Aggressive purging of voter rolls has become the new brag among Republican governors — one that should trigger alarm bells about who is being disenfranchised by these actions.
Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt is among the latest, boasting that he has stripped 450,000 Oklahomans from his state’s voter registry since 2021.
In August, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott touted his removal of 1.1 million voters from the state rolls, crediting what he said were strong election laws. In addition to those removed because they were deceased or had moved, more than 460,000 registered voters, according to Abbott’s office, were placed on a suspension list. In Texas, that can happen if you fail to vote in just two consecutive election cycles.
And North Carolina officials announced last week that they had purged 747,000 registered voters in the past 20 months. According to the State Board of Elections, most removed were ineligible because they had moved within the state and failed to register a new address or had not voted in the previous two federal elections.
The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 requires states to take reasonable measures to cull voter lists regularly, weeding out those no longer qualified. That’s a good thing that helps ensure a smooth count on Election Day. It’s also routine maintenance that, until recently, was conducted with little fanfare.
But some states may be crossing the line from tidying up rolls to straight disenfranchisement of certain voters for more nefarious purposes.
All voters are already required to attest under penalty of perjury that they are U.S. citizens, but that hasn’t stopped Republicans from pushing for further verification, including proof of citizenship. Earlier this year, a network of Trump allies challenged thousands of registrations in battleground states, some of which targeted Democratic areas, according to the New York Times.
Too little research has been done on the possible correlation between aggressive voter roll purges and turnout, but a piece published last month in Social Science Quarterly examined Michigan voter rolls between 2014 and 2018, geocoding exact addresses where voters were dropped.
The report’s conclusion was that “more Democratic-leaning areas, denser/more urban areas, and areas with more Black residents had higher rates of purges.” Racial makeup and median income “remained a significant factor in voter purge rates” and, the researchers concluded, “suggest a potentially troublesome underlying element” in the pattern of purges.
As with everything else in this hyper-polarized country, we are divided into states that see voting as a right to be extended as broadly as possible and those who see it as a privilege to be limited in any way officials see fit.
Voter fraud is rare in this country, partly because election systems are decentralized. There is no national voter registry to manipulate. Even the conservative Heritage Foundation looked at electoral fraud cases in the U.S. between 1979 and 2023 and found just 1,465 proven cases of fraud, or about 33 a year across the country.
We must take reasonable precautions to preserve election integrity. But the higher objective should be ensuring that every American eligible to vote can participate in this ritual, which is so fundamental to a healthy democracy, without unnecessary barriers.
Patricia Lopez is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy.
