Thousands Of Non-Citizens, Felons Removed From Texas Voter Rolls

 Thousands of non-citizens and felons were removed from the Texas voter rolls since the implementation of a 2021 law that has been celebrated as a way to safeguard the state’s elections.

More than 1 million ineligible voters have been removed from the Lone Star State’s voter rolls, Governor Greg Abbott announced yesterday. The cleanup of the voter rolls, which was made possible by Senate Bill 1, resulted in over 6,500 non-citizens and more than 6,000 felons being removed.

“Election integrity is essential to our democracy,” Abbott stated. “I have signed the strongest election laws in the nation to protect the right to vote and to crackdown 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.”

“We will continue to actively safeguard Texans’ sacred right to vote while also aggressively protecting our elections from illegal voting,” Abbott went on to state. The announcement from Abbott also noted that the process is ongoing.

In addition to the thousands of non-citizens and felons, the cleanup also resulted in the removal of more than 457,000 deceased people and over 134,000 people who had moved from the voter rolls.

 

The voter roll cleanup comes as Texas has become an increasingly competitive state in some recent elections, with Republicans sometimes only winning by slim margins. In the 2018 midterms, for example, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz beat his Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke by just over 200,000 votes.

Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin also recently removed 6,300 non-citizens from his state’s voter rolls after signing an executive order telling the Department of Elections to remove “non-citizens who may have purposefully or accidentally registered to vote.”

Gov. Abbott and Gov. Youngkin’s efforts to remove non-citizens from their states’ voter rolls come amid growing concerns that mass illegal immigration could harm the integrity of American elections. Elon Musk has accused the Democratic Party of leveraging illegal immigration to grow their political power, in part by allowing illegal immigrants to be counted in the Congressional district apportionment process.