Dallas lawyer, former LULAC president says he was mistakenly declared dead, removed from voter rolls: "I'm not dead yet"

A Dallas lawyer who recently served as president of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) called for answers after he said he was mistakenly declared dead and his voter registration wrongly canceled.

In a video shared to Facebook on April 17, Domingo García shared that he received a letter from the Dallas County Elections Department, which García said informed him of the cancelation. The letter, García noted, told him he had 10 days to appeal.

"I'm still very much alive."

García, who also previously served on the Dallas City Council and in the Texas House of Representatives, said he had just voted in March's primary elections and has "voted every year for the last 50 years". He then said that, apparently, it was reported that he had died. 

"As you can see, I'm not dead yet," García said in his video. "A lot of people want me dead, pero no."

"I'm still very much alive, and to quote Mark Twain, 'reports of my death are premature,'" he added.

What elections officials said

García, however, also said he wondered how many other voters, both in Dallas County and across Texas, were getting similar cancelation letters.

"Is this a computer glitch? Or is this an intentional act of voter suppression being conducted by the Secretary of State and elements of the far-right Republican Party?" he asked. "We want to know. The right to vote has been earned by millions of people who have fought to make sure that there was no poll tax, no whites-only primary, to make sure that if your name was Hernandez or García, or if you are African-American or Native American that you had the same right to vote; the right of women after suffrage was earned by protest and fighting."

The Dallas County Elections Department said in a statement to CBS News Texas that it was alerted to the situation and discovered the error "stemmed from data received through the Texas Secretary of State's voter database". The department said García's registration had been reactivated in its system and that at least one other voter had been wrongly marked as dead.

The department also said "We have been in communication with the Texas Secretary of State to resolve the issue and they are working with their voter database vendor to investigate. We are currently reviewing additional records that were included in the same file sent from their office."