Texas has removed one million people from voter rolls as part of controversial reforms

A set of legislation, passed in 2021, created more rules when voting in the state

Approximately 1.1 million people in Texas had their names removed from the state voter roll over the last three years (AFP via Getty Images)

Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced on Monday that more than one million people have been removed from Texas’s voter rolls over the last three years under a set of controversial voting laws that sought to “crackdown on illegal voting.”

According to a list, approximately 1.1 million people have had their names removed from Texas’s voter roll call –  most of those are people who died, moved to a different state or did not respond to voter status update questionnaires.

He claimed roughly 6,500 were noncitizens, 1,930 of whom had a voter history – though it is unclear how accurate that number is.

Abbott attributed the purge of names to the set of election laws, which he referred to as the “strongest election laws in the nation”, passed in 2021 after false claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

Those laws, under Senate Bill 1, restricted early voting hours, banned unsolicited mail-in ballot applications, required state ID, expanded poll watchers’ protections and access, and established a monthly maintenance review of noncitizens with voter registrations.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed a piece of legislation in 2021 that created more restirctions around voting in the Lone Star state (Getty Images)

But a local voting rights organization said Abbott’s announcement “lacks transparency”

“Year after year, people are taken off the voting rolls for all manner of innocuous reasons, and while Senate Bill 1 did enact stricter barriers for registering to vote, there is no evidence to suggest that the governor’s data can be attributed to the law,” Sarah Xiyi Chen of the Texas Civil Rights Project told The Texas Tribune.

Abbott’s press release indicated 463,000 people were dropped from the voter roll list after appearing on the “suspense list” – a method the state employs to ensure a voter’s address is updated. Counties will send a notice to an individual if a jury summons or other government form is not returned or is undeliverable.

This process has been used before the 2021 legislation was passed. More than 12 percent of Texas’s 18.3 million registered voters are on that list, according to KXAN. But many voters can be reinstated once they register again.

What is more unclear is the number of noncitizens with a voting history who were removed from the roll call.

Texas faced a similar controversy in 2019 after the secretary of state claimed 95,000 noncitizens had a voting history. It was later determined that the list was created by cross-referencing registered voters with people who said they were not citizens when they obtained a driver’s license or state identification card.

That meant the list could include plenty of people who became naturalized citizens at some point after obtaining a state I.D. A preliminary investigation found that at least 25,000 of those names were incorrectly added to the list.

The scandal resulted in multiple lawsuits, the resignation of the then-acting Texas secretary of state, and eventually the rescinding of the initial claim.