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Following a 2013 Supreme Court decision that struck down a key element of the Voting Rights Act, states are laying off a growing number of voters.
According to a new report from the NYU Brennan Center for Justice, voter turnaround rates – a sometimes flawed process that states use to clean up their voters lists – is considerably higher than it was ten years ago .
This increase coincides with a 2013 Supreme Court decision, which invalidated part of the Voting Rights Act that required nine states with a history of racial discrimination to obtain federal approval when they were not in compliance. they modify their electoral laws.
The peak is notable. Between 2006 and 2008, 12 million voters were purged from electoral lists. Between 2014 and 2016, this number rose to 16 million, an increase of about 33%.
Researchers at the Brennan Center also found a significant increase in electoral purges in places previously pre-scribed by the federal government under the Voting Rights Act. Several states – including Alabama, Virginia and South Carolina – with a history of racial discrimination in their electoral laws were required to implement changes to these policies by the Department of Justice, a practice known as federal preclearance.
The DOJ would then review the change and determine if it was potentially discriminatory. The 2013 Supreme Court decision effectively deprived the ability to enforce this provision of the Voting Rights Act.
Voter washout rates in pre-clearance jurisdictions between 2012 and 2016 far exceeded those in jurisdictions that were not pre-screened to federal preclearance. The report – which badyzed 6,600 jurisdictions and calculated purge rates for 49 states – finds that 2 million more voters have been stricken from voter lists because of higher purge rates in states of preclearance.
Purging is an important process that helps states and counties keep voter lists up to date by canceling registrations for electors who are no longer eligible, including those who have moved or died. However, when it is misbehaved, it can deprive voters who have been eliminated by mistake and not be notified before it is too late to improve the problem.
This is not just a hypothetical scenario. In Arkansas, thousands of voters were reported wrongly in 2016 as the state sought to reform the voters found guilty of crimes. In Virginia, voters were wrongly struck off lists in 2013 on the basis of an erroneous database that was tracking residents who had moved.
Myrna Perez, Deputy Director of the Brennan Center Democracy Program, argued that such erroneous purges can have real consequences on Election Day in a New York Times panel describing the results of the study.
Our badysis shows that, as the areas covered by the pre-clearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act increased their purge rates, the number of people who voted at their polling stations did not could be regular.
Voter advocates argued that purge practices can disproportionately affect minorities and low-income voters – and add yet another barrier to people's efforts to go to the polls. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor – one of four dissenters in a 2018 affair that upheld a law on the elimination of voters from Ohio – cited this concern in her case. dissent. "Our democracy is based on the ability of all individuals, regardless of race, income or status, to exercise their right to vote," she writes.
While the Department of Justice had previously served the federal agency took a different transfer during the Trump administration and urged election officials to be more aggressive in their cleansing practices, note the report. This orientation comes as Trump continues to warn of the threat of electoral fraud, including the possibility of a vote by undocumented immigrants, although there is little evidence that this will happen.
Instead, the data seems to suggest that electoral purges could simply make it more difficult for many people to vote.
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