Texas has purged 1.1 million names from voting rolls since the 2020 presidential election after the state found them to be ineligible, Gov. Greg Abbott announced Monday.
Abbott signed election integrity bill SB 1 into law in 2021 requiring the secretary of state to work with the Department of Public Safety to compare information on citizenship status in that agency's database to the voter rolls. The checks are required to be "monthly."
"Election integrity is essential to our democracy," said Abbott. "I have signed the strongest election laws in the nation to protect the right to vote and to crack down on illegal voting."
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"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."
The Texas government has referred cases of ineligible voters participating in an election to Attorney General Ken Praxton for prosecution.
"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," Abbott said.
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He added, "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."
The governor's office offered a chart breaking down reasons for removal from the voting rolls and categorized estimates for individuals in each category.
The largest group of Texas residents disqualified in the audit was "voters on the suspense list" – people who have failed to properly confirm their residential address in the state. Over 463,000 individuals were included in this category.
The second most prominent category was "deceased people" still included on the voting rolls, which numbered over 457,000.
The governor's office said that approximately 6,500 noncitizens were purged from the rolls – almost 2,000 of those noncitizens are alleged to have cast votes in past elections.
