Years After Texas Election Data Probe, Key Questions Remain

In March 2024, independent journalists discovered a startling anomaly in the Social Security Administration’s Help America Vote Verification (HAVV) data. Texas, supposedly a conservative bulwark for election integrity, was responsible for nearly two-thirds of all HAVV No-ID voter queries in the entire nation. The HAVV system exists to verify the identity of voter registration applicants who lack traditional photo identification by matching the last four digits of their Social Security Number against federal records. Normally, the data moves in predictable patterns, a slow rhythm of modest verification requests spread evenly among the fifty states. But in early 2024, the rhythm broke. Texas alone accounted for 64.76% of the nation’s HAVV traffic.

For a moment, it looked like the state had gone haywire. Based on the query data, Texas appeared to be registering roughly one million voters per month without ID. This contradicted state records showing the voter rolls had increased by only 57,711 voters that year. Then something even stranger happened. Within days of Governor Greg Abbott’s Secretary of State Jane Nelson issuing a defensive statement, the SSA stopped updating the HAVV data entirely. For a full month, the public record froze. When it resumed, Texas’s share of the queries had dropped from 64.76% to 6.37%.

What changed? No one would say. Nelson’s office refused to explain the spike, the pause, or the drop. The SSA ignored repeated Freedom of Information Act requests. And when reporters pressed for clarification, Governor Abbott himself turned his back, literally unfollowing those raising questions on 𝕏. More than a year later, there are still no answers.

The question that first drew my attention to the HAVV system was simple: why was Texas accessing the federal database so much more than every other state combined? After consulting several sources familiar with both election systems and cybersecurity, three possible explanations emerged. First, a nefarious actor could have been “cleaning” a list of Social Security Numbers to identify which were active and which were deceased. Second, the State of Texas itself might have been scrubbing voter rolls. Third, it could have been a software glitch. Only one of these explanations would be benign.

I decided to examine the full HAVV dataset, which spans from 2011 to the present. The results were damning. Every time a voter registers without ID, the state must verify the registration through HAVV using the applicant’s name, date of birth, and the last four digits of their SSN. The SSA confirms whether those data points match a living individual. It is therefore extraordinarily rare for a deceased person’s SSN to appear in the HAVV data. Yet in Texas, beginning around 2021, the system showed a massive and growing number of “dead person” matches.

Dead Texans do not attempt to register to vote. Someone else was accessing the HAVV system using credentials associated with the State of Texas and entering SSNs of deceased individuals. The question is why.

Something significant happened in 2021: the Biden-Harris administration began granting mass “auto-parole” to migrants encountered at the southern border. This administrative policy enabled nearly all of them to obtain Social Security Numbers under temporary lawful presence provisions. Millions of new SSNs were suddenly issued, and each year after 2021, the number of HAVV queries tied to deceased persons rose sharply.

The pattern suggests that someone, somewhere, was verifying large lists of SSNs, potentially to identify those still active and unregistered to vote. This could allow the creation of no-ID voter registrations or mail-in ballot requests tied to legitimate SSNs but belonging to individuals who were not citizens. In short, someone may have been laundering Social Security Numbers through the HAVV system to build a database of usable voter identities. If so, that would amount to the largest election-integrity breach in Texas history.

When the story first broke, journalists like @DC_Draino on 𝕏 amplified the data publicly, prompting the SSA’s reporting blackout. After the data reappeared, the scale of Texas’s queries collapsed overnight. The implication is obvious: someone got caught. The data change coincided precisely with public scrutiny. Yet no one in Austin would admit anything. Secretary Nelson has refused every request for comment or clarification. Her office offers no accounting for who accessed the database, what purpose it served, or what controls failed. Worse, Nelson later hired a Washington DC attorney, at taxpayer expense, to fight the Texas Republican Party’s effort to close its primaries to non-Republicans. One cannot help but ask why a Texas official would retain a Beltway lawyer to undermine her own state’s GOP. Taken together, these facts suggest a pattern not of transparency, but of protection.

If the systems that determine citizenship and allow no-ID voting are compromised in Texas, a state governed by Republicans, how bad must things be in California, Illinois, or New York? Texas was supposed to be a model of secure elections. Instead, its Secretary of State presided over the most suspicious spike in federal identity-verification queries in the nation, stonewalled every request for explanation, and then aligned herself with out-of-state operatives to weaken party control over primaries. Something is indeed rotten in Austin.

The broader danger is structural. The HAVV system was built in good faith, designed to ensure that those lacking photo identification could still exercise their right to vote. But that noble intention has been subverted. By allowing registration based on the last four digits of an SSN alone, states have created a loophole large enough to drive a convoy through. The SSA does not flag whether a Social Security Number belongs to a citizen or a non-citizen, only whether it matches the name and date of birth provided. This means that a non-citizen, or someone acting on their behalf, can register and vote under the cover of administrative ambiguity. The HAVV’s design makes fraud nearly impossible to detect after the fact.

The solution is both simple and politically inconvenient. The SSA should provide each state with a list of the last four digits of SSNs issued to non-citizens. States do not need names, addresses, or any identifying details, just the numbers. That list could be cross-referenced against voter registration records to ensure that only citizens are voting. There is no privacy violation in confirming that those who vote are citizens, and no democracy can survive long if it cannot make that basic guarantee.

Yet no one in the Texas government has moved to close this loophole. Not Abbott, not Nelson, not the legislature. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that either they are willfully blind or deliberately complicit. The political establishment would rather deny the existence of a problem than admit that the state’s election systems have been compromised. But the data speaks for itself.

What we witnessed in 2024 was not a glitch. It was a signal. It revealed that the machinery of voter verification in Texas is porous, vulnerable, and possibly being exploited. And if Texas, the reddest of red states, cannot or will not secure its voter database, it is naïve to believe blue states have fared better.

The time for polite silence is over. Secretary Nelson owes Texans an answer. Governor Abbott owes them accountability. And if the federal HAVV system remains open to abuse, Congress owes the nation a fix.

If we fail to act, the integrity of our elections will remain an illusion, protected by bureaucratic opacity and defended by officials too timid or too compromised to tell the truth.

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