Let America Vote announces voter purge review project
By Leigh Chapman, Senior Policy Advisor, and George Hornedo, Policy Fellow, for Let America Vote
Across the country, election officials have tried to control who turns out on Election Day with a deviously simple strategy: they find flimsy excuses to purge otherwise eligible voters from the voting rolls.
In Georgia, for example, the secretary of state dropped nearly 600,000 voters from the rolls in 2017. A 2015 voter purge in Ohio knocked tens of thousands of voters off the rolls, prompting a lawsuit that is now under review by the U.S. Supreme Court — with a decision expected in the coming weeks.
These efforts are highly suspect: while clearing the rolls of deceased or ineligible voters, purges frequently target many more people who have merely decided not to vote in recent elections, potentially in violation of federal law. Data indicates people of color and and low-income residents are disproportionately affected by purges, which means those voters’ voices are disproportionately silenced at the ballot box.
Let America Vote’s mission is to defend voting rights and create political consequences for vote suppressors. To that end, we’re actively gathering information about voter purges in key states across the country to find out who has been removed from the rolls and why.
In a project that began this spring and will continue through the summer, we’ve researched public-records laws and the voter-suppression histories in states across the country. We’re now drafting and submitting open-records requests to states’ chief elections officers seeking data, email correspondence, calendars and anything else that may shed light on voter-suppression efforts.
Once we have the documents in hand, we’ll analyze them and, where necessary, call out bad actors and obvious vote suppressors. We’re going to inform the public on where and why voters are being purged — and what they can do about it.
This is a big project, and we’re taking it on with the help of volunteers from We the Action — a platform that connects talented lawyers with critical causes. Our volunteers are now researching and drafting records requests for 25 states, from Alaska to to Mississippi to Rhode Island to Utah.
So if you’re a voting rights champion, watch this space for developments in the weeks and months to come, or get involved by texting VOTE to 44939. And if you’re a vote suppressor, watch your inbox, because we probably have a records request headed your way.
