Texas voter purge sends chilling message, lawmakers and advocates warn

Voters must check if they’re still registered or if they have been placed on a suspend list, which may result in “more barriers for their votes to count,” a Democratic state legislator said.

Texans who may have been wrongly removed from the state's voter registration list or whose voter registrations have been suspended have little time to reverse course, Democratic state lawmakers and civil rights advocates warned Thursday, a few days after Republican leadership announced the purge of more than 1.1 million names from their voter rolls.

States are required by law to regularly update their voter registration lists to remove people who have died or moved or who are found ineligible to vote for other reasons. But Republican Gov. Greg Abbott touted the routine maintenance of the voter rolls in a series of election integrity bills he signed into laws in 2021.

"Texas’ strong election laws removed over 1 MILLION ineligible voters from our voter rolls," Abbott wrote Monday on X.

Numbers released by Abbott’s office show that more than 134,000 voters purged from state voter rolls since September 2021 had confirmed they had moved elsewhere and that 457,000 others had died.

But most of the voters who were removed, more than 463,000, had been placed on a suspended list. Names on the suspended list are deleted if the state receives information that voters have permanently moved out of their registered addresses or don't vote in two consecutive election cycles.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/texas-voter-purge-warning-ballots-abbott-rcna168811

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