New Jersey Voters Wrongly Purged

Posted by Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet at 3:00 PM on September 10, 2008.

Many things can go wrong in elections - including before Election Day. New Jersey seems to be the latest poster child for high-tech snafus. The AP is reporting that the state sent 300,000 letters to people telling them they were not registered to vote, but in many cases they are qualified voters.

The problem is not confined to New Jersey. Under federal election reforms passed in 2002, every state is supposed to create statewide databases of its registered voters. The problem is not just that these new mega-lists contain errors, as is the case in New Jersey, but what state election officials are doing with the data.

In New Jersey, state election official apparently compared the lists to other statewide databases, such as motor vehicle records, to see if voters had moved and therefore should be removed from voter rolls. That practice, which also has been done in Louisiana, Michigan and Kansas in 2008, is illegal, according to voting rights lawyers who say it does not follow federal rules for purging voters.

The National Voter Registration Act says any voter who has not voted in one federal election should get a non-forwardable post card or notice saying they will be considered an inactive voter if they don't vote. If that individual receives two mailings to the same address, over two federal elections, only those are returned as non-deliverable, only then can election officials purge that individual from voter rolls.

Whether voting rights organizations such as the Brennan Center for Justice at nearby NYU Law School will sue remains to be seen. You can be sure that New Jersey, like Louisiana, Kansas and Michigan, will not be the last state making this mistake in 2008.

Steven Rosenfeld is a senior fellow at Alternet.org and co-author of What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election, with Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman (The New Press, 2006).