The "Use It or Lose It" Voter Bill Has Been Filed for the 2025 Legislative Session

The headline below caught our attention in the Spring of 2023 from the Texas Standard:

Texas could be the next state to pass "Use It or Lose It" voter bill, voters could be removed from the rolls if they miss consecutive elections.
By Michael Marks & Marissa Greene, April 21, 2023

The bill passed the Texas Senate in April 2023, but did not see action in the Texas House.

This was the recorded party line vote by our elected Texas Senators: Yeas 19, Nays 12.

Yeas: Bettencourt, Birdwell, Campbell, Creighton, Flores, Hall, Hancock, Huffman, Hughes, King, Kolkhorst, Middleton, Nichols, Parker, Paxton, Perry, Schwertner, Sparks, Springer.

Nays: Alvarado, Blanco, Eckhardt, Gutierrez, Hinojosa, Johnson, LaMantia, Menéndez, Miles, West, Whitmire, Zaffirini.

Action for 2025 Legislative Session

Senator Kolkhorst and Senator Bettencourt filed SB260 as SB396 on December 2, 2024. It's the same bill that passed in the Senate in April 2023 that will send notifications to voters who haven't voted for 25 months, put them in suspense and on the way to purging. This is the supplemental process to the existing NVRA move/suspense practice that Ohio had been doing for years and was upheld in the 2018 SCOTUS case. Essentially putting a voter into the suspense process because they didn't vote.

Dr. Andrea Barreiro ran a view of voter impacts from this proposed legislation using public Dallas County data after the November 2024 election. The analysis shows 29% of active status Dallas voters would definitely be at risk for notification as defined by this bill. Definitely at risk means they have not voted since before the general election in November 2022.

The 29% represents 377,089 active voters - just in Dallas County. In our analysis from the summer of 2024, Dallas County had 25% of active voters likely at risk. Effective date for the bill, if it becomes law, is September 1, 2025.

We need Texans to vote in May 2025 or in November 2025 if county election notifications are to go out on November 30 following a general election. This is not the current NVRA process where a voter can update an address online and move from suspense status to active status. A voter has to vote to not receive a notification.

Texas already purges about half a million voters every two years from the suspense process. Suspense voters are now 11.8% of the total voters registered (see chart below).

Here is the research document: "Use It or Lose It" Texas Voter Bill Analysis.

In March 2024, voters in suspense were 11.8% of total registered voters, up from 10.3% in 2022.

Voting in November will remove your suspense status.