrymandered the 2025 Map” and ordering the state to revert to its 2021 map for the 2026 elections. Texas appealed, and on December 4, 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court granted a stay, allowing the 2025 map to be used for the 2026 midterms. In an unsigned opinion, the Court said Texas was “likely to succeed on the merits” and that the district court had “improperly inserted itself into an active primary campaign.” Justice Elena Kagan dissented, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Jackson, writing that the order “disserves the millions of Texans whom the District Court found were assigned to their new districts based on their race.”²⁷ The merits are unresolved, and the stay continues pending a potential full appeal.²⁸

Polling Place Disruptions in the 2026 Primary

During the March 2026 Texas Senate primary, voters in Dallas and Williamson Counties ran into major disruptions when Republican Party chairs unilaterally withdrew from the countywide polling system that had been in place for more than a decade. Countywide voting had let voters cast ballots at any location; the switch to precinct-based voting restricted them to a specific polling place based on residence and party affiliation. The change was attributed to unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud.²⁹

Many voters were unaware of the change and were turned away from their usual polling locations. A new election data management system compounded the problem, causing missing voter registration cards and inaccurate online precinct assignments. Local Democratic parties obtained a court order extending polling hours, but the Texas Supreme Court reversed the extension, closing polls earlier than the newly announced time and leaving some voters unable to cast ballots or uncertain whether their votes would count. The Brennan Center noted Dallas County holds the state’s second-largest Black voter population and fourth-largest Latino voter population, and that the disruptions disproportionately burdened voters with disabilities, hourly workers, and those reliant on public transit.²⁹

What the 2025 Legislature Did and Did Not Pass

The 89th Texas Legislature considered Senate Bill 16, which would have required documentary proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote, applying not only to new applicants but retroactively to all 18.6 million registered Texas voters. The ACLU of Texas and a broad coalition opposed the bill, arguing it would disenfranchise young people, naturalized citizens, married women who had changed their names, and low-income communities, and estimating that roughly 1.3 million voting-age Texans lack easy access to the required documentation.³⁰ The bill passed the Senate on a party-line vote, stalled in the House, and died without a floor vote.³¹

Other election bills did pass. Senate Bill 2753, approved in June 2025, restructures the early voting period into 12 consecutive days ending on Election Day, extends Sunday voting hours from six to nine hours, and requires early voting locations to also serve as Election Day polling places. The bill does not allocate funding to counties for the additional costs.³² Senate Bill 827, effective September 1, 2025, requires post-election hand count audits of at least 1 percent of polling locations in elections using electronic voting systems, along with mandatory risk-limiting audits for statewide races. It passed the House 137–0.³³ House Bill 521, also effective September 1, 2025, added new requirements for curbside voters, including a signed statement affirming physical inability to enter the polling place, and imposed reporting obligations on anyone who assists or transports seven or more voters, with intentional failure to comply classified as a Class A misdemeanor.³⁴

Heading into the 2026 midterms, Texans vote under a photo ID requirement with a reasonable-impediment workaround, strict mail ballot ID matching rules whose constitutionality is still being fought over, an active voter purge program being challenged in federal court, and a congressional map a federal court found was racially gerrymandered but which the Supreme Court has allowed to stand for this election cycle.

1
OER TX. Texas Government – Voting and Elections
2
Every Texan. Texas Has a Long History of Voter Discrimination Based on the Pretext of Voter Fraud
3
Campaign Legal Center. Veasey v. Abbott One Pager
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Voting Rights Caucus. Appeals Court Calls Texas Voter ID Law Discriminatory, Orders Changes
5
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Veasey v. Abbott, No. 17-40884
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MALDEF. Timeline of Texas’s Voter Suppression Legislation SB1
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Texas Legislature. Senate Bill 1 Enrolled Text
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Votebeat. SB1 Mail Ballot Rejections – Asian Latino Black Voters
9
Brennan Center for Justice. Study Reveals Lasting Voter Suppression Effects of Restrictive Texas Law
10
U.S. Department of Justice. United States v. Texas Complaint
11
League of Women Voters. OCA-Greater Houston v. Esparza, Consolidated With La Union del Pueblo Entero v. Abbott
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U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. La Union del Pueblo Entero v. Abbott, No. 24-50826
13
MALDEF. LUPE Petition for Certiorari
14
NPR. Texas Voting Chief Who Led Botched Voter Purge Resigns
15
Texas Tribune. Texas Voting Rights Groups Win Settlement With Secretary of State
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Office of the Texas Governor. Governor Abbott Announces Over 1 Million Ineligible Voters Removed From Voter Rolls
17
Texas Tribune. Greg Abbott Voter Rolls Texas
18
Houston Public Media. Texas Immigration Election Voting Lawsuit Noncitizens
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Campaign Legal Center. CLC Sues Texas Over SAVE System Usage to Conduct Voter Purges
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Campaign Legal Center. Defending Texans From Discriminatory Voter Purges
21
The Guardian. Crystal Mason Voting Intimidation
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New York Times. Texas Primary Voter Arrested
23
Brennan Center for Justice. Redistricting Litigation Roundup
24
Houston Public Media. Texas Legislature Begins Mid-Decade Redistricting Under Pressure From Trump and Abbott
25
NPR. Trump Republicans Democrats Redistricting
26
Office of Senator Alex Padilla. Padilla Leads Call for Investigation Into Trump Administration Violations of Hatch Act
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SCOTUSblog. Supreme Court Allows Texas to Use Redistricting Map Challenged as Racially Discriminatory
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SCOTUSblog. Abbott v. League of United Latin American Citizens
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Brennan Center for Justice. Chaos and Voter Suppression in the Texas Primary
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ACLU of Texas. ACLU of Texas and Partners Oppose Controversial Voter Suppression Bill
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Texas Tribune. Texas Proof of Citizenship Vote Senate Bill 16
32
Votebeat. Senate Bill 2753 Expands Early Voting Access Weekend
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Texas Legislature. SB 827 Bill Analysis
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Texas Secretary of State. Advisory 2025-12 – Changes to Curbside Voting and Assistance Procedures