The Wrongfully Purged: Who Votes After Their Registration is Cancelled?

• In Event: Billboards, Ballot Boxes and Voting Booths

Abstract

Over the past few years, the role of voter list maintenance and voter purges have received increase attention from journalists, voters, and increasingly scholars as well. Much of the analysis to date, however, has relied on highly aggregated counts of voters removed from sources such as the EAVS. Such highly aggregated data makes identifying wrongful purges difficult, but existing research suggests that voter list maintenance is on the rise in parts of the United States formerly covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act (Brater et al. 2018).
This paper proposes a new way of understanding who is most as risk of being “wrongfully” purged – that is to say, votes who are removed from the registered voter list despite neither dying nor moving. This project is made possible using lower-level data in North Carolina. By comparing snapshots of the registered voter file from 2012 and 2016 (and 2014 and 2016), I identify the individuals who have been purged. North Carolina also makes detailed provisional ballot data available, which identifies who cast these ballots, where they were cast, and whether they were ultimately counted. These two data sources, taken together, allow me to identify voters who have been purged but subsequently tried to cast a ballot. It also allows me to identify whose provisional ballots are accepted after being purged, and whose are rejected. Preliminary analysis suggests that voters of color are more likely to try to cast a provisional ballot after being purged and are less likely to have their provisional ballots counted. This project intends to advance our understanding of whose access to the ballot box is most at risk to problematic voter list maintenance.

Author

• Kevin Thomas Morris, Brennan Center for Justice