It's Not Just Russians Who Steal Elections. Republicans Have Other Methods As Well

All morning we've been looking at the Blue Wave and how hard it will be for the GOP to defend themselves against it. So, they're resorting to cheating-- removing Democrats from the registration rolls. The non-partisan Brennan Center for Justice reported that 9 states with a history of barring blacks from voting are up to their old tracks agin, now that the Justice Department no longer requires them to get pre-approval for changes in their election protocols. The former slave-holding states that went to war against America have a higher rate of removing legitimately registered voters from the rolls than normal states and a higher rate of removing legitimately registered voters from the rolls than they did while the Justice Department rubles on pre-clearance were in effect (in accord with the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which was struck down by the right-wing Supreme Court 5 years ago.

Millions of legitimately registered voters have been purged from the rolls, mostly in Southern states, to protect Republican officeholders. Georgia has been leading the way, although Republican secretaries of state everywhere in the country are singing from the same hymnal. Brennan Center: "Voter purges are an often-flawed process of cleaning up voter rolls by deleting names from registration lists. Done badly, they can prevent eligible people from casting a ballot that counts... In June 2016, the Arkansas secretary of state provided a list to the state’s 75 county clerks suggesting that more than 7,700 names be removed from the rolls because of supposed felony convictions. That roster was highly inaccurate; it included people who had never been convicted of a felony, as well as persons with past convictions whose voting rights had been restored. And in Virginia in 2013, nearly 39,000 voters were removed from the rolls when the state relied on a faulty database to delete voters who allegedly had moved out of the commonwealth. Error rates in some counties ran as high as 17 percent."

These voters were victims of purges-- the sometimes-flawed process by which election officials attempt to remove ineligible names from voter registration lists. When done correctly, purges ensure the voter rolls are accurate and up to-date. When done incorrectly, purges disenfranchise legitimate voters (often when it is too close to an election to rectify the mistake), causing confusion and delay at the polls.

Ahead of upcoming midterm elections, a new Brennan Center investigation has examined data for more than 6,600 jurisdictions that report purge rates to the Election Assistance Commission and calculated purge rates for 49 states.

We found that between 2014 and 2016, states removed almost 16 million voters from the rolls, and every state in the country can and should do more to protect voters from improper purges.

Almost 4 million more names were purged from the rolls between 2014 and 2016 than between 2006 and 2008.3 This growth in the number of removed voters represented an increase of 33 percent-- far outstripping growth in both total registered voters (18 percent) and total popula- tion (6 percent).

Most disturbingly, our research suggests great cause for concern that the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder (which ended federal “preclearance,” a Voting Rights Act provision that was enacted to apply extra scrutiny to jurisdictions with a history of racial dis- crimination) has had a profound and negative impact:

For the two election cycles between 2012 and 2016, jurisdictions no longer subject to federal preclearance had purge rates significantly higher than jurisdictions that did not have it in 2013. The Brennan Center calculates that 2 million fewer voters would have been purged over those four years if jurisdictions previously subject to federal preclearance had purged at the same rate as those jurisdictions not subject to that provision in 2013.

In Texas, for example, one of the states previously subject to federal preclearance, approximately 363,000 more voters were erased from the rolls in the first election cycle after Shelby County than in the comparable midterm election cycle immediately preceding it.5 And Georgia purged twice as many voters-- 1.5 million-- between the 2012 and 2016 elections as it did between 2008 and 2012.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department has abdicated its as- signed role in preventing overly aggressive purges. In fact, the Justice Department has sent letters to election officials inquiring about their purging practices-- a move seen by many as laying the groundwork for claims that some jurisdictions are not sufficiently aggressive in clearing names off the rolls.