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voter purges
With Abortion Rights on the Line, Ohio Lawmaker Says Those Purged Unlawfully Must Be Allowed to Vote
"Ohioans deserve assurances of what will happen to ballots cast by any voters you purged who show up to vote in the November 7th election," said state Rep. Bride Rose Sweeney.
Nov 03, 2023
With days to go until Ohio voters decide on a pivotal abortion rights referendum in the November 7 election, one state representative is leading the charge to ensure all eligible Ohioans are able to have their ballots counted despite Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose's recent purge of 27,000 supposedly "inactive" voters."
Ohio state Rep. Bride Rose Sweeney (D-16) wrote to LaRose on Friday, warning that her office's preliminary analysis had shown "significant errors" were made, with some of the people removed from rolls having voted in recent elections.
Sweeney said her office believes "the purge was not uniform and nondiscriminatory as required by federal law" and called for its reversal.
"Ohioans deserve assurances of what will happen to ballots cast by any voters you purged who show up to vote in the November 7th election," she wrote.
Sweeney took note of the voter purge late last month and promptly demanded answers from LaRose, who, she pointed out, ordered thousands of voters to be removed from the rolls after voting in the general election had already started in September. The voting period began on September 22, when ballots were first sent out to overseas voters, and the purge was ordered for September 28.
Calling the order "stunning" and a "purge of choice" that should have taken place after the election, Sweeney called on LaRose to undo the damage. But after the secretary of state defended the purge, claiming it targeted only voters who had "moved or died" or had been unresponsive to attempts to contact them and accusing Democrats of "trying to help dead people vote," Sweeney doubled down on her demand for answers.
"Something's not adding up," she replied to LaRose on social media, noting that the purged voters were disproportionately under the age of 45, while that age group makes up less than 7% of deaths in Ohio each year.
Sweeney's finding that some of the purged residents are in fact active voters in Ohio "is reason enough to reverse the purge, take a more thorough look at the list, and only remove those who have truly become ineligible to vote in Ohio—and to do so only after the November 7 election," wrote the lawmaker.
She also called on LaRose to clarify whether voters who were wrongly purged will be able to have their votes counted in the election.
On Tuesday, the secretary of state's office said: "If the voter heads to the polls to vote, it reactivates their registration. They are not shut out of the process."
Noting that ballot reports from the August special election indicated that provisional ballots were not counted, Sweeney wrote, "Are you stating that these purged voters' provisional ballots will be counted?"
Next Tuesday, voters will be asked whether the Ohio Constitution should be amended to enshrine the right of Ohioans to make choices about their reproductive health, including whether to have an abortion. A six-week abortion ban is currently on hold in the state while the Ohio Supreme Court deliberates the law.
"No Ohioan should be denied their freedom to vote because of an error or—even worse—because of a hyperpartisan secretary of state," said Sweeney in a statement.
In her letter to LaRose, she noted that "there seems to be a misunderstanding of voting basics" in the secretary's office, which has made "several concerning misstatements about how voter registration and voter roll maintenance work" in recent days.
LaRose's office has claimed that voters who move are no longer legally permitted on voter rolls, which is "simply incorrect," Sweeney said, and that when voters move and register at a new address, their old registration is not canceled.
"In fact, county election officials do remove the former registration when adding a voter to their rolls as a matter of course," said Sweeney. "There simply are not large numbers of duplicate registrations on our rolls. It is a rare case where the former registration stays on the rolls. We look forward to seeing your data showing why each voter was purged."
On social media, Sweeney noted that she called for a third-party audit after the secretary of state's last "massive voter purge," and said expanding voting rights in Ohio and the U.S. would end such purges.
"Automatic voter registration would make our rolls more accurate," said Sweeney, "and basically render the purges moot."
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A Shocking Voter Purge Crisis Is Underway
An increasingly desperate GOP is doing this because they know their policies are unpopular: racism, pollution, privatizing Medicare, ending Social Security, criminalizing abortion, etc.
Aug 11, 2023
If you live in the Blue part of a Red state, Republicans don’t want you to vote. And their latest strategy is their most brute-force method: simply remove you from the voting rolls.
A shocking new study from Demos lays out the dimensions of this voter purge crisis of democracy brought to us by an increasingly desperate GOP.
Republicans are doing this because they know that their policies are unpopular: most Americans aren’t fans of tax cuts for billionaires, more pollution, deregulation, high-priced drugs, privatizing Medicare, ending Social Security, criminalizing abortion and birth control, student debt, hating on Black and queer people, and the GOP’s war on unions and working people.
So, the GOP does everything it can to make voting difficult or even impossible, particularly for people in heavily Democratic neighborhoods (which are usually college towns, big cities, and Black neighborhoods).
When Republicans run elections in such areas (typically Blue cities in Red states), they’ll close or change polling places at the last minute to sow confusion and cause people to give up when they show up at their normal polling place and find it closed.
For example, in this week’s election in Ohio the state changed polling places for mostly Black voters in Cuyahoga and Summit counties just five days before the election, as Newsweek noted in an article titled:
“Ohio GOP Changing Polling Locations Days Before Election Raises Questions”
Ohio voters were outraged, and that outrage spread across X (formerly Twitter) with comments like this:
“The Ohio GOP is playing ‘Your polling place has moved’ with 47,000 voters in the largest African American voting county in Ohio—just five days before the election. Making it harder to vote—in the crucial August 8th special election (deciding if a majority of voters still can amend Ohio's state constitution)—is wrong.”
Another X user noted:
“Ohio Republicans are so damn shady! … This stinks to high heaven. At the last minute, before Ohio’s special election, polling locations were changed in Cuyahoga and Summit counties. More than 47,000 voters are affected by changes to 50 voting precincts.”
The fact that this little trick in Ohio this week got virtually no national press coverage guarantees Red states will be doing more of it in the upcoming 2023 and 2024 elections.
But that’s just the beginning.
Knowing that working-class people are less likely to vote Republican than white upper-class suburbanites, Republicans also engineer polling situations so people paid by the hour will have to wait for hours in line just to vote, losing out on income.
Every year, we’re treated to pictures and videos of hours-long lines to vote in Blue cities in Red states, while lines in white suburbs typically run less than 10 to 15 minutes.
Similarly, many Red states have imposed draconian penalties on people conducting voter registration drives for making even the smallest mistakes, or for failing to “properly register” themselves with the state. This has shut down many voter registration programs, including some from long-term organizations like the League of Women’s Voters.
As The Kansas Reflector newspaper noted, the penalty for even a minor, inadvertent error is now 17 months in the state prison and a $100,000 fine:
“The League of Women Voters of Kansas and other nonprofits are suspending voter registration drives for fear of criminal prosecution under a new state law.”
The League has sued Florida, Tennessee, and Texas for their criminalization of voter registration drives as well.
But purging voters — by the tens of millions every election cycle — is where the GOP finds their best result. As the Demos report notes:
“Between the close of registration for the 2020 general election and the close of registration for the 2022 general election, states reported removing 19,260,000 records from their voter registration rolls. This was equal to 8.5% of the total number of voters who were registered in the United States as of the close of registration for the 2022 general election.”
Additionally, seventeen million voters were purged in the two years leading up to the 2018 election, fully ten percent of America’s voting population, according to the Brennan Center.
Given that the most radical purges took place among Black and youth voters in Republican-controlled Red states, those 8.5 percent and 10 percent “national averages” could well be twice or three times that percentage in the states where these purges are concentrated.
They added, most of the purge activity was taking place in former Confederate Red states that — before five Republicans on the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in their 2013 Shelby County decision — had to have purges pre-cleared by the federal government:
“The median purge rate over the 2016–2018 period in jurisdictions previously subject to preclearance was 40 percent higher than the purge rate in jurisdictions that were not covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.”
More than a quarter of those purged during this period from 2016-2022 were removed from the rolls either because they failed to vote in the previous election or because they failed to return a postcard mailed out by a Republican secretary of state (that is usually designed to look like junk mail).
This is called “caging” and used to be illegal, but Sam Alito broke the tie and wrote the 5-4 decision in their 2018 Husted v A Phillip Randolph Institute when the five Republicans on the Court ruled that Ohio Republican Secretary of State Husted could continue his practice of mailing the postcards into Ohio cities with the largest Black populations.
In his dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer pointed out that only around 4 percent of Americans move out of their county every year. Yet, he wrote:
“The record shows that in 2012 Ohio identified about 1.5 million registered voters—nearly 20% of its 8 million registered voters—as ineligible to remain on the federal voter roll because [Husted said that] they changed their residences.”
The Brennan Center found that just between 2014 and 2016, in the two years leading up to the Hillary/Trump presidential election, over 14 million people were purged from voter rolls, largely in Republican-controlled states. Then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp purged over a million in Georgia alone leading up to his 50,000 vote 2018 election win against Stacey Abrams.
Calling the findings “disturbing,” the Brennan Center noted, “Almost 4 million more names were purged from the rolls between 2014 and 2016 [just after the Supreme Court legalized large-scale no-oversight voter purges in 2013] than between 2006 and 2008. 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 population (6 percent).”
Another strategy that the GOP has rolled out in a big way to suppress the vote in Blue areas of Red states is “strict signature matching.” They primarily use this against voters who’ve succeeded in obtaining vote-by-mail ballots, which are authenticated by comparing the signature on the envelope with the voter’s registration card.
Because signatures change over time and often vary a lot when people are in a hurry, this is low-hanging fruit for the GOP. Last year they started a program to field an “army” of 50,000 “poll watchers,” including interviewing candidates from among white supremacist militia groups, for the 2024 election.
While some of these poll watchers will be on hand to try to intimidate or challenge Black and young voters (a practice that’s legal in most Red states), many will be overseeing the counting of mail-in ballots, which are generally more Democratic than Republican.
All they have to do is claim that, in their opinion, a signature doesn’t match and the ballot goes into the “provisional” pile and won’t be counted until or unless the voter shows up in person at the county elections office. Most people never even know their ballot was challenged and not counted.
Meanwhile, the GOP in Texas is quietly recruiting 10,000 white volunteers “courageous” enough to go into Black and Hispanic polling places and confront people trying to vote.
As Jessica Corbett reported for Common Dreams:
“Common Cause Texas on Thursday shared a leaked video of a Harris County GOP official discussing plans to ‘build an army’ of 10,000 election workers and poll watchers, including some who ‘will have the confidence and courage’ to go into Black and Brown communities to address alleged voter fraud that analyses show does not actually exist.”
Voting in Red states has become difficult, and registering voters is now treacherous since five Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized all these little tricks and strategies to purge or discourage Democratic voters.
If you live in a Blue area of a Red state, get ready: the GOP plans to pull out all the stops for the 2024 election.
Double-check your voter registration every month or two, and be sure to double-check it in the weeks just before the deadline for registration, as Republican Secretaries of State prefer to purge people in this window so by the time people discovered they’re purged it’s too late to re-register.
Forewarned is forearmed. Pass it on to your friends in Red states.
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Report Warns State Voter Purges Are a Growing Threat to Democracy
"We are facing an unprecedented assault on voting rights in this country, and purges that erroneously target eligible voters for removal are part of the problem," said one campaigner.
Aug 10, 2023
States removed more than 19 million people—or about 8.5% of the registered U.S. electorate—from voter rolls between the 2020 and 2022 electoral cycles, often via flawed practices that prevent many eligible persons from exercising their right to vote, a report released Thursday revealed.
The report—Protecting Voter Registration: An Assessment of Voter Purge Policies in 10 States—from the liberal think tank Dēmos, examines how voters are removed from electoral rolls in Arizona, California, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, and Wisconsin.
"An inclusive democracy requires free and fair ballot access. But too many states are limiting this fundamental right."
"Between the close of registration for the 2020 general election and the close of registration for the 2022 general election, states reported removing 19,260,000 records from their voter registration rolls," the report notes. "This was equal to 8.5% of the total number of voters who were registered in the United States as of the close of registration for the 2022 general election."
"Of course, some removals are necessary for the proper maintenance of voter rolls, such as for persons who have died or have moved away from their voting jurisdiction," the authors acknowledged. "One of the most frequent reasons for purging, however, was 'inactivity,' or failure to respond to a confirmation notice and not voting in at least two consecutive federal general elections. This reason accounted for more than a quarter of all removals while 26.8% and 25.6% were for address change or death of the registrant, respectively."
The report continues:
Flawed voter purge practices—such as removals for inactivity or based on inaccurate identification of felony status or citizenship status—often disproportionately target voters of color, naturalized citizens, and other communities, and can prevent many eligible persons from exercising their right to vote. In addition, too many states lack readily available data on voter purges, which prevents advocates, organizers, and voters from stopping improper purges before they happen or correcting an erroneous purge in time for an election. As a result, tens of thousands of eligible voters who have taken all the necessary steps to exercise their right to vote are wrongly prevented from making their voices heard in our democracy.
"Protecting voting rights and fair elections includes equitable election administration and voter roll maintenance," Dēmos president Taifa Smith Butler said in a statement. "We are facing an unprecedented assault on voting rights in this country, and purges that erroneously target eligible voters for removal are part of the problem."
"The Supreme Court has spent the last decade systematically weakening the protections in the Voting Rights Act," she continued. "Extremist state legislatures are passing laws that disproportionately target Black and Brown voters. Voter suppression efforts are a direct threat to the basic rights of Black and Brown people, families, and communities, as well as young and rural voters. This analysis makes it clear that we must pass comprehensive, federal voting rights legislation.”
The 10 states in the report were selected "because their voter removal laws and safeguards, as well as the accessibility and transparency of their registration data, provide representative examples of the spectrum of laws and practices across the United States."
"Additionally, many of these state legislatures are either considering bills or have recently enacted laws that impact how voters are removed from the voter rolls," the report notes. "In the 2022 legislative session, state lawmakers introduced at least 43 bills that would allow or require problematic voter purges, and in 2023, as of the writing of this report, states are considering at least 28 additional bills."
Dēmos graded the states on a percentage-point scale in four categories: voter removal practices, safeguards against erroneous removal, data accessibility, and data transparency. In the removal practices category, Indiana received the highest score, earning a 76% rating, while Ohio, which scored 24%, ranking last. For safeguards, Wisconsin received a 90% rating, while six states tied for last with a 20% score. North Carolina and Ohio got perfect 100% scores for data accessibility, while Indiana received a 0% rating. North Carolina and Georgia received perfect scores for data transparency; Indiana got another 0% mark.
"All 10 states must modernize their removal practices to ensure that only ineligible voters are removed from the rolls, and all need better systems to ensure that erroneously removed eligible voters can re-register and vote in the current election," the report asserts.
"We know from work with partners in other states that the problems identified here are not confined to these 10 states."
"Additionally, almost all these states need improved policies to ensure that they collect and publish voter registration data in an accessible and transparent format," the publication adds. "While we examine only a subset of states, we know from work with partners in other states that the problems identified here are not confined to these 10 states but are likely representative of issues across the entire United States."
"Bottom line: Every examined state must improve its laws and practices to guard against improper voter registration purges," the authors stressed.
The report offers a lengthy list of recommendations for federal and state lawmakers, election officials, and advocates to improve the voter removal process and ensure a more inclusive democracy. At the federal level, the Freedom to Vote Act was reintroduced last month after narrowly failing to pass during the 117th Congress. However, the measure has little chance of making it to President Joe Biden's desk given Republican control of the House of Representatives.
The Dēmos report comes amid ongoing efforts by GOP-controlled state legislatures to restrict voting rights. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, a progressive public policy institute, at least 322 restrictive bills have been introduced in 45 states this year, with 13 laws enacted. The center said six of the introduced bills "would increase the risk of faulty voter purges."
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