INTRODUCTION
On April 19, 2016, thousands of eligible Brooklyn voters dutifully showed up to cast their ballots in the presidential primary, only to find their names missing from the voter lists. An investigation by the New York state attorney general found that New York City’s Board of Elections had improperly deleted more than 200,000 names from the voter rolls.
In June 2016, the Arkansas secretary of state provided a list to the state’s 75 county clerks suggesting that more than 7,700 names be removed from the rolls because of supposed felony convictions. That roster was highly inaccurate; it included people who had never been convicted of a felony, as well as persons with past convictions whose voting rights had been restored.
And in Virginia in 2013, nearly 39,000 voters were removed from the rolls when the state relied on a faulty database to delete voters who allegedly had moved out of the commonwealth. Error rates in some counties ran as high as 17 percent.
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.
Ahead of upcoming midterm elections, a new Brennan Center investigation has examined data for more than 6,600 jurisdictions that report purge rates to the Election Assistance Commission and calculated purge rates for 49 states.
We found that between 2014 and 2016, states removed almost 16 million voters from the rolls, and every state in the country can and should do more to protect voters from improper purges.
Almost 4 million more names were purged from the rolls between 2014 and 2016 than between 2006 and 2008.3 This growth in the number of removed voters represented an increase of 33 percent — far outstripping growth in both total registered voters (18 percent) and total popula- tion (6 percent).
Most disturbingly, our research suggests great cause for concern that the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder (which ended federal “preclearance,” a Voting Rights Act provision that was enacted to apply extra scrutiny to jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination) has had a profound and negative impact:
For the two election cycles between 2012 and 2016, jurisdictions no longer subject to federal preclearance had purge rates significantly higher than jurisdictions that did not have it in 2013. The Brennan Center calculates that 2 million fewer voters would have been purged over those four years if jurisdictions previously subject to federal preclearance had purged at the same rate as those jurisdictions not subject to that provision in 2013.
In Texas, for example, one of the states previously subject to federal preclearance, approximately 363,000 more voters were erased from the rolls in the first election cycle after Shelby County than in the comparable midterm election cycle immediately preceding it. And Georgia purged twice as many voters — 1.5 million — between the 2012 and 2016 elections as it did between 2008 and 2012.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department has abdicated its assigned role in preventing overly aggressive purges. In fact, the Justice Department has sent letters to election officials inquiring about their purging practices — a move seen by many as laying the groundwork for claims that some jurisdictions are not sufficiently aggressive in clearing names off the rolls.
This new report follows an extensive analysis of this issue in a 2008 Brennan Center report entitled Voter Purges. In that report, we uncovered evidence that election administrators were purging people based on error-ridden practices, that voters were purged secretly and without notice, and that there were limited protections against purges. In this year’s report, we discovered that little about purge practices has improved and that a number of things have, in fact, gotten worse.
This study also found:
- In the past five years, four states have engaged in illegal purges, and another four states have implemented unlawful purge rules.
- States use inaccurate information.
- A new coterie of activist groups is pressing for aggressive purges.
This report makes the following recommendations:
- Enforce the NVRA’s protections.
- States should set purging standards that provide even more protections than the NVRA.
- Pass automatic voter registration.
Purges: A Growing Threat to the Right to Vote | Brennan Center for Justice
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