What are Thousands of Ineligible Voters Doing On the Rolls?

What are thousands of ineligible voters doing on the rolls?

When a key swing state announced a month before the 2024 presidential election that it had stripped 750,000 people from its list of registered voters in less than two years, alarm abounded.

North Carolina’s announcement had conspicuous timing, but other than that, it should have been uncontroversial.

Election officials’ otherwise mundane task of removing ineligible voters from their voter rolls has, however, become mired in partisan conflict and legal fights, and it is attracting growing attention as Election Day nears.

Often described as “voter list maintenance,” removing people who have moved, died, received certain criminal convictions, or become mentally incapacitated is not only normal but also required by federal and state laws.

Discord arises when election hawks notice flaws in the process of managing voter rolls and seek solutions but are swiftly met with pushback from people who say they are worried about disenfranchisement.

These disputes frequently fall along party lines. Republicans tend to want more guardrails built into the process, while Democrats want less, a divide that has invited speculation about the opposing party’s motive. Republicans face accusations that they want to prevent people from voting, while Democrats face claims that they are unconcerned with fraud and want everyone, including noncitizens, to vote.

David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research and a former Department of Justice attorney, acknowledged the differing perspectives but rejected the idea that either side had malicious intentions.

“There’s often the rhetoric that Democrats want noncitizens on the list, the Republicans want to take eligible citizens off the list. That is not a real thing in either way,” Becker told the Washington Examiner. “There’s not a Republican election official out there that wants to take an eligible voter off the list … and there is not a Democratic election official out there that wants an ineligible person on the list. We just have to first accept those two realities.”

Prominent voices on the Left, such as attorney Marc Elias and voting rights activist Stacey Abrams, and on the Right, such as former President Donald Trump and billionaire X owner Elon Musk, would disagree with Becker.

The purging process

States vary in how they handle their voter rolls, but all are required to keep a public statewide list of registered voters and have a process in place to keep them clean. This typically involves election officials taking the list and cross-checking it against a variety of other statewide, and sometimes federal, databases and removing registered voters when necessary.

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, an elected Republican, told the Washington Examiner many people refer to this as “purging” voter rolls, but his view is that Democrats “intentionally” use that term because it is “ominous sounding.”

LaRose pointed to the Soviet-era “Great Purge” executions and noted, “There’s a horror movie called The Purge. When you talk about taking bad data out of the voter rolls and keeping voter rolls up to date, it’s not quite as outrageous.”

In the blue state of California, for example, county election officials are responsible for scrubbing their voter rolls. Finding out how they do this requires examining county-level communication from election officials.

A document published by Ventura County advertises that it conducts registration checks “daily, weekly, and monthly.” The county says it uses databases from the California departments of motor vehicles, public health, and corrections. If there is no record of the registrant in a database, the person must show an ID at the polls, the Ventura County document says.

Unlike California, Georgia has, at the state level, communicated in strings of easily accessible statements information about how it cross-checks its voter registration list against both state and federal databases.

As far as citizenship checks, many states, but not all, primarily use their departments of motor vehicles for that since those departments keep a record of which identification holders have citizenship. Some states go beyond this.

LaRose told the Washington Examiner his office starts with that but then uses other means, including the Department of Homeland Security’s finicky immigration database. —>LOTS MORE HERE

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