The Brennan Center for Justice published a 34-page must read report titled, Purges: A Growing Threat To The Right To Vote. The report was co-written by four expert authors from the Brennan Center including Jonathan Brater, Kevin Morris, Myrna Pérez, and Christopher Deluzio. The report takes an inside look at how democratic rights are trampled on in the U.S. In effect, the system is denying them their right to vote and make decisions for their country and also gives reasons of purges and why not solutions to overcome the issues.
The new book tries to look at what happens when voters head to the polls and end up not voting due to the absence of their names on the voter’s registration list. It goes through a long and detailed analysis comparing the voter purge rate of recent to that of past years. Their data clearly shows that the voter purge rate has increased over time.
The introductory section of the new report covers how voters go to the poll with the full intention of having their opinion respected but end up disgruntled to find out their names have been taken off the system for one reason or another. According to that introduction:
We found that between 2014 and 2016, states removed almost 16 million voters from the rolls, and every state in the country can and should do more to protect voters from improper purges.2 Almost 4 million more names were purged from the rolls between 2014 and 2016 than between 2006 and 2008.3 This growth in the number of removed voters represented an increase of 33 percent — far outstripping growth in both total registered voters (18 percent) and total population (6 percent).
The various authors used different methods to come up with different statistics on number of voters who are not able to vote knowing that their names are eradicated from the system. The total number of 16 million citizens who could not vote just within two years that is 2014 to 2016 could be as a result of death, change of residence, criminal conviction and many others. But there are worrying signs that there is abuse of rights going on:
Most disturbingly, our research suggests great cause for concern that the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder (which ended federal “preclearance,” a Voting Rights Act provision that was enacted to apply extra scrutiny to jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination) has had a profound and negative impact:
For the two election cycles between 2012 and 2016, jurisdictions no longer subject to federal preclearance had purge rates significantly higher than jurisdictions that did not have it in 2013. The Brennan Center calculates that 2 million fewer voters would have been purged over those four years if jurisdictions previously subject to federal preclearance had purged at the same rate as those jurisdictions not subject to that provision in 2013.
The voter purge rate is so high today that there is a true risk to democracy. As detailed in page 6 of the book, new institutions like the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck program (Crosscheck) and Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) are spreading this harm. The report also offers solutions to the crisis, proposing that voter rolls should be kept highly accurate and ensuring voters have mechanisms to protect them from wrongful wrong purges.
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