On Monday, Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced that the Lone Star State has removed more than 1.1 million ineligible voters from the state’s voter rolls. It’s part of a crackdown on election integrity spurred by the signing of Senate Bill 1 in 2021.
Senate Bill 1 was the main reason that dozens of Democrats left the state in the summer of 2021 in a denial of quorum action. The Democrats fled to Washington, D.C., for six weeks to delay action on the bill, which was eventually signed into law by Abbott.
“Election integrity is essential to our democracy,” Abbott noted in a press release. “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.”
Abbott continued: “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.”
Among those removed from the voter rolls were more than 457,000 deceased people, over 463,000 on Texas’ “Suspense” list (voters whose address can not be verified by the state), more than 6,000 felons, and more than 6,500 non-citizens.
Despite these findings, state Democrats are calling the idea of voters who are not eligible to vote in state elections a “scare tactic.”
“This false narrative that there’s all these undocumented folks that are registering to vote, that our election system somehow is rigged … it’s not,” said Democrat Eddie Morales. “It is anticipated that there will not be any problems in the November election. We have a great checks and balances system in place.”
Republicans, on the other hand, want citizens to have more confidence in their voting system.
“What we want is our voters to say, ‘these are fair, these are transparent, my vote counts.’ As a state, we need to be the gold standard for the country, and the country, the gold standard for the world,” said Republican Mano DeAyala.
The announcement comes as Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is investigating organizations that may be assisting illegal immigrants to vote in the state.
“My office is investigating every credible report we receive regarding potential criminal activity that could compromise the integrity of our elections. The Biden-Harris Administration has intentionally flooded our country with illegal aliens, and without proper safeguards, foreign nationals can illegally influence elections at the local, state, and national level,” Paxton said.
Abbott signed several new election measures in the wake of the highly contentious 2020 general election. Senate Bill 1113 allows the secretary of state to withhold funds from counties that fail to remove non-citizens from voter rolls. House Bill 574 makes it a second-degree felony in the state to knowingly count invalid votes or to fail to count valid ones.
