Voting rights advocates criticize La. purges

20th August 2018   ·   0 Comments

By Meghan Holmes
Contributing Writer

In July 2018, the Brennan Center for Justice released a report analyzing voter purging across the country showing that between 2014 and 2016 officials removed more than 16 million people from voting rolls nationwide. That’s four million more names than states removed between 2006 and 2008 (the last time frame analyzed).

The center attributes this increase in purging to an increase in the use of sometimes flawed data matching software across states to remove names, as well as conservative activist groups lobbying for, and sometimes suing to get, more purges and tougher legislation to protect against potential non-citizen voters.

Louisiana’s last voter purge was in 2017, a routine post-election clean up that resulted in 55,000 names removed from an inactive voter list of more than 100,000. (There are some three million registered voters in total in the state).

Voters become inactive after they don’t vote in a federal election and, “we don’t have a way to reach them by mail or phone,” says Louisiana secretary of state’s spokeswoman Meg Casper Sunstrom. “In other words, we can’t verify they are living where they are registered to vote. As soon as they participate and vote, they can be removed from the inactive list.”

Some voting rights advocates have criticized past purges in Louisiana, particularly a post-Katrina purge that resulted in a federal lawsuit against the state in 2007. Many displaced people registered for driver’s licenses and acquired temporary residences in other states, and data matching systems subsequently flagged their names as potential “double voters” – people registered to vote in multiple states. Millions of people are registered in two places, and research shows that since 2000, around 30 cases of voter fraud have been validated in the United States.

Despite little to no evidence of illegal voting across the country, the Trump Administration has aggressively pursued efforts to curtail even the possibility of fraud – creating a now defunct national voter fraud task force and asking states to turn over detailed information on individual voters. Then, Louisiana secretary of state Tom Schedler declined the task force’s request, offering only the same (less extensive) data available for purchase to political candidates online.

Trump’s task force also asked states for information about how and when they purge voters, concerning the Brennan Center and other advocates. On August 7, the center filed a suit demanding that the administration release documents related to requests the department of justice made to states, seeking more information on how the federal government might attempt to encourage further purging efforts.

Some voter purges are legitimate, like when an individual dies, or asks to be removed from the rolls. Every month, parish officials send the state department notices of deaths, and a software system called ERIC (Electronic Registration Information Center) aggregates information from the DMV, the postal service and other sources, and alerts the state to voters who have potentially moved. Once a voter is flagged, and fails to contact state officials, they become inactive. Currently, purges of the inactive voter list happen around every two years, and remove tens of thousands of voters each time.

Before purging, the state “lists names in the newspaper, and people can also see that they’re inactive when they check their registration online,” says Casper Sunstrom. “We have been participating in ERIC for several years now, and we are seeing more voter cancellations as people move state to state and their capabilities have advanced.”

Understanding the capabilities, and potential flaws, in data matching systems is pivotal in preventing voters from being inaccurately purged. More than half the states in the country (not including Louisiana) use a system called Crosscheck, which consistently flags legitimate voters. A 2017 Stanford study found that, if applied nationwide, “Crosscheck would impede 300 legal voters for each double vote” and that “there is almost no chance double votes could impact the outcome of a national election.”

Crosscheck flags voters using their first name, last name and birth date. This system makes people of color inherently more vulnerable, because African- American, Asian American and Latino people are more likely than white people to have one of the most 100 common last names in the country, and therefore be flagged by the system. Low-income people are also disproportionately impacted during purges, because notices from the state are less likely to be delivered as individuals frequently move. Some states allow for voters to be purged as soon as they are flagged, without notice or a waiting period, which the Brennan Center argues is in violation of federal law.

Louisiana’s system, ERIC, is a newer data matching system, in part funded by the Pew Charitable Trust. Twenty-four states participate, and they all give notice to flagged voters and follow a waiting period before purging. State officials report largely positive experiences with this system, but many also continue to use Crosscheck, and there is little data to indicate what impact ERIC might be having on purging.

The Brennan Center also looked at the impact of the Supreme Court’s Shelby County v. Holder decision in 2013 which ended federal preclearance, a Voting Rights Act provision enacted to apply additional scrutiny to legislation in places with a history of racial discrimination. Purge rates were higher in these places, with a median rate of 9.5 percent as opposed to 7.5 percent in non-covered jurisdictions. More than two million fewer voters would have been purged in these places if removal rates had aligned with the rest of the country. Research also noted that provisional ballots had a statistically significant relationship to purge rates in jurisdictions formerly covered under preclearance, meaning that the number of people who showed up to vote but were unable to do so increased along with an increase in purging.

Casper Sunstrom says the state has no plans to purge any voters or change any voting policies before the next federal election.

The Edwards administration has increased voting access in some ways, recently implementing legislation that gives felons the right to vote five years after their release. Nonetheless, advocates worry that pressure from conservative groups and the Trump Administration could lead to more voter purging and effective voter suppression.

This article originally published in the August 20, 2018 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.