Last week, Gov. Greg Abbott announced that over one million ineligible voters had been removed from the state’s rolls since 2021.
“Election integrity is essential to our democracy,” said Abbott 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.
“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.”
The announcement drew criticism from some quarters, however.
Ashley Harris, a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, claimed that the state’s data is flawed.
“What this data tells us is that the state, one, flagged someone as a potential citizen and then wasn’t able to confirm their citizenship. We have seen in a broader context that Texas has a long history of incorrectly flagging people as potential non-citizens both in 2019 and subsequently in 2021 on which this data is largely based,” Harris alleged.
Fox 4 KDFW recently sat down with the governor to speak with him about the voter roll cleanup and the accusations of voter suppression. Here’s the start of the story:
AUSTIN, Texas – Recently, Texas removed nearly a million votes out of play for the November election.
State officials claim they found a lot of names on county voter rolls that just simply didn’t belong. The purge that resulted is somewhat of a rebooted overhaul, after a previous attempt a few years ago misidentified several thousand illegal voters.
This recent effort has prompted accusations of voter suppression aimed at Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.
Abbott spoke with FOX 7 Austin’s Rudy Koski about the new process and the accusations.
GREG ABBOTT: It is a cleanup but not a one-time cleanup. It is a constant cleanup because we have a perpetual duty to ensure that there’s nobody on the voter rolls who is in, who is ineligible to vote. It is the way, the primary way that we are able to ensure that we can cut down on any type of illegal voting.