Three States Accused of Illegally Purging Voter Lists

By Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet. Posted July 25, 2008.

Election officials in a handful of states appear to be ignoring the federal law dictating the way registered voters may be purged from voter rolls, civil rights attorneys say.

National voting rights groups have contacted officials in Kansas, Michigan and Louisiana in recent weeks because those states appear to be purging registered voters after election officials found duplicate names and birthdays of people on their voter lists and in out-of-state databases, such as driver's license records.

The states are assuming that a more recent driver's license or voter registration in another state indicates that the voter has relocated, meaning the voter registration tied to their prior address is no longer valid. While purging voters who move, die or are imprisoned is a routine part of managing elections, the federal law governing purges -- the National Voter Registration Act -- lays out a multiyear process of trying to contact voters to confirm a change of address before deleting them from voter rolls.

The election attorneys say the NVRA process seeks to err on the side of protecting voting rights and cannot be circumvented by what appears to be a duplicate voter registration.

"The National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) limits the circumstances in which a state may cancel a voter's registration," the Fair Elections Legal Network, a Washington-based voting rights consortium, said in a June 24 letter to Kansas Secretary of State Ron Thornburgh. "The NVRA does not permit cancellation based on a match alone."

"We are looking at several statewide purge issues," said Bradley Heard, a senior attorney with Advancement Project, a voting rights law firm. He said that in Michigan, both data matching and mailings by local officials to verify a voter's registration information were of concern. "We are also looking at a state law that calls for purging a bunch of voter registration records that are otherwise eligible."

But state election officials in these three states disagree with the voting rights groups, offering different explanations that suggest existing state laws or election management practices pre-empt the NVRA.

"We follow the state law that was adopted by our state Legislature," said Jacques Berry, press secretary for Louisiana Secretary of State Jay Dardenne, a Republican. "It supersedes the NVRA."

"There is a section of the NVRA that they (the voting rights lawyers) interpret differently than we do," said Brad Bryant, Kansas deputy secretary of state. "It has been this way for 15 years."

Kelly Chesney, spokeswoman for Michigan Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land, did not reply to requests to comment.

Voting Rights Groups Target Purges

Last week, Project Vote, which is working in two dozen states to register voters in 2008, sent a letter to Dardenne saying his state appeared to be ignoring sections of the NVRA that require that voters be notified by mail over two federal election cycles before being removed. Project Vote's attorney said Louisiana Commissioner of Elections Angie LaPlace was treating apparently duplicate database listings as "cases of suspected fraud or some other irregularity."

Last year, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund sued Louisiana over the purging of registrations of refugees from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Many people who applied for a driver's license in a neighboring state -- to quickly acquire an ID after losing their belongings in the storms -- also were registered to vote without their knowledge, NAACP attorneys said. Those new voter registrations resulted in 21,000 voters being removed from Louisiana voter rolls last August, the group said. While the NAACP suit was dismissed, Project Vote's recent letter suggests the state's voter list maintenance practices have not changed. Project Vote also wrote to the U.S. Department of Justice about the matter, as the agency oversees federal elections in most Southern states as a result of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Louisiana election officials disagreed with Project Vote's assessment, saying the state has its own voter purge process that "supersedes" the federal law. Berry, the secretary of state's spokesman, explained that Louisiana updates its voter roll annually with multiple mailings to voters so the lists are accurate in state elections -- not just federal contests. He said that process is more rigorous than that outlined in the federal NVRA, requiring, for instance, that voters reaffirm their Louisiana voter registrations in person after receiving a final state notice. Berry said the process was approved by the Department of Justice.

"What we find is in the vast majority of cases the voter has moved out of Louisiana and registered in another state, not realizing that they will not automatically cancel their voter registration," he said.

The issue of whether states are heeding the National Voter Registration Act reveals how the implementation of the nation's election laws often turns on a patchwork of local or state policies. In the absence of litigation, whether a state or election jurisdiction is following the NVRA often remains a question of local interpretation.

In Madison County, Mississippi, county supervisors this week rescinded a plan to send a mass mailing to voters, where returned postcards were to be used to purge voters over a two-year period. In this instance, Project Vote notified county officials that its timetable would violate the NVRA, and, according to local news reports, the county's supervisors decided to abandon the plan and instead prepare for a high-turnout election in the fall.

See more stories tagged with: elections, voting, voter registration, voter lists

Steven Rosenfeld is a senior fellow at Alternet 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).

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