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Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced Monday that the state has purged about one million people from its voter rolls since signing a 2021 election law reform bill.

“Illegal voting will never be tolerated in Texas. We will continue to actively protect Texans’ sacred right to vote while aggressively protecting our elections from illegal voting,” he said.

But election experts point out that both federal and state laws already require voter rolls to be maintained, and the governor’s portrayal of this routine process as a safeguard against illegal voting could undermine confidence in the election. The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 already regulates how states should keep their voter rolls accurate and up-to-date, and also includes safeguards to prevent the accidental deletion of properly registered voters.

“Year after year, people are purged from the voter rolls for all sorts of innocent reasons,” says Sarah Xiyi Chen, an attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project.

Neither the governor nor the Secretary of State’s office responded to requests for comment.

Deportation of “non-citizens” raises questions

The majority of voters purged from the rolls were purged because they died, did not respond to notifications from election officials or moved away from Texas. Abbott’s press release also said more than 6,000 voters were purged from the rolls after being convicted of a crime.

The total cited by Abbott includes more than 463,000 voters who were removed from the electoral roll after being placed on the so-called suspense list. Such voters are removed from the electoral roll after the voter registrar receives information that they have moved. If the voter does not update their information and does not vote for two election periods, they are removed from the electoral roll.

In addition, the governor stressed that over 6,500 “non-citizens” who should not have been registered had been removed from the register and that about 1,930 of them had a voting history.

Voter observers like Alice Clapman, senior counsel at the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights Program, said they wanted to know more about these voters because Texas has previously incorrectly classified people as noncitizens.

Legal voters may be mistakenly labeled as noncitizens if, for example, outdated information is obtained from naturalized citizens or if someone accidentally checks the wrong box at the DMV, Clapman said.

In 2019, Texas authorities identified 95,000 voters as “non-citizens” and accused them of voter fraud. After an audit, it turned out that many of the people listed on the voter rolls were naturalized citizens. The scandal led to the resignation of the Secretary of State. The state abandoned the plan after numerous lawsuits, which led to the state issuing new guidelines for future voter roll purges.

Ashley Harris, an attorney for the ACLU of Texas, points to the 2019 incident as an example of the state’s lack of transparency about how this data is collected.

“It’s hard to say what these numbers actually mean. The state didn’t name anyone who actually voted as a non-citizen, and it provided data without context,” Harris said.

There is no evidence that non-citizens voted on a large scale in the federal election, despite increasing unsubstantiated claims by Republicans across the country, including former President Donald Trump.

Clapman also said it was unlikely that a non-citizen would risk deportation or other penalties for casting a single vote.

“The idea itself is so illogical,” Clapman said. “It is irresponsible of politicians and others to fan the flames of disinformation and undermine confidence in elections.”

Officials say Texas has “strong, clean voter rolls”

County registrars of voters perform extensive daily maintenance of voter rolls. As they receive and process applications, eligibility status is verified by the Texas Secretary of State. However, at the local level, election officials can also verify whether a voter is a U.S. citizen through local district attorneys’ offices.

Across the state, these offices use county voter rolls to send out questionnaires for jury summons. Voters who indicate in these surveys that they are not U.S. citizens are not eligible to serve on a jury. This information is also used by the Voter Registration Office to remove noncitizens from the rolls.

At a hearing of the state House of Representatives committee on elections on Monday, officials from the Texas Secretary of State spoke about how the state verifies that registered voters are U.S. citizens and eligible to vote.

Christina Adkins, the agency’s elections division director, said that since 2021, the Texas Department of Public Safety has been providing weekly data to the secretary of state on people who obtained an identification card or driver’s license while identifying themselves as noncitizens. As part of that process, they must provide DPS with proof of their legal residency in the United States, such as a permanent resident card – known as a green card – or an immigrant visa.

This data is compared to voter rolls and sent to each county’s registrar of voters. In addition, election officials use information from volunteer deputy registrars – appointed by the county to assist voters with voter registration – to verify that a voter registered at their U.S. naturalization ceremony.

When a voter provides the last four digits of his or her Social Security number on his or her voter registration application, the state verifies that the person on the application is who he or she claims to be by comparing the person’s first and last name and date of birth with data from the Social Security Administration.

Adkins stressed that the state has “strong, clean voter rolls” and that the state is looking for ways to improve voter roll maintenance and eligibility verification. “For many, many, many years, Texas has been at the forefront of making sure we have the right records and that they are properly and securely validated,” she said.

The state is also considering working with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice to obtain data on Texans with criminal records who may be eligible for parole or probation.

“Identifying these ineligible voters not only results in a strong voter registration list, but also prevents individuals from potentially making errors that could also negatively impact them,” Adkins said.

Last week, Attorney General Ken Paxton launched an investigation into “reports that organizations operating in Texas may be illegally registering noncitizens to vote.” Earlier, a Fox News host made an unsubstantiated claim on social media that immigrants were registering to vote at a driver’s license office outside Fort Worth.

Both the county election official and the chairman of the Republican Party said they had investigated the allegations and found no evidence.

The law, signed by Abbott in 2021, established new rules and penalties for assisting voters, criminalized the proactive distribution of absentee ballot requests by local officials, banned local initiatives to extend voting hours and allow drive-thru voting, and gave partisan poll watchers more autonomy inside polling places, among other things.

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