During his time in office, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has made two things apparent: his fondness for performative politics and his unabashed eagerness to grovel before former President Donald Trump.
The Republican governor highlighted both tendencies last week in an announcement that Texas had booted a million people off its voter rolls in an effort to stamp out “illegal” election tampering. In a press release full of tough talk yet light on details, Abbott bragged that the purge was a direct result of an election law overhaul he signed in 2021.
“Illegal voting in Texas will never be tolerated,” Abbott said. “We will continue to actively safeguard Texans’ sacred right to vote while also aggressively protecting our elections from illegal voting.”
Abbott’s framing of the cleanup of Texas’ voter rolls couldn’t be more dishonest.
In response to the governor’s claim, election experts told the Texas Tribune that both federal and state law already require routine maintenance of voter rolls. What’s more, the majority of people removed by the state had simply died, failed to respond to notices from election officials or moved out of state, the news organization reports.
To be clear, what Abbott bragged about in his announcement is routine maintenance, not a sweeping purge of lawbreakers.
Voting experts also told the Tribune they’re skeptical about Abbott’s claim that the state scrubbed 6,500 “noncitizens” who should never have been registered. Naturalized citizens have been erroneously flagged before over simple errors such as checking the wrong box when obtaining a driver’s license, observers noted.
To the experts’ point, Texas in 2019 threatened to kick 95,000 people off the rolls whom officials had identified as “noncitizens.” In actuality, data reviews showed many of those people were naturalized citizens.
Secretary of State David Whitley, who led the botched effort, ended up resigning amid a flurry of lawsuits and embarrassing testimony in front of the Texas Legislature. (Don’t worry, though, Abbott immediately found a $205,000-a-year job for Whitley in the governor’s office, and Whitley’s since gone on to run his own political consulting group.)
“It's difficult to tell what these numbers actually mean, and the state hasn't pointed to anyone who actually voted as a noncitizen, and they've provided data without context,” ACLU of Texas attorney Ashley Harris told the Tribune of Abbott’s new claim that noncitizens were kicked off the rolls.
Here’s the bottom line: by twisting the facts about a routine cleanup of the voter rolls, Abbott is once again sowing distrust in the election system by falsely suggesting voter fraud is rampant. It’s a dishonest, dangerous tactic Trump has repeatedly used to cast doubt on the 2020 election he legitimately lost.
Abbott is smart enough to know the facts aren’t on his side. However, it’s clear that our assclown of a governor lacks the decency to set aside his zeal for showmanship and his unbridled sycophancy of Trump.
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