This post is somewhat technical, but I think it’s important now to distinguish between voter list maintenance and voter list purges. The former is often mistaken for the latter.
My county removed several thousand voters from the local rolls in January. Cleaning up the voter rolls is standard operating procedure after an election. Periodic maintenance. Timing in your state may vary. One of my best friends here is the Elections Board chair, and I’ve worked with/beside the staff for years, so I don’t sweat it.
MSNBC’s Joy Reid last night, however, led off a segment by declaiming a voter “purge” in Georgia. This story via the Atlanta Journal-Constitution prompted it:
Georgia election officials are mailing letters this week to over 185,000 registered voters who haven’t participated in elections for at least five years, a step toward eventually canceling their registrations under the state’s “use it or lose it” law.
Many of them likely moved out of state and are no longer eligible to cast a ballot in Georgia, according to Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office. But the notifications also cover an unknown number of residents who haven’t moved and decided not to vote in recent elections.
The notifications are being mailed as Georgia election officials are preparing to cancel the voter registrations of an additional 102,000 people who filed change-of-address requests with the U.S. Postal Service, had election mail returned as undeliverable or haven’t voted since 2012.
Florida is doing something similar, again in a non-general-election year:
Final address verification notices are going over the next few days to 12,000 people on the Leon County voter rolls who may not be living in Florida anymore based on official records gleaned from a multi-state database.
“Ensuring the accuracy and integrity of our voter rolls is an important responsibility of my office,” Leon Supervisor of Elections Mark Earley said Monday.
This marks the first time that Earley and the rest of the state’s 67 county election supervisors are using the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) since joining two years ago to identify and purge ineligible voters from their rolls.
Some counties have already completed the list maintenance update while others are in the process of doing so or will complete in the next month.
Look, people are justifiably on heightened alert for any and all GOP efforts to disenfranchise Democratic voters. But just because Georgia and Florida are GOP-dominated states does not mean the actions described above are nefarious. Let’s not overplay our hand.
The National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) describes voter list maintenance requirements (note section I’ve bolded):
The National Voter Registration Act (NVRA)
While states set policy on voter registration, they do so under a federal framework.
At the federal level, the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA, commonly referred to as “motor voter” because it contains provisions about voter registration at department of motor vehicles offices) created a regulatory floor for state maintenance of voter registration rolls (Section 8). These regulations give states rules and guidelines for maintaining voter list rolls. The NVRA allows states to institute other provisions for the maintenance of voter rolls at their discretion above and beyond the NVRA’s requirements, as long as they are uniform and non-discriminatory. The NVRA is a floor, not a ceiling. For more information on the NVRA see this webpage from the Department of Justice.
The NVRA specifies that a voter may be removed from the voter registration list at the request of the registrant. If an election official receives indirect or second-hand information that a voter has moved, it triggers a removal process (rather than the immediate removal of the voter from the list). See the section on Removing Voters from the Registration List below for more information.
The NVRA also requires states to conduct reasonable list maintenance activities to remove deceased persons from the voter rolls (see Removal of Deceased Voters section below). And, it prohibits states from removing registrants from the voter list within 90 days of an election, as a failsafe against accidental removal that would affect a registrant’s ability to vote in the upcoming election.
Note: not all states are subject to NVRA requirements. Six states (Idaho, Minnesota, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Wisconsin and Wyoming) are exempt from NVRA requirements because they either had no voter registration requirements or permitted Election Day registration at the time the NVRA was enacted. Even though these states are not subject to the same federal requirements on list maintenance required by the NVRA, they still have state-specific procedures for list maintenance that are similar in many ways.
The Help America Vote Act (HAVA)
In addition to regulations under the NVRA, the 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA) requires states to establish statewide voter registration databases and sets basic requirements for computerized list maintenance (sec. 303(2)). This included coordinating with state agency records on felon status and deaths, and the removal of duplicates from the computerized list. It also initiated basic matching protocols for verifying a new registrant’s information by requiring registrants to provide either a driver’s license number or the last four digits of the applicant’s social security number (sec. 303(5)), which is discussed in the next section.
How about removing nonparticipants from the voter rolls? (Note again section I’ve bolded):
Some states conduct the bulk of their list maintenance right after a big election, others do it in the months before a big election. This timing may be a statutory requirement. Removing voters after an election minimizes the chances that eligible voters will be inadvertently removed. A state that does the bulk of the list maintenance work just before an election improves the accuracy of the list going into the election, but this is a more aggressive approach and runs the risk that eligible voters are removed before a big election. And, the NVRA specifies that list maintenance activities cannot be conducted with 90 days of a federal elections.
States periodically send mailings to voters who have not voted in a couple of cycles to see if they still there. “Unless an election official has received direct information from a voter that he or she has moved, the voter will typically be moved to an ‘inactive’ status rather than removed from the list entirely. A voter who is inactive through two federal elections can be removed from the list,” NCSL states. Being flagged inactive does not mean a voter who shows up to vote will be refused.
Wiping inactive registrations for intermittent voters is less of a big deal if the state has same-day registration and same-day registration requirements are not too onerous. (That’s a big IF.) Some states may require no more than a driver’s license or a power bill showing your current address. If you show up without them and find your registration has been removed … well, that’s onerous for you. (See image at top.)
So what constitutes a purge? Perhaps not the timing or federally mandated maintenance, but the aggressiveness with which states carry it out.
The Brennan Center in its 2018 report cites people mistakenly removed in New York, Arkansas, and Virginia:
These voters were victims of purges — the sometimes-flawed process by which election officials attempt to remove ineligible names from voter registration lists. When done correctly, purges ensure the voter rolls are accurate and up-to-date. When done incorrectly, purges disenfranchise legitimate voters (often when it is too close to an election to rectify the mistake), causing confusion and delay at the polls.
In essence, one person’s voter roll maintenance is another’s voter purge. It depends on how well the removals are done.