Texas is suing the US over election allegations made by non-citizens

(Reuters) – Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued Democratic U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration on Tuesday, saying the federal government failed to provide necessary help in assessing the citizenship status of some of its registered voters.

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, accuses the Biden administration, and specifically the Department of Homeland Security, of refusing to assist in determining the citizenship status of 450,000 of the state’s 17.9 million registered voters.

It is already illegal for non-citizens to vote in U.S. federal elections, and government and private audits have found very few cases where this is the case. Still, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and his allies have argued that large numbers of non-citizens could vote in the Nov. 5 election, when he faces Democrat Kamala Harris.

The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Trump has falsely claimed that his loss to Biden in 2020 was due to widespread voter fraud.

Paxton’s office said he sent a letter earlier this month asking the U.S. government to verify the citizenship status of people who may have been unlawfully registered to vote in Texas by Oct. 19. His office said he filed a lawsuit when his request went unanswered.

His office said there were nearly half a million voters whose citizenship status had not been verified, but acknowledged that the majority of those voters were likely citizens and therefore eligible to vote.

“While the majority of voters on the list are likely citizens who are eligible to vote, without additional information, Texans have no way of knowing whether any of the voters on the list are non-citizens who are not eligible to vote,” the office said.

(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Washington; Editing by Scott Malone and Stephen Coates)