Pre-filled voter registration forms are not proof of fraud

CLAIM: The campaign of Democrat Beto O’Rourke, who is running for Texas governor, engaged in voter fraud by sending pre-filled voter registration forms to dead people.

AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. O’Rourke’s campaign did send out partially filled-out forms to encourage people to register before the Texas deadline, a spokesperson for the campaign told The Associated Press. However, experts and government officials say that sending such forms is permitted under Texas law, even if they are sent to dead people because of databases that are not up to date. Even if someone tried to return the form on behalf of a dead person, the applications are verified for eligibility by the state before they are approved. There are additional safeguards, such as signature validation, to protect against fraud if an actual ballot gets mailed on behalf of someone who has died — a rare occurrence, the AP has reported.

THE FACTS: One week out from the midterm elections, some social media users are falsely claiming that O’Rourke’s campaign is engaging in voter fraud by trying to illegally register dead people to vote.

“Beto O’Rourke’s campaign has also been sending pre-filled registration applications to dead voters,” a woman said in a video posted to Twitter. “This is literally right before the November elections and they’re sending this to dead voters. This is voter fraud.”

A tweet featuring the video had received more than 20,000 likes and more than 11,000 shares as of Monday.

“Beto O’Rourke’s Campaign caught sending out prefilled voter registration to dead voters in Texas !!” another tweet stated. “Democrats are trying to steal elections the same way as in 2020.”

O’Rourke’s campaign did send out application forms with people’s names, birthdays and addresses filled out to remind them to update their voter registration if they’d moved, or to register for the first time, before the Texas deadline on Oct. 11, according to Chris Evans, the campaign’s director of communications.

Evans acknowledged that the database the campaign uses for such mailings might contain errors. But he noted that all voter registration applications are reviewed by the state of Texas to make sure people who fill them out are eligible to vote.

“An individual who is not eligible would have their application flagged by the state and be unable to successfully register,” he said.

Texas election experts and officials concurred that a campaign sending out registration forms with select portions filled out is legally sound, even if some end up being sent to voters who have died through faulty mailing lists.

“Campaigns and third-party organizations that send people blank voter registration applications are allowed to pre-fill certain portions of the application,” Sam Taylor, a spokesperson for the Texas secretary of state’s office, told the AP.

Texas election law allows for such pre-filled applications to already include the voter’s name, birthdate and address, Taylor said.

He confirmed that all voter registration applications are subject to validation — including a comparison of information to Texas Department of Public Safety and Social Security Administration records. Individuals reported to those agencies as deceased would fail the validation process.

“There are ample checks in the system to make sure someone cannot register and request a mail-in ballot in the name of a deceased person,” Taylor said.

He also noted that it is common for campaigns and other organizations to use private data sources to send such forms and that those lists can include outdated or inaccurate information.

Information in such databases may be outdated or inaccurate because the databases are not updated in real time, said Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University in Houston.

“Look at it from their perspective — they don’t want to mail it to anyone who’s deceased because that’s going to be a wasted piece of direct mail,” he said. “It’s quite possible, especially if somebody passed away within 2022, that the death certificate essentially has not been updated in whatever dataset they’re using and therefore the person still appears to be living.”

D. Theodore Rave, a professor of law at the University of Texas at Austin with expertise on election law, similarly told the AP that it’s not illegal to fill out information such as a name, address and birthday. It would be against state law to fill out other information, such as “statements that the voter is a U.S. citizen, a resident of the county, not incapacitated, and not a felon,” he wrote in an email.

“If a partially pre-filled registration form is sent to someone who has died, in all likelihood, nothing at all would happen,” Rave added. “If someone else were to attempt to use one of those forms to register in the name of a dead person, that would indeed be fraud under Texas Election Code sec. 276.013, and would subject that person to criminal penalties.”

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This is part of AP’s effort to address widely shared misinformation, including work with outside companies and organizations to add factual context to misleading content that is circulating online. Learn more about fact-checking at AP.