On August 26, 2024, Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced that since he signed Senate Bill 1 into law in 2021, Texas has removed over one million people from Texas’ voter rolls. The people removed from the voter rolls include individuals who moved out-of-state, are dead, and are non-citizens. The entire removal process will continue apace. 

 “Election integrity is essential to our democracy,” proclaimed Governor Abbott. “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. 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. Illegal voting in Texas will never be tolerated. We will continue to actively safeguard Texans’ sacred right to vote while also aggressively protecting our elections from illegal voting.”

 Of the over 6,500 potential non-citizens taken out of the voter rolls, roughly 1,930 have a history of voting. The Secretary of State’s office is currently sending all 1,930 records to the Attorney General’s Office to be investigated and potentially be litigated. To impose greater penalties on illegal voting,  Abbott signed House Bill 1243 into law 2023, stiffening the penalty for illegal voting, which includes voting by non-citizens, to a second-degree felony.

Back in 2021, Governor Abbott signed Senate Bill 1, Senate Bill 1113, and House Bill 574 into law. Senate Bill 1 made an individual lying as they registered to vote a state jail felony, criminalized ballot harvesting, mandated the Secretary of State to carry out randomized audits of elections every two years, prohibited distribution of unsolicited mail-in ballot applications and ballots, and mandated the use of ID for mail-in ballots. Senate Bill 1113 granted the Secretary of State the power to withhold funds from counties that refuse to remove non-citizens from their voter rolls. House Bill 574 made the intentional counting of invalid votes or refusal to count valid votes a second-degree felony. 

Cleaning up voter rolls is a good first step. Election integrity is a critical issue of our time. As the US turns into a Banana Republic, the Right must be prepared to impose heavy-handed measures against individuals who try to subvert our electoral process. The Right must also firmly oppose all forms of mass migration — vote rigging by another name due to how immigrants vote overwhelmingly for the cultural Left. 

At this juncture of American history, there is no room for error in checking the Left.