Texas Gov Abbott announces over 1 million ineligible voters removed from voter rolls since 2021

More than 1 million ineligible voters have been removed from voter rolls since 2021, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced Monday.

The ineligible voters started to be removed after Abbott signed Senate Bill 1 into law in 2021, which increased the penalty for lying on a voter registration form to a felony.

“Election integrity is essential to our democracy,” Abbott said in a statement. “I have signed the strongest election laws in the nation to protect the right to vote and to crackdown on illegal voting. 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.

He also said the Texas 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 state's Attorney General’s Office and local authorities for investigation and prosecution. 

Over 6,500 non-citizens were removed from the state's voter rolls, and about 1,930 of them have voted. The records of those 1,930 voters are in the process of being sent to the attorney general's office from the secretary of state's office for investigation.

Of the more than 1.1 million voters who have been removed from voter rolls since 2021, more than 6,000 have a felony conviction and more than 457,000 are deceased.