Call it the Texas Cleanup.
More than 1 million “voters” have been purged from the rolls in Texas since a tough new election integrity law went into effect in 2022, Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott announced this week.
And some who might have voted illegally have been referred for prosecution.
In a news release on Monday, Abbott declared that the second largest number of names — 457,000 — have been removed for what’s probably the best reason possible: They are deceased.
The largest number of names — 463,000 — have been removed because they were on a “suspense list,” meaning they haven’t confirmed a residential address in the state, according to Fox News.
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The remaining names were removed for a variety of reasons, including, most troubling, as belonging to those suspected of being non-citizens.
“Illegal voting in Texas will never be tolerated,” Abbott said in Monday’s announcement. “We will continue to actively safeguard Texans’ sacred right to vote while also aggressively protecting our elections from illegal voting.”
Now, that shouldn’t be a controversial statement. Protecting elections from illegal votes is as important as safeguarding the right to vote for every American who chooses to exercise it.
That doesn’t mean the government can go off half-cocked, of course. The liberal-leaning Texas Tribune greeted Abbott’s announcement by reprising a scandal from 2019 in which the Texas Secretary of State’s Office erroneously identified a jaw-dropping 95,000 “non-citizens” as being on the state voting rolls.
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In actuality, tens of thousands of those “non-citizens” had become naturalized citizens, and the secretary of state’s office was using old information, the Tribune reported in February 2019.
That scandal resulted in the May 2019 resignation of then-Secretary of State David Whitley, as The Houston Chronicle reported at the time.
But past misfires can’t preclude officials in the present from doing their duty — and the fact of that matter is that the number of non-citizens voting in American elections should be zero.
Even one vote cast illegally dilutes the power of votes cast legally, essentially depriving American citizens of their right to control their own government.
While the numbers Abbott released on Monday include potential non-citizens, the overwhelming majority involve undeniably suspect names — the dead and those whose addresses are not confirmed.
Being dead, of course, invalidates any claim on the democratic process (even if some Democrats don’t agree). But just being alive doesn’t guarantee it either. Voter address registration is key to ensuring not only that votes are cast legally, but also that votes are cast only once.
“Election integrity is essential to our democracy,” Abbott said in Monday’s announcement. “I have signed the strongest election laws in the nation to protect the right to vote and to crackdown on illegal voting.”
In 2021, the release noted, Abbott signed S.B. 1, a bill aimed at protecting the integrity of the vote in Texas. (Non-Texans might remember it as the year Texas Democrats went on the lam to try to stop it.)
The results are becoming evident.
“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,” Abbott said in the announcment.
“The Secretary of State and county voter registrars have an ongoing legal requirement to review the voter rolls, remove ineligible voters, and refer any potential illegal voting to the Attorney General’s Office and local authorities for investigation and prosecution.”
With the presidential election only 68 days away, the Texas example ought to be headline news nationally.
The Lone Star State is historically Republican, but a commitment to ensuring the integrity of voter rolls should be fundamental no matter what party controls power in the state capital.
Other states should be following Texas’ lead.
