The upcoming presidential election is just a little over a month away, and the American people are on the edge of their seats. After two assassination attempts on Republican nominee Donald Trump, President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the race, Vice President Kamala Harris’s decision to run, and a series of twists and turns in between, the results of this election are anyone’s guess. However, to ensure a fair and trustworthy outcome, experts and watchdogs have been putting pressure on states to uphold election integrity. In many cases, U.S. states have done just that.

Considering “somewhere between 1.5 million and 2.7 million illegal immigrants are likely to cast a ballot in the 2024 elections,” experts have noted that it’s time to clean up voter rolls. Heeding the call, Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) announced in August that the state had removed “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.” As The Washington Stand reported, this also “included 7,000 illegally registered noncitizens and 6,000 convicted felons.” Florida has also taken steps to remove “ineligible” voters from the Sunshine State’s rolls.

Last week, officials from Oklahoma announced that over 453,000 ineligible voters have been removed since the beginning of 2021. According to The Post Millennial, “The purge included 97,065 deceased voters, 143,682 people who moved out of state, 5,607 felons, 14,993 duplicate registrations, and 194,962 inactive voters who were removed through an address verification process.”

As Governor Kevin Stitt (R-Okla.) said in a statement, “Voting is our most sacred duty as Americans — and every Oklahoman wants to know their vote is securely cast and properly counted.” Secretary of State Josh Cockroft (R) added, “We’ve aggressively pursued policies to ensure voting is secure and accurate, and we’re innovating to protect our elections from emerging technology like AI. In Oklahoma, every eligible citizen will have their vote counted and their voice heard.”

In another pro-active example, the Georgia State Election Board voted 3-2 on Friday to hand-count Election Day ballots. The process is designed to ensure that the number of ballots hand-counted results in the same number produced by the scanner. And while some have pointed out this decision “could drastically lengthen the amount of time to tally results in a critical battleground state,” others have expressed that the new rule helps ensure the accuracy of “check-in computers and voting machines.”

Meanwhile, in the state of Arizona, rather than removing ineligible voters, the state’s supreme court ruled on Friday that nearly “98,000 people whose citizenship papers have not been confirmed are allowed to vote in state and local races.”

Allegedly, the unanimous ruling came “after officials uncovered a database error that, for two decades, mistakenly designated the voters as having access to the full ballot.” But unlike some states that have been accused of attempting to allow noncitizens or illegal immigrants to vote, this error pertains to individuals “who obtained their driver’s licenses before October 1996 and subsequently received duplicates before registering to vote after 2004” — which speaks to the longevity of how long they have been in the U.S.

Even so, some have described this as “a significant decision that could influence ballot measures and tight legislative races.” The Arizona Supreme Court decided “the voters were not at fault for the database error” and should not be penalized for it.

In light of these various developments, Matt Carpenter, director of FRC Action, shared with The Washington Stand, “Georgia, and many other states like Texas and Florida, took steps in the years following the 2020 election to tighten up voter identification requirements and mail-in voting, curb the use of ballot drop boxes, and end all together third-party expenditures for election administration.” He also noted the efforts of “other states, like Pennsylvania, [that] have had recent court decisions which will eliminate some potentially fraudulent ballots from being counted in final tabulations.”

Ultimately, “[T]his election season has been marked by states like Oklahoma and Ohio removing ineligible voters from their voter rolls.” And as Carpenter concluded, “While there is still much to do to ensure our elections meet the commonsense objectives of being easy to vote and hard to cheat, the cumulative effect of these moves has been a big step in the right direction.”