[Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger
recently announced a voter purge of 330,000 people that could affect
the 2020 elections. Voting rights activists are rallying to fight this
and other similar purges throughout the South. ]
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FIGHTING THE AGGRESSIVE VOTER PURGES PLANNED ACROSS THE SOUTH  
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Benjamin Barber
November 7, 2019
Facing South
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_ Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger
recently announced a voter purge of 330,000 people that could affect
the 2020 elections. Voting rights activists are rallying to fight this
and other similar purges throughout the South. _

Stacey Abrams, founder of Fair Fight Action, “I am not convinced at
all that we will have free and fair elections unless we work to make
it so.”, Peyton Fulford/The Guardian

 

Despite research documenting the serious problems they present for
voting rights, aggressive purges of the voting rolls continue to be
proposed in advance of the 2020 elections, with some of them
considered for Southern states.

According to a recent analysis
[[link removed]] by
the Brennan Center for Justice, at least 17 million people were purged
from voting rolls nationwide between 2016 and 2018, with racial
minorities hit hardest. While states have a legitimate interest in
keeping their voting rolls updated, doing so through wholesale purges
close to elections risks barring qualified voters from casting
ballots. There was a dramatic increase in such purges following the
U.S. Supreme Court's 2013 _Shelby County v. Holder_ ruling
[[link removed]], which freed areas with a
history of voter discrimination from federal preclearance of election
changes under the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Several Southern states are now considering voter purges that could
affect the outcome of upcoming elections — but they're getting
pushback from voting rights advocates.

They include Georgia, where concerns about voter suppression dominated
last year's close governor's race between Democrat Stacey Abrams and
Republican Brian Kemp, who won by only about 55,000 votes. Republican
Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger recently announced that about
330,000 voter registrations could be canceled next month if the voters
in question do not confirm that they live in the state. The purge,
which targets people who have not voted in the last five years, could
affect up to 4 percent of the state's voters.

Georgia is one of several states that remove people from the voter
rolls for not casting ballots in recent elections, a policy that has
been criticized by voting rights advocates. "Voters should not lose
their right to vote simply because they have decided not to express
that right in recent elections," said
[[link removed]] Lauren
Groh-Wargo, the CEO of Fair Fight Action, a voting rights advocacy
group founded by Abrams.

Kemp, who served as secretary of state overseeing the gubernatorial
election he won, was accused of trying to weaken the influence of the
African-American voting bloc by purging voter registrations in a way
that disproportionately affected black residents. Of the 53,000 voters
purged from the rolls by Kemp's office last year, 70 percent were
black. Kemp oversaw the cancellation of some 1.4 million voter
registrations since 2012, with nearly 670,000 registrations cancelled
in 2017 alone.

Critics of Georgia's latest planned purge worry this is just the
beginning of efforts by some state officials to suppress the vote in
competitive races this election cycle. The state has posted the
cancellation list online so it can be examined for problems. This week
the Georgia chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union identified
70 people
[[link removed]] who
voted last November but are still targeted to have their registrations
canceled. Meanwhile, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution analysis of the
list found
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it does not show racial disparities or many obvious errors. That
contrasts with Ohio, where this fall the state wrongly targeted
[[link removed]] 40,000
voters for cancellation.

Next year's election in Georgia will be especially important because,
along with voting for president, voters will be choosing two new U.S.
senators. Sen. Johnny Isakson, a Republican, announced in August that
he was retiring for health reasons, while Sen. David Perdue, also a
Republican, is up for re-election.

'A RISK WE CANNOT TAKE'

In Kentucky, Judge Thomas Wingate last month sided with the state
Democratic Party in its lawsuit against the state elections board for
putting the names of about 175,000 people on an "inactive" voter
list, which was nearly even split between Democrats and Republicans.
Anna Whites, an attorney for the Kentucky Democratic Party, argued
that the state elections board failed to follow state law, which
requires waiting two federal election cycles after voter notification
attempts to place names on the inactive list.

Wingate found that creating a separate list for inactive
voters' names would create an undue burden and undermine the
integrity of the voting process. In order for voters on the inactive
list to vote in the upcoming elections, they would have to get out of
the voting line, sign an oath, and possibly have to wait for action by
the county clerk, county elections board, or a circuit judge before
they could cast a ballot.

"Not every voter has the luxury of waiting for a possible lengthy
period of time to jump through unnecessary hoops when the State Board
of Elections' intent can be achieved through simpler, less
prejudicial means such as placing an asterisk by the names of the
175,000 individuals on the master voter list and having poll workers
confirm each voter's address," he wrote
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his ruling. Wingate issued a temporary injunction that puts the names
back on the main voter registry, where they will be asterisked. The
voters can still expect to be removed from the rolls if they fail to
either update their address or vote by November 2022.

And in North Carolina, Gov. Roy Cooper (D) this week vetoed a bill
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would have given the state elections board the power to compare voter
and juror information to purge non-citizens from the voter rolls.
Senate Bill 250 targeted voters who have been disqualified from jury
service because they were determined not to be citizens. Sponsored by
state Sen. Joyce Krawiec, a Forsyth County Republican, the measure
passed the Senate earlier this year by 29-21 and the House by 59-51,
both votes along party lines.

Non-citizen voting is not a significant problem in North Carolina. A
2016 post-election audit by the state elections board found that out
of the record 4.8 million North Carolina voters who turned out to cast
ballots that year, only 41 were people with legal residency status who
were ineligible to vote.

Voting rights advocates argued
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the bill would have suppressed voting in immigrant communities, whose
electoral clout is growing in the state, and could have opened the
door for harassment of eligible, naturalized citizen voters.
"Only citizens should be allowed to vote," Cooper said in his veto
statement
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"But blocking legitimate voters from casting a ballot is a risk we
cannot take when the law already prevents non-citizens from voting and
has legitimate mechanisms to remove them from the rolls."

[_Benjamin Barber is a researcher and writer with Facing South. He can
be reached @benbarber96 [[link removed]]._]

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