Over ONE MILLION ineligible voters removed from Texas voter rolls

On Monday, Texas Republican Governor Abbott announced the removal of more than one million voters from voter rolls in the state of Texas as part of a purge to protect the integrity of the election and crackdown on illegal voting. The list included people who moved out-of-state, are deceased or are noncitizens.

In 2017, Abbott signed SB 5 into law which increased the penalty for election workers who allow non-citizens and ineligible people to vote.

He then followed that up by signing SB 1 into law in 2021 to create statewide voting hours, maintain and expand voting access for registered voters needing assistance, prohibit drive-through voting, authorize poll watchers to observe more parts of the election process, ban distribution of unsolicited mail-in ballot applications and ballots, and require IDs for mail-in ballots.

The same year, Abbott signed Senate Bill 1113 and House Bill 574 into law, which allow the Secretary of State to withhold funds from counties that fail to remove non-citizens from their voter rolls and make it a second-degree felony to knowingly count invalid votes or refuse to count valid votes.

As a result, over 1.1 million voters have been purged from the voter rolls, which included approximately 6,500 who were non-citizens.

Abbott said in a statement, “Election integrity is essential to our democracy. I have signed the strongest election laws in the nation to protect the right to vote and to crack down on illegal voting. These reforms have led to the removal of over one million ineligible people from our voter rolls in the last three years, including noncitizens, deceased voters, and people who moved to another state.”

He added, “The Secretary of State and county voter registrars have an ongoing legal requirement to review the voter rolls, remove ineligible voters, and refer any potential illegal voting to the Attorney General’s Office and local authorities for investigation and prosecution. Illegal voting in Texas will never be tolerated. We will continue to actively safeguard Texans’ sacred right to vote while also aggressively protecting our elections from illegal voting.”

Abbott noted that the number of people purged is obviously "a number higher than what we want to see, we want to see zero. I don’t care what your color is — black, white, brown, Asian — I think everybody wants to see fair elections with the rules followed with no illegal voting."