Texas voter purge marked by mistakes, misidentifications

By jake Miller /
CBS News/ November 2, 2012, 11:04 AM

Texas election officials erroneously purged voters from the rolls after the voters were mistakenly linked with deceased individuals who shared their names and birthdays, according to a review of records conducted by the Houston Chronicle.

Rich Parsons, a spokesman for the Texas Secretary of State, affirmed that the state was cross-referencing the its voter rolls with the Social Security Administration's death database, and that 6,491 voters have been deemed ineligible as a result.

One such voter, James Harris Jr., an African-American veteran of the U.S. Air Force who has voted in every presidential election since the Nixon era, received a letter asking him whether he was dead. He was apparently misidentified as an Arkansan man who shared his name and died in 1996.

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