With just 70 days until the November election, some races in Texas are getting more exciting. The state’s Republican officials have focused on what they call election integrity.

“It’s a matter of proximity. Just imagine: You go to a baseball game, the score is 10-0, and the umpire makes a bad call that costs you a point. You’re going to walk away and say, ‘My team wasn’t very good.’ If the score is extremely close, 0-0, and then there’s a bad call by the umpire, then you start blaming not your team but the umpire,” said Bob Stein, a professor of political science at Rice University.

Stein has been involved in elections for decades and served as an expert witness in the state’s election audit.

He was not surprised when Governor Greg Abbott announced on Monday that the reforms he signed had resulted in more than a million ineligible voters being removed from the state’s voter rolls since 2021.

“There are two sides to this: It strengthens voters’ confidence that the election will be fair, and it puts people who might try to vote on notice that they will be prosecuted,” Stein explained. “I’ll leave it to other listeners to judge who and which parties benefit from this, but I think the coincidence of these two events and the proximity to the upcoming election is a little problematic.”

Emptying voter lists is nothing new.

“I don’t think it’s unusual that a million names have been removed,” Stein said. “I would imagine that as many as half a million people have died, moved away or changed their address.”

According to records from the Texas Secretary of State, the number of people being purged from the voter rolls has not really increased in recent years.

In fact, 1.25 million people were deported nationwide in 2020.

In 2019, 683,000 were deducted.

The governor’s office did not respond to our questions about this, but we know voter turnout is a big deal for both parties.

“If voters no longer believe in the election or in anything else, if gambling in Las Vegas or baseball games are not fair, then they won’t come out and participate,” Stein said.

You have until October 7 to register for the November election.

“It’s really important that you go out and check your voter registration,” said Dallana Carmargo of the League of Women Voters. “Sometimes if you haven’t registered in two consecutive federal elections, you get removed from your voter rolls. You have to re-register, or maybe you’ve moved since the last time.”

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