Republican Legislation Would Remove Eligible Voters from the Rolls

[Nevilledog]

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Democracy Docket
@DemocracyDocket
🚨ALERT: An investigation by @bpolitics found that there are over 50 GOP legislative proposals in statehouses that would aggressively purge voters and mistakenly remove thousands of eligible voters from the rolls.

Republican Legislation Would Remove Eligible Voters from the Rolls
Read the report here.
democracydocket.com
12:56 PM · Apr 30, 2021

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Republican proposals to purge voters from the rolls could disenfranchise tens of thousands of voters across the country, according to a new investigation by Bloomberg News. State legislatures are considering over 50 bills that would aggressively remove voters from the rolls, in furtherance of Republican conspiracies of election fraud and their promotion of the Big Lie. Such legislation culls the rolls in a myriad of ways, including checking rolls against death, criminal, DMV and immigration records. But these other official records are not meant to be used for election administration, and are structured in ways that would incorrectly disenfranchise eligible voters who are most often poor or people of color.

Mistakes are common with these kinds of purges: in Arkansas, more than 7,000 people were incorrectly listed as felons in 2016, and Texas’ drivers licence data incorrectly marked 25,000 people as non-citizens in 2019. Wisconsin mistakenly marked 46,000 voters as having moved addresses in 2017. Eligible voters who find they have been removed from the rolls are asked to cast a provisional ballot on Election Day, which has a lower chance of being counted in the final tally. Election vote margins, especially in swing states, are consistently small, and this excessive and inaccurate purging could change the results of the next election in Republicans’ favor.

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Original article
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-30/gop-risks-purging-eligible-voters-in-drive-to-cull-states-rolls?sref=TWaMA5s7

Republican lawmakers across the country are proposing an aggressive culling of voter rolls by checking names against other government databases that may be flawed, meaning eligible voters could be swept out and blocked from voting.

Nationally, at least 50 bills have been proposed that would trim voter rolls more vigorously than in previous legislative sessions, and several have already been signed into law, spurred by record turnout in the 2020 election and allegations, led by former President Donald Trump, that the outcome was somehow rigged.

GOP-led state legislatures in Utah, Iowa, Texas and elsewhere want local officials to check voter names against other official sources, including death records, criminal records, lists from state motor vehicle departments and federal immigration records, and remove questionable names.

Yet those records are not structured for identifying voters and when they have been used too broadly to cull rolls in the past, tens of thousands of people were put at risk of being disenfranchised, many of them poor and people of color.

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[Phoenix61]

1. The only reason someone should be removed is if they haven't

voted in some predetermined time frame based on presidential elections. It’d be easy to implement and easy for people to understand.

[Mad_Machine76]

2. Why?

I don't think there's really any good reason for people to be purged from voting rolls other than death. What's the justification for voter purges?

[Phoenix61]

3. It's about good data management.

Using files created by other agencies to purge voters from the voter database will result in bad matches and legit voters being purged. If it’s based on voting that couldn’t happen.