Right-wing groups are at it again this year trying to remove supposedly ineligible people from the voter roles. Over the past five years, several such groups have filed 17 lawsuits seeking to force state or local officials to aggressively purge their voter rolls. Among others, the folks at the Brennan Center for Justice and its partner groups have been challenging some of these purges with litigation of their own, as noted by Christopher Deluzio and Myrna Pérez, both top attorneys at Brennan.
Done right, purges are a perfectly reasonable way to make sure voter rolls are up to date and accurate by removing the dead, people who have moved, duplicate names, and those who are otherwise ineligible to vote. But there is no national standard for such purges, and this is also true of many states, where purges are left up to local election officials setting their own standards. Those often reflect little more than intentional bias.
As a decade-old Brennan report points out, purges often depend on lists filled with errors. This includes notices of deaths of people who are still alive. Voters are purged secretly and without notice, meaning they can show up on election day and find they aren’t on the rolls and not entitled to a ballot. Bad “matching” criteria makes voters vulnerable to manipulated and abusive purges (like the Florida 2000 purge that cleared the rolls of anyone if 80 percent of the letters of their last names were the same as those of persons with criminal convictions).
Suppressing the vote of legally eligible people is both unAmerican and as American as apple pie. Our ideals, of course, say this shouldn’t happen. In practice, however, it’s been a feature in many states for at least a century and a half. This suppression has mostly been directed at people of color, the main targets being African Americans and American Indians, and more recently Latinos.
At times, the sole approach was pure intimidation. For instance, the African American Louis Allen, ironically a citizen of Liberty, Mississippi, a logger and World War II veteran, was murdered in January 1964. His crime: He tried to register to vote in a state where blacks had been barred from voting by the state constitution since 1890. He had also talked to the FBI about the murder of a black civil rights activist three years previously: Herbert Lee. Although nobody was prosecuted for gunning down Allen, decades later independent researchers found that the evidence pointed very strongly at the then-sheriff, Daniel Jones, a cousin of the untried murderer of Lee.
While such killings kept legions of black people away from the polls, some other brave souls were deprived of their right to vote by poll taxes and slippery techniques like literacy tests. Often such tests were only imposed on black citizens, or they were forced to take a harder test than whites. The 30-question 1964 Louisiana literacy test—to be completed in 10 minutes—failed takers who didn’t answer every question correctly.
Ambiguity was intentional. Questions included No. 20: Spell backwards, forwards. No. 21: Print the word vote upside down, but in the correct order. No. 23: Draw a figure that is square in shape. Divide it in half by drawing a straight line from its northeast corner to to its southwest corner, and then divide it once more by drawing a broken line from the middle of its western side to the middle of its eastern side. No. 28: Divide a vertical line into two equal parts by bisecting with a curved horizontal line that is only straight at its spot bisection of the vertical.
Those days are gone. But more veiled versions of voter suppression live on. Most of these are focused on keeping likely Democrats from voting, and that mostly means, yet again, efforts directed at people of color. But others, the elderly among them, are also hit. Deluzio and Pérez write:
In theory, there is nothing wrong with scrubbing voting lists of people who are ineligible to vote because, for example, they have moved or are dead. But there is plenty wrong with sloppy or overly aggressive purging practices. [...]
[The American Civil Rights Union] has an active lawsuit against Starr County and the state of Texas. PILF, headed up by a former member of President Trump’s now-disbanded “Voter Fraud” Commission, sent menacing letters to nearly 250 jurisdictions in 2017 threatening litigation if they did not clean up their voter rolls.
These threats and numerous lawsuits have pushed many jurisdictions to purge vast numbers of registered voters from the polls. Data in a report from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission show that more such voters are being removed from the rolls than was the case a decade ago.
Voter-roll purges ought to meet a high standard, and the only way that may ultimately be achieved is by federalizing election regulations. But in the short run, get-out-the-vote efforts need to concentrate some of their energy on trying to ensure that people most vulnerable to purges have updated their voter registrations.