ELECTION INTEGRITYElection Experts Cautious as Abbott Touts Voter Roll Purge
Federal and state law already required voter roll maintenance. Experts warn the governor’s framing of this routine process could be used to undermine trust in elections.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced on Monday that the state has removed roughly a million people from its voter rolls since he signed a legislative overhaul of election laws in 2021.
“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,” he said.
However, election experts point out that both federal and state law already required voter roll maintenance, and the governor’s framing of this routine process as a protection against illegal voting could be used to undermine trust in elections. The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 already governs how states should keep their registration rolls accurate and up-to-date, and also includes protections to avoid the inadvertent removal of properly registered voters.
“Year after year, people are taken off the voting rolls for all manner of innocuous reasons,” said Sarah Xiyi Chen, an attorney at the Texas Civil Rights Project.
Neither the governor nor the Secretary of State’s Office responded to requests for comment.
Removal of ‘Noncitizens’ Raises Questions
The majority of voters removed from the rolls were taken off because they died, failed to respond to notices from election officials, or moved out of Texas. Abbott’s press release also said more than 6,000 voters were removed after being convicted of a felony.
The total Abbott cited includes more than 463,000 who were taken off after being placed on what is known as the suspense list. Such voters are removed after the voter registrar receives information that they have moved. If the voter does not update their information and does not vote for two election cycles, they’re then removed from the rolls.
In addition, the governor stressed that more than 6,500 “noncitizens” who shouldn’t have been registered were removed, and approximately 1,930 of those had a voting history.
Voter watchdogs such as Alice Clapman, senior counsel at the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights Program, said they want to know more about those voters, because Texas has wrongly flagged people as noncitizens before.
Erroneously flagging legal voters as noncitizens can occur when outdated information is obtained from naturalized citizens or if someone mistakenly checks the wrong box at the DMV, Clapman said.
