This Tuesday the Brennan Center for Justice released a report on voter purging, the process by which states remove ineligible voters from the rolls. Brennan found that the purging process is secretive, prone to error, and vulnerable to manipulation. Voters are rarely informed that they are being removed from the rolls, and often states rely on poor matching criteria to determine if a voter is eligible. Some of the more dramatic examples include Florida's selective purge in 2000 of "suspected felons," which included a great deal of African Americans but mostly excluded Latinos, or the use of a matching system that purged voters whose names contained 80 percent of the letters in the names of people with criminal convictions. Myrna Perez, the author of the report, spoke with TAP about how the purging works and what can be done about making sure eligible voters get their vote counted.
Adam Serwer: How does the voter purge process work?
Myrna Perez: It differs from state to state, and it depends what kind of purge we're talking about. People can be purged for a number of reasons; they can be purged because someone believes they have died, or they have moved, or they have a criminal conviction, or they have a duplicate registration, or they've been adjudicated incapacitated for the purposes of voting. The process for each is different, but generally what happens is officials look at a list of people who are ineligible for one of those reasons and compare the list of persons who are ineligible to people who are currently registered. When they identify a person that has matched, they take whatever next steps are appropriate, and there are legally required steps depending upon what grounds of purge they are being investigated for, and then they remove them.
Serwer: Is it done all at once, or is it done by category?
Perez: There's multiple kinds. … I like to talk about purges being systematic or organized versus routine. A systematic or an organized purge would be when a state will decide, "OK, this is the day where we are removing all people who are deceased."
But there are also those instances in which someone will come in with a death certificate of their mother and say, my mother passed away last night, please remove her from the rolls. So there are purges that are large scale and systematic, and there are purges that are routine that happen and are specific to an individualized registrant.
Serwer: Which voters are more likely to be purged wrongfully, and which states are the most reckless in doing so?
Perez: That is not a question I could answer at this point. Because one of the problems with purges is that they happen behind closed doors, and you don't find out about it until it's too late. And you can have a bad purge on the basis of people who thought they were disenfranchising criminal convictions, for example, what happened in Florida, or you can have a bad purge because someone relied on a faulty Social Security administration list of people who had died. So I can't tell you which of these grounds are most erroneous, but I can tell you that across the board, in many states and even in localities within states, the practices that they use are not uniform, and they're not consistent, and they rarely have enough protections to be confident that the right people are being removed and the correct people are staying on the rolls.
As far as states that we're watching, one of the problems with purges is that a bad purge can happen anywhere, at any time. In Mississippi, a week before the presidential primary, a local election official purged 10,000 people from her home computer. We're monitoring the whole country to the best that we can; we're paying close attention to states where we know there's been bad purges recently. We're going to be watching, Florida, we're going to be checking out Georgia and Mississippi, and there are other states where there are reports surfacing that there might be purges, and certain kinds of caging-related challenges, which we would classify as a type of purge, such as Michigan and Ohio.
Serwer: Could you describe the caging process?
Perez: Caging is a category of purge, and what that means is that a locality or a state will send out a mass mailer, usually a postcard or a simple piece of paper, and it's sent out to a large group of people. All of the mailings that are returned as undelivered get put on a specific kind of list. The term comes from, or we believe that it comes from, the old cages that the post offices used to have for putting return mail in them. Then people take the lists of the mail that was returned as undeliverable, and come Election Day, those people are not able to cast a regular ballot. Those persons may be challenged at the polls, they may be put on a removal list. The main thrust of the report with respect to this is that you cannot rely on undelivered mail as an indicator that someone has moved. There are a whole host of reasons why mail may be returned as undelivered, and because we're talking about people's fundamental right to vote, we need evidence greater than that; that alone is not sufficient for making a determination on a person's eligibility or a person's residency.
Serwer: What can be done about preventing the elimination of eligible voters from the rolls?
Perez: There's a lot that can be done, there's a lot in the report about what election officials should focus on -- they can be categorized into transparency, uniform and consistent standards, and protections for voters. For example, two weeks before a purge, state officials can announce that there is going to be a purge happening, so voters should know that they should check their registration status a day after, to see if they were erroneously purged.
Election officials should also have consistent and robust standards for ensuring that a particular voter is the same person identified on a list of people to be purged. Far too frequently, local officials only compare a few pieces of information before making a determination that someone is ineligible has matched someone on a registration list. On Election Day, we should have robust and thorough mechanisms that protect voters who have been erroneously purged by allowing them to cast a provisional ballot that will be counted.
On a long-term basis, we as a country should be thinking about universal voter registration, and we should pass legislation to that effect. That is where the government keeps track of us for taxes and parking tickets, and they make sure eligible citizens and only eligible citizens are on the voter rolls.
Serwer: What can voters who may show up and be told they're not on the rolls do to make sure that their right to vote is respected?
Perez: Well the first thing that I like to tell voters to do, is if possible before the election try to check on your registration status. [In] some states it's still possible for you to register if you're not on the rolls. And if you've been erroneously purged, it might be possible for you to get corrected in advance, especially if you call and make a fuss beforehand.
If a voter shows up on Election Day and is not on the rolls, it is imperative that they insist on being given a provisional ballot. By law, voters who arrive and are not on the registration list should be given a provisional ballot, and they should also be given a mechanism to make sure that ballot is counted. [Voters] should ask for that mechanism, and in some states it's a phone number, or other places have other ways you can look and see, but poll workers are supposed to tell voters, this is how you go about getting your ballot counted, and this is how you make sure it was counted, and voters should demand that.
If voters still have a problem, or it's still not being resolved, voters should call the election-protection hotline: 866-OUR-VOTE.
Serwer: Could you talk a little more about provisional ballots?
Perez: [With provisional ballots] there needs to be another step, and the step is different in every state, and it's different for whatever the reason is. Sometimes people cast provisional ballots because they've changed addresses, but as long as they swear that this is their new address that ballot is supposed to be counted. Other times, [a voter] might cast a provisional ballot because they don't have the right kind of identification; they are required to show that identification within a certain period of time.
So there are different things that people need to do to make sure that their provisional ballot is actually counted as a valid ballot, and far too frequently poll workers don't tell voters that. They give them a provisional ballot, kind of like a placebo to shut them up and get them out of their way, and the voter never knows what to do to make sure that ballot gets counted in the end. That's why it's so important for a voter to actually check to make sure their ballot was counted, and to follow up with that. While they may not be able to do anything with that particular election with respect to that, they can at least do things after the election to make sure they're eligible for next time.
