Governor Greg Abbott (R-Texas) announced Monday that the state has purged over a million voters from the state’s voter rolls to protect election integrity and combat illegal voting. Those purged include non-citizens, deceased voters and convicted criminals.

In a press release Monday, Abbott said, “Election integrity is critical to our democracy. I signed the nation’s strongest election laws to protect the right to vote and crack down on illegal voting. These reforms have resulted in over a million ineligible people being removed from our voter rolls over the past three years, including noncitizens, deceased voters and people who have moved to another state.”

The press release noted that in 2017, Abbott signed Senate Bill 5, which increased penalties for poll workers who knowingly allow non-citizens and ineligible people to vote. In 2021, Abbott signed Senate Bill 1, Senate Bill 1113 and House Bill 574.

The Senate’s first bill criminalized ballot harvesting, made lying on voter registration a state prison crime, banned the distribution of unsolicited mail-in ballots, required identification for mail-in ballots, and required the Secretary of State to conduct an election audit every two years.

Senate Bill 1113 authorized the Secretary of State to withhold funds from Texas counties that do not remove noncitizens from voter rolls, while House Bill 574 made willfully counting invalid votes or refusing to count valid votes a second-degree felony.

READ MORE: GOP state investigates reports of illegal voter registration of non-citizens

In a press release Monday, Abbott stated that the Secretary of State and county voter registrars “have an ongoing legal obligation to review voter rolls, remove ineligible voters, and refer any potentially illegal ballots to the Attorney General’s office and local authorities for investigation and prosecution.”

The Republican governor warned that Texas will not tolerate “illegal voting” and reiterated that the state will “actively protect Texans’ sacred right to vote while vigorously protecting our elections from illegal voting.”

In a statement obtained by Fox 7, Abbott said the legislation he signed in 2021 “expanded” the state’s ability to “screen noncitizens who may be eligible to vote.”

The governor’s press release said that of the more than 1.1 million voters purged from the state’s voter rolls, approximately 6,500 were noncitizens, more than 6,000 were convicted of a serious crime and more than 457,000 voters were deceased.

“That’s obviously a higher number than we want, we want zero,” Abbott added in a statement to Fox 7. “I don’t care what color you are – black, white, brown, Asian – I think everyone wants to see a fair election where the rules are followed and there is no illegal voting.”