by Rich McKay in Reuters:

The center that honors slain U.S. civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. will devote the holiday celebrating his legacy on Monday to voter education and registration, his youngest daughter said in a recent interview.

Bernice King, 56, said she believes her father would have been disappointed with efforts playing out in some U.S. states to purge voter rolls of people who have not recently cast ballots or to impose strict ID requirements.

“You can’t take away someone’s right to vote just because they haven’t decided to exercise it,” said King, who serves as chief executive of the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta. “When you take people off the voter rolls because they haven’t chosen to exercise their rights, to me, is suppression.”

Advocates of revoking the registration of inactive voters say that doing so reduces the risk of people fraudulently casting multiple ballots or voting in multiple places, though studies show that voter fraud is exceptionally rare in the United States.

Political observers note that purges disproportionately affect poor and minority voters, who are more likely to support Democratic candidates.

Read the full article at Reuters.