Texas has removed one million people from voter rolls as part of controversial reforms

Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced on Monday that more than one million people have been removed from Texas’s voter rolls over the last three years under a set of controversial voting laws that sought to “crackdown on illegal voting.”

According to a list, approximately 1.1 million people have had their names removed from Texas’s voter roll call –  most of those are people who died, moved to a different state or did not respond to voter status update questionnaires.

He claimed roughly 6,500 were noncitizens, 1,930 of whom had a voter history – though it is unclear how accurate that number is.

Abbott attributed the purge of names to theset of election laws, which he referred to as the “strongest election laws in the nation”, passed in 2021 after false claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

Those laws, under Senate Bill 1, restricted early voting hours, banned unsolicited mail-in ballot applications, required state ID, expanded poll watchers’ protections and access, and established a monthly maintenance review of noncitizens with voter registrations.

But a local voting rights organization said Abbott’s announcement “lacks transparency”

“Year after year, people are taken off the voting rolls for all manner of innocuous reasons, and while Senate Bill 1 did enact stricter barriers for registering to vote, there is no evidence to suggest that the governor’s data can be attributed to the law,” Sarah Xiyi Chen of the Texas Civil Rights Project told The Texas Tribune.

Abbott’s press release indicated 463,000 people were dropped from the voter roll list after appearing on the “suspense list” – a method the state employs to ensure a voter’s address is updated. Counties will send a notice to an