Category: Voter Purge News

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

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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

VPP Developing New Field Testing Methods to Investigate Voter Purges and Drops

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Excerpt – Wade Rathke, Chief Organizer Blog – February 15, 2020

As the Voter Purge Project moves forward, we are now analyzing the voter files on more than a dozen states on our way to double that number in coming weeks. Many of them include the hotly contested “battleground” states like Pennsylvania, Florida, Michigan, and North Carolina.  The VPP is processing these lists with our database team assure that any voter suppression efforts are prevented from purging legitimate voters or purging voters in a discriminating way based on race, ethnicity, income or any other reason. 

Early results have been encouraging, with some important results in terms of voters saved and purges forestalled, but the project continues to wrestle with huge questions and concerns.

One of the most puzzling is determining the difference between purges for death or address changes as opposed to unexplained “drops” or voter disappearances. Another is whether in states like Ohio and Georgia, where a piece of mail can trigger a purge if there has not been a recent voting history, the purge is legitimate.

I spent time with former ACORN organizers in person and on the phone while in Columbus trying to puzzle out a field test that would combine our database analysis and questions with on-the-ground door knocking to determine either the answers or the legitimacy of these actions by the government. 

In Columbus, we decided to look at four zip codes in the heart of our historic low-and-moderate income, African-American constituency in Ohio. We analyze the Ohio voter file on a weekly basis when it is posted on the Secretary of State’s website, so we can tell who the “disappeared” are in almost real time.

The plan would be to pull the names that are deleted in these zip codes from week to week and then to deploy organizers on the ground to visit the last known address of the voter that was in our database before they were either purged or dropped.  By keeping rigorous records of whether or not the actions were valid or not, we estimate that we would be able to determine the accuracy of the government’s actions and calculate a percentage of validity in the list.  In Ohio and other states where on-line registration is possible, we might be able to re-register them on the spot or work out a verification system with the authorities so that they were put back on the list.  If this works, we would do identical field tests in Atlanta, Georgia, Charlotte, North Carolina, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The notion for this kind of field test occurred to me as I visited Barbara Clark, a former ACORN organizer in the childcare center where she was working part-time.  She and some other former ACORN members were involved in circulating petitions for various initiatives in Columbus and were often paid by the signature.  She was complaining about the problems her team would have in collecting their money when the signature verifiers would claim that signatures were invalid when the people signing had sworn to them that they were registered.  In thinking with her about a way to use our voter list access to keep her team from being ripped off, it seemed like there might be a way to reverse engineer her negative experience and find a way to “clean” the list in the street and build a firewall and prevention program around these purges and voter disappearances preemptively.

Georgia is adding more Democratic-leaning voters faster than Republicans can purge them

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Daily Kos – February 11, 2020

Georgia Republicans have been working hard to get voters off the rolls, and indeed, they reduced their numbers by 7% in last year’s purge. The bad news for those Republicans, however, is that nearly as fast as they throw voters off the lists, new ones—in large part younger and more racially diverse—are registering.

There was a 3% increase in registered voters in the last year, and new voter registrations outpaced the purges of 2016-2018, with 902,000 new voters replacing the 797,000 removed during that time. Another 98,000 were purged late last year, in what was a limited win by Stacey Abrams’ group Fair Fight Georgia: The original plan had been to delete more than 300,000.

The share of voters aged 18-34 has increased by 68% over the last three years, to comprise almost a third of the state voters. The share of white voters has decreased since 2016 as well, though whites are still a 59% majority of those who identify their race when they register. In 2016, that share was 62%. The state began automatic registrations at driver’s license offices in September 2016, which account for about 1.1 million of the new registrations. But it’s not just that, as voter registration drives have been activated ahead of the 2020 election, when Georgia will have two U.S. Senate seats and three open House seats as well as the president on the ballot.

“We’re seeing an aging cohort that’s majority white, and then you’ll see an increasing younger age cohort [that’s] majority nonwhite,” Mike Carnathan, manager of research and analysis for the Atlanta Regional Commission, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “That’s exactly what the future of metro Atlanta holds when it comes to the composition of the population.”

Read the rest of the story at the Daily Kos website.

Federal district judge deals blow to Gov. Kemp on voter roll purge

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11 Alive – Georgia – February 10, 2020

ATLANTA — A federal judge, this week, ruled against Gov. Brian Kemp in a lawsuit filed against him in 2018, while he was still Secretary of State.

The federal lawsuit was initiated by freelance journalist Greg Palast along with Helen Butler, executive director of Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda.

According to the suit, Kemp, in his role as secretary of state, was accused of using a racially-biased methodology for removing as many as 700,000 legitimate voters from the state’s voter rolls during a period between 2016 and 2018.

Read the rest of this story on 11Alive’s website.

In Closely Divided Wisconsin, the Battle for Votes Is Already Underway

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A legal challenge over who can vote in Wisconsin has set off a furious fight, a reflection of political tension in a pivotal state for the presidential race.

Jan. 14, 2020
By Mitch Smith and Michael Wines

MADISON, Wis. — It began with what seemed like a simple question: If a computer says voters have moved and are no longer eligible to vote at their old addresses, should the voters be struck from the rolls even if the computer has a history of mistakes?

An election volunteer helped register voters in Waukesha, Wis., in 2018.Credit – Tim Gruber for The New York Times

When Wisconsin election officials first pondered the question a few months ago, it ruled unanimously against the computer and for preserving the voters’ registrations, at least temporarily. But what once seemed a matter of electoral housekeeping has morphed into a political cage fight that has sprawled across four courts, split the state’s Elections Commission and spurred intimations of voter suppression and voter fraud.

In other words, it is business as usual in Wisconsin, a partisan hothouse where elections can turn on onionskin margins and every ballot is potential booty in a political death struggle. Memories of President Trump’s victory in Wisconsin in 2016 by fewer than 23,000 votes remain fresh. And as Americans gird for a raucous election year, the scuffle over who stays on Wisconsin’s voting rolls may also portend similar struggles nationwide.

Judge orders state to purge more than 200,000 Wisconsin voters from the rolls

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PORT WASHINGTON – An Ozaukee County judge on Friday ordered the state to remove hundreds of thousands of people from Wisconsin’s voter rolls because they may have moved.   

Ozaukee County Circuit Judge Paul Malloy, shown during a 2015 hearing. (Photo: Mike De Sisti / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

The case is being closely watched because of the state’s critical role in next year’s presidential race. Circuit Judge Paul Malloy also denied the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin’s petition to intervene.

Lawyers for the League and for the Wisconsin Elections Commission indicated they will appeal and asked Malloy to stay his ruling pending those appeals, but he declined.

At issue is a letter the state Elections Commission sent in October to about 234,000 voters who it believes may have moved. The letter asked the voters to update their voter registrations if they had moved or alert election officials if they were still at their same address. 

The commission planned to remove the letter’s recipients from the voter rolls in 2021 if it hadn’t heard from them. But Malloy’s decision would kick them off the rolls much sooner, and well before the 2020 presidential election.

Continue reading at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel website.

voter purge project, Georgia voters

Georgia Plans to Purge 300,000 Names From Its Voter Rolls

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Voting rights advocates described the removals as troubling, saying it was just the beginning of efforts to suppress the vote in battleground states.

By Nicholas Casey
Oct. 30, 2019
A coming purge of Georgia’s voter rolls has raised alarms among advocacy groups in the state and nationwide, many of whom see the issue of who gets to cast a ballot re-emerging with next year’s election, particularly in battleground states.

This week, Georgia state officials said they would be removing about 300,000 names from their lists of eligible voters, a number that amounts to almost 4 percent of those registered to vote. The state said the move is a normal part of updating records after voters have moved away or stopped casting ballots.

Continue reading at the New York Times website.

Ohio Was Set to Purge 235,000 Voters. It Was Wrong About 20%.

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When Ohio released a list of people it planned to strike from its voting rolls, around 40,000 people shouldn’t have been on it. The state only found out because of volunteer sleuthing.

A purge of voter rolls in Ohio included activists like Jen Miller, the executive director of the League of Women Voters. Credit Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times.

By Nicholas Casey
Oct. 14, 2019
COLUMBUS, Ohio — The clock was ticking for Jen Miller. The state of Ohio had released names of 235,000 voters it planned to purge from voter rolls in September.

Ms. Miller, director of the League of Women Voters of Ohio, believed thousands of voters were about to be wrongly removed. Over the summer, the Ohio secretary of state had sent her organization and others like it a massive spreadsheet with the 235,000 names and addresses that would be purged from the state’s
voter rolls in just a month — a list of people that, state officials said, some part of the bureaucracy flagged as deceased, living somewhere else or as a duplicate. The League of Women Voters had been asked to see if any of those purged qualified to register again.

Ms. Miller, who spends her work day helping register people to vote, scrolled through the names and then asked herself a question: What was her own voter status in the state?

Continue reading at the New York Times website.