Voter Purging: A Legal Way for Republicans to Swing Elections?

The Department of Justice's Voting Section is pressuring 10 states to purge voter rolls before the 2008 election based on statistics that former Voting Section attorneys and other experts say are flawed and do not confirm that those states have more voter registrations than eligible voters, as the department alleges.

Voting Section Chief John Tanner called for the purges in letters sent this spring under an arcane provision in the National Voter Registration Act, better known as the Motor Voter law, whose purpose is to expand voter registration. The identical letters notify states that 10 percent or more of their election jurisdictions have problematic voter rolls. It tells states to report "the subsequent removal from rolls of persons no longer eligible to vote."

"That data does not say what they purport it says," said David Becker, People for the American Way Foundation's senior voting rights counsel and a former Voting Section senior trial attorney, after reviewing the letters and statistics used to call for the purges. "They are saying the data shows the 10 worst voter rolls. They have a lot of explaining to do."

"You are basically seeing them grasping at whatever straws are possible to make their point," said Kim Brace, a consultant who helped the U.S. Election Assistance Commission prepare its 2004 National Voter Registration Act report, which contains the data tables cited by the Voting Section letter to identify the errant states.

The Justice Department would not comment for this report, despite repeated requests.

The 10 states receiving Voting Section purge letters are Iowa, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Carolina, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Texas, Utah and Vermont. Since 2005, the Section has also sued six other states or cities -- Indiana, Maine, New Jersey, Philadelphia and Pulaski County, Arkansas -- where purging voter rolls was part of the resulting settlement. Only Missouri fought a Voting Section suit, winning in federal court, although that decision has been appealed.

Democratic Party officials in Washington and state capitals were not fully aware of the latest Voting Section effort to winnow voter rolls, but Democratic National Committee officials said it would be studied in a 50-state review of election practices before 2008.

The voter roll purges are part of an unprecedented effort at the Justice Department to eliminate "voter fraud," which, as defined by Republican activists, is an assumption that Democratic political operatives or sympathetic political organizations have filed fake voter registrations or encouraged supporters to vote more than once to win elections. These claims have been investigated by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) and academics and found to be without merit. However, the Bush administration's Justice Department, starting under former Attorney General John Ashcroft, has devoted considerable resources to prosecuting "voter fraud." The effort to pressure states to additionally purge voter rolls is a trickle-down effect of these policies.

Voter roll purges, if incorrectly done, can be a factor in determining election outcomes -- particularly in tight races. Unlike most of the "voter fraud" cases cited by GOP activists, where a handful of registrations -- usually in the single digits -- from big voter registration drives are found to be erroneous, purges can affect thousands of voters. In Florida and Missouri in 2000, a total of 100,000 legal voters were incorrectly removed, according to academics and local election officials. In Cleveland in 2004, voter purges were a factor behind long lines and people leaving without voting as poll workers dealt with people who did not know they had been removed from voter lists, various media reported.