We are just 70 days from November’s election, and some races are tightening in Texas. State Republican officials have focused on what they call election integrity.
“Closeness matters. The way to think of it simply — you go to a baseball game, the score is 10 to nothing, and the umpire makes a bad call, and it costs you a run, you will walk away and say, ‘My team wasn’t very good.’ If the score is extremely close, zero to zero, and then a bad call by the umpire, then you begin to blame, not your team, but the umpire,” Rice University Political Science Professor Bob Stein said.
Stein has studied elections for decades and was an expert witness in the state’s election audit.
He wasn’t surprised when Governor Greg Abbott announced on Monday that since 2021, reforms he has signed into law have led to more than 1 million ineligible voters being taken off the state’s voter rolls.
“There are two sides to this: reinforce confidence in voters that elections are conducted fairly and serve notice to people that might attempt to vote who are not eligible to vote that they will be prosecuted,” Stein explained. “I’ll leave it to others who listen to this to make a judgment of who and which parties are advantaged to that, but I think that the coincidence of these and the proximity to the upcoming election seems to be slightly problematic.”
Clearing out voter rolls isn’t new.
“I don’t consider a million names removed unusual,” Stein said. “I would imagine that as many as half a million people have died, moved, or changed addresses.”
According to records provided by the Texas secretary of state, voter roll removal numbers haven’t actually gone up in recent years.
In fact, 1.25 million people statewide were removed in 2020.
In 2019, 683,000 were taken off.
The governor’s office didn’t respond to our questions about it, but we do know voter turnout is a big deal for both parties.
“If voters no longer believe in elections, or for that matter anything else, gambling in Las Vegas, baseball games are not fair, they don’t come, they don’t participate,” Stein said.
You have until Oct. 7 to register to vote in November’s election.
“It’s really important that you go out and check your voter registration,” Dallana Carmargo with the League of Women Voters said. “Sometimes, if you haven’t registered in two consecutive federal elections, they’ll remove you. You have to re-register, or maybe you have moved since the last time.”
