In August 2024, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott boasted the state removed more than 6,500 noncitizens from its voting rolls.
The registrations were canceled “through a routine practice” of culling voter lists of people “who have moved or died,” the Texas Tribune said here. That’s a standard practice in all states, and there’s nothing remarkable about it.
Here’s the thing, though. “Election experts have urged caution in using the numbers to make definitive statements about registered noncitizens. But Abbott did just that, initially stating in his news release that thousands of noncitizens had been stripped from the rolls.”
In short, if election offices sent them letters saying there’s a question about their citizenship, and they didn’t respond, the governor counted them as noncitizens. In other words, “citizens who simply never received or responded to such letters are almost certainly included in Abbott’s 6,500 number.”
There’s lots of reasons why citizens wouldn’t respond to such letters. They might be dead, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t citizens when they voted. Or they may have moved, or not bothered to respond, but that doesn’t turn citizens into noncitizens, either.
The secretary of state’s office, which looked at those registrants more closely than the governor did (i.e., not at all), reported that 581 of the 6,500 were noncitizens. That’s a huge discrepancy. And that information was given to the governor’s office.
He doesn’t want to hear it. He’s a Republican, and his inflated claims lend credence to “Republican allegations that noncitizens plan to cast ballots en masse to sway elections for Democrats,” which Trump and the GOP will use “to cast doubt on the integrity of the upcoming November election.”
More than 11 million Texans voted in 2020, and Trump won the state by more than 600,000 votes. If the state has fewer than 600 noncitizens on its voter rolls, that’s a drop in the bucket, especially as it’s certain only a fraction of them, if any at all, actually voted. A Texas county official called those few “an infinitesimal, small issue.”
In addition, the very few noncitizens who actually vote isn’t indicative of fraud. Some states automatically register people who apply for driver licenses. Noncitizens also can end up registered to vote through mistake or misunderstanding.
This isn’t the first time that Republican officials in Texas have inflated noncitizen voting data. “Five years ago, Texas officials suggested that nearly 100,000 noncitizens were registered to vote and that nearly half of them had cast ballots. Those claims quickly unraveled under scrutiny,” the Texas Tribune says.
Many of those registered voters “turned out to be naturalized citizens whom the state incorrectly identified as ineligible” from outdated data on driver license and state ID applications, according to a story here.
Ineligible voting is a tiny problem, and voting fraud is rarer still. Republican claims of election outcomes being changed by widespread illegal voting are hogwash. Those claims have been debunked by reputable research, and none have held up in court. But the GOP is using them in the court of public opinion to undermine their supporters’ confidence in elections, and incite them to reject election results.
The real issue is that Republicans don’t like it when Democrats, and especially black people, vote against their candidates. The answer is to have better candidates, and better represent the wishes of the people, not try to take away their right to vote.
Related story: A federal judge has stepped in to halt a voter purge by Alabama GOP officials that likely included naturalized citizens (read story here).