ELECTIONS ARE A chance for voters to throw their support behind leaders they think are going to best bring about our hopes and visions for what this country can be. But there are a lot of reasons why eligible Americans may have a hard time casting a ballot that counts. One reason is sloppy purges of the voter rolls.
Purges are a practice—often controversial—of election administrators removing or cancelling voters from registration lists in order to update state registration rolls. We all benefit from clean and accurate voter rolls, which are used by poll workers to identify who is registered to vote. There is no real dispute that people who are not eligible should be removed from the rolls. Too often, however, purge processes are shrouded in secrecy, prone to error, and vulnerable to manipulation.
Part of the reason purges are so controversial is because more voters are being purged than in the past, and there is no satisfying explanation as to why. Between 2006 and 2008, the U.S. purged about 12 million voters. Between 2016 and 2018, however, the U.S. purged about 17 million voters. That’s an increase of more than 33 percent—during a time when total population growth was about 6 percent and the number of registered voters increased by 18 percent.
Another reason purges are controversial are their locations. Battleground states like Ohio and Wisconsin have had recent purge flare-ups. Ohio has a practice whereby voters who miss one election are put on a track for removal from the rolls. While voters can take steps to get themselves off that track, many believe that starting the process after missing only one election is too aggressive. The U.S. Supreme Court disagreed, so Ohio continues with the practice. Wisconsin, on the other hand, is in the middle of a court dispute with an activist group suing the state because the group thinks Wisconsin is not purging voters flagged for removal quickly enough.
Additionally, states with extensive histories of racial discrimination in voting, such as Texas and Georgia, have had high-profile purge attempts. Those two are joined by other states with records of discrimination in voting so egregious that they were required to follow certain special protocols until the Supreme Court issued a controversial decision in 2013 mothballing those protective protocols, which were part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
To put a finer point on it: Those states with the country’s most problematic histories of racial discrimination in voting increased their rate of purges as soon as the Supreme Court lifted the important protections for minority voters. If purge rates in the counties that used to have those protective protocols were the same as the rates in states that never had them, then as many as 1.1 million fewer individuals would have been removed from voter rolls between 2016 and 2018.
Voters can take steps to protect themselves. The easiest way is to confirm—regularly—that your registration record is accurate and up to date. A good plan is to check 30 days before the election, a week before the election, and the day before the election. If there is a problem at any of those points in time, voters should contact their local election administrator immediately.
Voter advocates are going to be doing all we can to protect eligible voters against purges. Voters can help by checking their own registrations. This is a group effort. Our elections matter, and our ability to participate in them matters even more.
Myrna Pérez is director of the Voting Rights and Elections program at the Brennan Center for Justice and a Sojourners contributing editor.
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