HE'S NEVER BEEN TO NORTH CAROLINA, EH?:

In a four-page ruling, Judge Biery takes repeat aim at Texas Secretary of State David Whitley over his office's issuance of an advisory notice instructing local officials to target 98,000 recently-naturalized Texans who had previously indicated they were not citizens but who are currently registered to vote.

Compiling this list in the first place was a problem because it immediately produced "flawed results," the court determined.

Judge Biery detailed how flawed those results were:

Out of 98,000 new American voters on the list, thus far approximately 80 have been identified as being ineligible to vote. Almost immediately upon sending the list, the government had an "oops" moment, realizing that 25,000 names should not have been included. It appears this is a solution looking for a problem.

The decision also contains some relevant statistics from a similarly-situated state:

As plaintiffs' counsel stated at the preliminary injunction hearing, "[o]n the Florida case,. . . they started at 180,000 identified voters in that state, and by the time they went through all the sifting, they ended up with 85" people who were ineligible to vote.

"The Florida program, similar in nature to Texas, was ultimately abandoned by the state," Judge Biery noted in his decision-which quoted both William Shakespeare and Henry David Thoreau in order to make the case that Texas officials had created this suddenly complicated problem out of whole cloth.

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