Category: Appear on front page

Georgia

communications

From ACJ:

A federal judge on Wednesday declined to force the state to immediately restore to voting rolls thousands of people who were removed last year.

Voting rights organizations, including the Black Voters Matter Fund, sued Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger earlier this month, challenging the removal of what they said were hundreds of thousands of eligible voters from Georgia’s rolls.

U.S. District Judge Steve C. Jones said he would not grant the immediate restoration of voters to the rolls because they have had a year to reregister if they were removed incorrectly and, if the secretary of state’s office did reinstate them, it would cause confusion.

“Plaintiffs acknowledge that they do not know how many people on their list of cancelled registrations may have re-registered before December 7, 2020,” Jones wrote in his ruling. “Thus, the risk of dual registrations and voter confusion is high.”

Read the full article from the ACJ.

Voter Purge Project Updates

communications

This fall, we have been hard at work doing Get Out the Vote drives to ensure that all eligible voters made their voices heard.

Now that the national election is over, we are focused on the Georgia run-off, where our team of canvassers is out knocking on doors to get out the vote for the January 5th senate race.

All the while, we are still collecting and processing data to track voter purges around the country. Stay tuned for reports and more updates about what we learn from our data.

Voter Purge Project in Vice

communications

Vice News talked with founder of the Ohio Voter Project and author of the Voter Purge Project’s data cleaning and analysis methodology Steve Tingley-Hock about our work to track wrongful data purges across the country.

“When I ran the initial queries, that was my first indication that there was a serious problem here,” Steve says of the initial Ohio records that showed about 40,000 voters were set to be wrongfully purged. Steve, along with the VPP, now collects and analyzes data for 16 states.

Watch the full video below, and read more about what we are doing with this data in our report.

Voter Purge Project Report

communications

On October 1, we released Unnecessary Disenfranchisement: Voter Purges Around the Country, a report detailing our work to monitor and organize against wrongful purges across the country.

Read the full report below for background on the project, our methods, and what we are doing to ensure eligible voters are informed of their voter status as November’s elections draw near.



 Download 

Will Young People Who Protest Also Vote?

communications

Spectrum News One, Cleveland, Ohio

Tweeting, Instagramming, protesting —all things that Millennials and Generation Z embrace. But what about voting?

According to the Ohio Voter Project, which analyzes election data, as of July 1, there are approximately 740,000 voters, ages 18-24 registered to vote in the state, compared to 3 million people age 50 and older.

Based on the most recent population data from the state of Ohio published in 2018, only about 70 percent of younger eligible voters are registered for the November election. For eligible voters 50 and older, that figure is nearly 90 percent.

Watch the full story here.

voter purge project

One IT Guy’s Spreadsheet-Fueled Race to Restore Voting Rights

communications

From WIRED Magazine September 2020 Issue:

Armed with [Steve Tingley-Hock’s], work, voter rights groups in a handful of states are trying to plug these holes in the voter registration system—before hundreds of thousands of voters are drained from the rolls ahead of the presidential election. It’s the story of database nerds, armed with a deep knowledge of SQL, trying to preserve democracy in America.

“One of the scandals here,” Rathke said, “is that some lists are exorbitantly expensive. In Alabama, it costs over $36,000 every time you pull a list. In Wisconsin, which has a huge issue around their purges, it’s $12,500.” So far, Rathke’s organization [Voter Purge Project] is working toward a regular vetting of voter rolls in 13 states. He is preparing to sue nine states, including Wisconsin, to obtain lower-cost access to their voter lists.

Read the full story in WIRED here.

Texas Dems file complaint to protect right to vote by mail during COVID pandemic

communications

On March 20, 2020, the Texas Democratic Party filed this lawsuit in the Travis County Texas State Court. The plaintiffs sued Ruth Hughs in her capacity as Texas Secretary of State and the Travis County Clerk under state law. Represented by private counsel, the plaintiffs sought injunctive and declaratory relief that allows all eligible voters, regardless of age and physical condition, to cast their ballot by mail, if they believe their health is in danger under the threat of COVID-19 and they need to practice social distancing.

Read the full case summary here.

Berkeley Law School Students Report: No Easy Legal Fix for Voter Purging

communications

In March of 2020, Pooja Shivaprasad and Amanda Miller, law students at the University of California at Berkeley, produced a legal memorandum examining voter protection rights in Ohio in light of rising voter suppression concerns in this state.

The memo includes an introduction to federal voter protections as well as a brief summary of state laws relevant to Ohio. We hope that this document provides a roadmap by which others can analyze the strength or weaknesses of voter protection laws in their states.

Shivaprasad and Miller found that there is no clear path to legally challenging many voter purging practices, which makes the work of the Voter Purge Project and our partners even more critical.

The report also found that:

  • The National Voter Registration Act (“NVRA”) was enacted under the Elections Clause of the Constitution and signed into law in 1993, and prohibits removal from voter registration lists solely because of a failure to vote.
  • Ohio’s voter purge practices were litigated in Husted v. A. Phillip Randolph, a 2018 case in which the Supreme Court ruled that Ohio’s practices of clearing the state’s voter rolls of individuals who had died or relocated did not violate the NVRA or the Help American Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA). Advocates found that Husted’s holding has disproportionately affected low-income communities, communities of color, and the housing insecure.
  • Section 8 of the NVRA prohibits states from removing registrants from voter registration lists solely for failure to vote, but states can implement “supplemental” processes to get around this prohibition.
  • HAVA requires state election offices to develop clear procedures for accepting, verifying, updating, and canceling voter registrations across the state.
  • Each state is responsible for ensuring its practices are in compliance with the NVRA.
  • State laws provide little guidance to local election officials and do not specify what identifying characteristics should be verified after a potential duplicate record has been flagged or what degree of approximation is permitted when comparing potentially duplicative entries. Despite these vague laws local election officials report increased pressure from state officials to “clean” the voter registration list of duplicate records. 
  • There are no federal legal remedies in place that allow for voter list maintenance transparency.
  • Purging practices vary widely from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and offer few protections for affected voters.
  • As of September 2017, the Public Interest Legal Foundation had brought nine suits in six states in the previous two years alleging lax vigilance of voter rolls

We are extremely grateful to Berkeley Law, Pooja Shivaprasad, and Amanda Miller for their work and expertise in producing this report.

Download the full report here: Legal Memorandum on Voter Purge Issues and Relevant Legal Claims Download