Voter purges are disenfranchisement in disguise

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. That’s a state of 4 million, now with just 2.3 million registered voters.

In August, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott touted his removal of 1.1 million voters from his state’s rolls, crediting what he said were strong election laws. In addition to those who were 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 within the last 20 months. According to the State Board of Elections, most removed were ineligible because they had moved within the state and failed to register their new address or had not voted in the previous two federal elections. However, North Carolina Republicans recently filed a suit against the state, claiming it had not taken action on complaints about ineligible voters.

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.

The rate of purges has already caught the attention of the U.S. Justice Department over concerns that federal rules are being violated. Democracy Docket, which tracks election litigation, has noted three dozen cases in 19 states related to the maintenance of voter rolls. On Friday, the Justice Department announced that it had filed a lawsuit against Alabama and its secretary of state, alleging the state violated federal law by removing voters from its rolls too close to the November election.

In Nevada, the Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign are suing Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar, accusing him of failing to purge more than 6,000 citizens from state voter rolls. They’re seeking a court order requiring Aguilar, a Democrat, to verify the citizenship of all voters before the election — a virtually impossible task at this late date.

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.

That’s disturbing enough, but the overall rate of voter roll purges has been ramping up at a pace that should alarm Americans. Between 2020 and 2022, it jumped 21% from 2014-2016, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. More than 19 million voters were removed.

In Oklahoma, more than 40% — just under 195,000 — of the purged voters fell in the “inactive” category. Often, such occasional voters don’t discover until Election Day that they have been removed from the rolls, long past registration deadlines.

State Representative Mauree Turner, a Democrat, said the latest Oklahoma removal numbers are cause for dismay, not celebration, as Stitt contends. “My first thought is how many people are in there that have been purged and don’t know that they’ve been purged,” Turner said. “All this is going to do is discourage people who are already less inclined to show up to the polls anyway in a deeply red state.”

Oklahoma had the lowest voter turnout in the country in 2020, when just 54.4% of the eligible population voted, according to statistics compiled by the University of Florida’s Election Lab. In fact, Oklahoma has had some of the lowest voter turnout in the country for the past four presidential elections, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.

Too little research has been done on the possible correlation between aggressive voter roll purges and turnout, but a piece published earlier this month in Social Science Quarterly examined Michigan voter rolls between 2014 and 2018, geocoding exact addresses where voters were dropped.

The report’s initial 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 — yes, the folks responsible for Project 2025 — 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.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. Patricia Lopez is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. She is a former member of the editorial board at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, where she also worked as a senior political editor and reporter.