Right-wing groups are at it again this year trying to remove supposedly ineligible people from the voter roles. Over the past five years, several such groups have filed 17 lawsuits seeking to force state or local officials to aggressively purge their voter rolls. Among others, the folks at the Brennan Center for Justice and its partner groups have been challenging some of these purges with litigation of their own, as noted by Christopher Deluzio and Myrna Pérez, both top attorneys at Brennan.
Done right, purges are a perfectly reasonable way to make sure voter rolls are up to date and accurate by removing the dead, people who have moved, duplicate names, and those who are otherwise ineligible to vote. But there is no national standard for such purges, and this is also true of many states, where purges are left up to local election officials setting their own standards. Those often reflect little more than intentional bias.
As a decade-old Brennan report points out, purges often depend on lists filled with errors. This includes notices of deaths of people who are still alive. Voters are purged secretly and without notice, meaning they can show up on election day and find they aren’t on the rolls and not entitled to a ballot. Bad “matching” criteria makes voters vulnerable to manipulated and abusive purges (like the Florida 2000 purge that cleared the rolls of anyone if 80 percent of the letters of their last names were the same as those of persons with criminal convictions).
Suppressing the vote of legally eligible people is both unAmerican and as American as apple pie. Our ideals, of course, say this shouldn’t happen. In practice, however, it’s been a feature in many states for at least a century and a half. This suppression has mostly been directed at people of color, the main targets being African Americans and American Indians, and more recently Latinos.
At times, the sole approach was pure intimidation. For instance, the African American Louis Allen, ironically a citizen of Liberty, Mississippi, a logger and World War II veteran, was murdered in January 1964. His crime: He tried to register to vote in a state where blacks had been barred from voting by the state constitution since 1890. He had also talked to the FBI about the murder of a black civil rights activist three years previously: Herbert Lee. Although nobody was prosecuted for gunning down Allen, decades later independent researchers found that the evidence pointed very strongly at the then-sheriff, Daniel Jones, a cousin of the untried murderer of Lee.
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