Texas Voter Roll Removal Complies with Federal Law

A viral post on Threads claims that Texas Governor Greg Abbott recently removed 1.1 million people from the state’s voter rolls. “TEXANS. Governor Greg Abbott has removed 1.1 million people from the voter rolls,” it reads. “Check your status at VoteTexas.gov,”

This claim is factually true, but it lacks important context. Texas has removed 1.1 million ineligible voter registrations from its rolls since 2021, but such removals are common: Federal law requires states to periodically remove ineligible voters from their rolls.

In 2021, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed Senate Bill 1, an election integrity measure that included changes to the state’s rules on mail-in and drive-thru voting, voting hours, protections for poll watchers, and citizenship checks. The legislation came amid a national push for election security reform by state Republican parties following widespread—and unfounded—allegations of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

The Texas bill made its way back online late last month after Abbott bragged that since the bill was signed in 2021, more than a million ineligible voters had been removed from Texas’ voter rolls. “Election integrity is essential to our democracy,” Abbott said in a press release. “I signed the strongest voting laws in the country to protect the right to vote and crack down on illegal voting. These reforms have led to the removal of more than a million ineligible people from our voter rolls in the last three years, including noncitizens, deceased voters, and people who moved to another state.”

Although Abbott apparently attributes the removal of ineligible voters to recent state election laws, periodic voter roll purges are not new and have been required by federal law for decades.

Section 8 of the National Voting Rights Act of 1993 requires states to “implement a general program to remove the names of ineligible voters from the official lists of eligible voters” for reasons such as “the death of the registrant” or “a change in the registrant’s residence.”

In Texas, voters whose official mail (such as a renewal certificate or jury summons) is returned as undeliverable are added to a waiting list and sent an address confirmation notice. If the voter does not respond to the notice and does not vote in the next two general elections, their registration is subject to cancellation. The process of removing deceased voters in Texas occurs monthly when death certificates are submitted to county and state authorities, and again quarterly when the Secretary of State receives death certificates from the U.S. Social Security Administration.

According to an analysis of Texas voter registration cancellation data by the The New York TimesThe number of ineligible voters purged from Texas voter rolls since Abbott signed Senate Bill 1 has not differed substantially from those purged before the bill passed.

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