Category Archives: voter registration

Must-read NYT: “Trump’s Allies Ramp Up Campaign Targeting Voter Rolls”

NYT:

A network of right-wing activists and allies of Donald J. Trump is quietly challenging thousands of voter registrations in critical presidential battleground states, an all-but-unnoticed effort that could have an impact in a close or contentious election.

Calling themselves election investigators, the activists have pressed local officials in Michigan, Nevada and Georgia to drop voters from the rolls en masse. They have at times targeted Democratic areas, relying on new data programs and novel legal theories to justify their push.

In one Michigan town, more than 100 voters were removed after an activist lobbied officials, citing an obscure state law from the 1950s. In the Detroit suburb of Waterford, a clerk removed 1,000 people from the rolls in response to a similar request. The ousted voters included an active-duty Air Force officer who was wrongly removed and later reinstated.

The purge in Waterford went unnoticed by state election officials until The New York Times discovered it. The Michigan secretary of state’s office has since told the clerk to reinstate the voters, saying the removals did not follow the process laid out in state and federal law, and issued a warning to the state’s 1,600 clerks.

The Michigan activists are part of an expansive web of grass-roots groups that formed after Mr. Trump’s attempt to overturn his defeat in 2020. The groups have made mass voter challenges a top priority this election year, spurred on by a former Trump lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, and True the Vote, a vote-monitoring group with a long history of spreading misinformation.

Their mission, they say, is to maintain accurate voting records and remove voters who have moved to another jurisdiction. Democrats, they claim, use these “excess registrations” to stuff ballot boxes and steal elections.

The theory has no grounding in factInvestigations into voter fraud have found that it is exceedingly rare and that when it occurs, it is typically isolated or even accidental. Election officials say that there is no reason to think that the systems in place for keeping voter lists up-to-date are failing.

The bigger risk, they note, is disenfranchising voters….

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Michael Morse on Voter List Maintenance in BU Law Review with Doug Spencer Response

Michael Morse has written Democracy’s Bureaucracy: The Complicated Case of Voter List Maintenance (B.U. L. Rev.):

This Article calls attention to the development and derailment of a novel cross-governmental bureaucracy for voter registration. It focuses specifically on voter registration lists as the vulnerable backbone of election administration. In short, the constitutional allocation of election authority has left a mobile electorate scattered across fifty different state registration lists. The result is more than a tenth of the electorate likely registered in their former jurisdiction and more than a third not registered at all. The solution, in the vocabulary of election officials, has become “list maintenance”—or, identifying when voters, previously registered at one address, subsequently move or die, often by matching administrative data or coordinating across agencies.

Part I traces the rise of national, but not federal, efforts to coordinate voter registration lists across states. In particular, it offers the first comprehensive account of the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a non-profit corporation run by state chief election officials to facilitate list maintenance by pooling voter registration and other critical voter data, from state driver’s license records to the federal death file. But after a decade of growth ERIC has begun to unravel: nine Republican states have now quit the bipartisan effort. Part II argues that disjointed voter registration lists are an easily exploited democratic vulnerability, partly due to the unintended effects of federal privacy law. It explains how state voter registration lists often lack a unique national identifier, so efforts to simply compare state voter registration lists produce the appearance of fraud where none exists; how more reliable comparison requires supplementing registration lists with confidential administrative data, subordinating one form of legitimacy for another; and how private interest groups, engaging in what this Article terms “vigilante list maintenance,” increasingly use public, but necessarily incomplete, administrative records to further fan partisan narratives about fraud. Finally, Part III offers a series of policy solutions to both fortify list maintenance from attack and promote enfranchisement. It proposes trimming the scope of federal privacy laws to accommodate election administration; flipping the procedural and substantive framework for list maintenance; and expanding the government’s obligation to update, rather than cancel, registrations as voters move. Ultimately, this Article resists the familiar narrative that pits voter access against electoral integrity; a robust national, but not federal, bureaucracy for voter registration can promote both values.

Doug Spencer response, “Electoral Maintenance:” 

According to the U.S. Supreme Court, the right to vote is fundamental because it is preservative of all rights, and yet in many cases legal protections for the right to vote fall short of protections for the other rights that voting is meant to preserve. Redefining the right to vote cannot solve this problem alone. Election administration has at least as much consequence on the right to vote as any particular definition or legal theory. In Democracy’s Bureaucracy, Michael Morse draws our attention to one of the most important yet understudied issues of election administration: voter list maintenance. In addition to his descriptive account of the novel way states have cooperated to perform list maintenance, Morse’s analysis provides a window into three pathologies of America’s election administration more generally. First, the mechanics of elections directly implicate the fundamental right to vote, raising questions of how stringently these procedures should be evaluated by courts. Second, political interference in the administration of elections can flip representative government on its head by insulating elected officials from political accountability and making elections less secure. Finally, several challenges related to the administration of elections are rooted in our electoral system that narrowly links geography and political representation. Relaxing this link may foster a more effective, responsible, and inclusive system of government. 

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“Eligible voters are being swept up in conservative activists’ efforts to purge voter rolls”

CBS News:

Voters eligible to cast ballots are already being swept up in a grassroots effort to purge the nation’s registration rolls ahead of the 2024 presidential election, a CBS News investigation has found. 

Fueled by doubts about the 2020 election, an army of conservative activists is poring over state voter lists, looking for registration errors that can be used to file what are known as voter challenges — questioning the registrations of thousands of Americans.

The undertaking, which includes the involvement of a lawyer tied to former President Trump’s alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election, tends to affect minority or younger voters who may be statistically more likely to vote Democrat, according to local election officials. 

“It’s young voters, it’s people of color, and it’s people that are unhoused,” said Karli Swift, chair of the election board in DeKalb County, Georgia. “Those are generally the types of people that end up in voter challenges.” 

One of those hit with challenges was James McWhorter, who received a letter at the barbershop he manages in the middle of October from DeKalb County informing him that someone had challenged his voter status. The challenger, a woman named Gail Lee, argued McWhorter improperly registered to vote at a commercial address and snapped photos of his barbershop, which is located inside an Atlanta-area Kroger supermarket, as evidence.  

“I didn’t know Gail Lee from a can of paint,” McWhorter told CBS News chief Washington correspondent Major Garrett. 

Since the two had never met, there was no way for Lee to know that McWhorter had registered to vote at the shop’s address in 2008 because he was homeless at the time. A veteran of the Gulf War, he was still trying to get back on his feet after years of struggling with PTSD and alcoholism.

“My friends, my family never knew I was displaced, never knew I was homeless,” McWhorter said, adding he would return to the barbershop after it closed and sleep in his chair and wash his clothes at a24-hour laundromat nearby.

Nevertheless, the letter made it clear that McWhorter’s voter registration could be canceled if he didn’t take action…

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“Alabama Secretary of State unveils new voter roll management system after ERIC withdrawal”

News from the States:

Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen Monday said the state would launch its own database of registered voters after withdrawing from a national one earlier this year.

Allen unveiled the Alabama Voter Integrity Database (AVID) to manage the state’s registered voter rolls, completing a goal to replace the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) system that the Secretary of State withdrew from at the beginning of the year.

“This is going to be an Alabama-based system,” Allen said. “This is not going to be something that we send to some private nonprofit, third party vendor, out of state. It is going to be something that we control, that we have access to at all times.”

Observers said Monday that Allen seemed to simply be creating a newer version of the system he left behind.

“The thing that struck me was that he is trying to recreate the ERIC system,” said Kathy Jones, president of the League of Women Voters of Alabama, referring to Allen. “That system is owned and operated by the secretaries of states of the member states. It is not a third-party nonprofit that he mentioned.”

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“Florida’s elections laws pose challenge for voter registration groups”

Tampa Bay Times:

Florida made it tougher to vote and engage in civic activities following baseless allegations from former President Donald Trump that his re-election in 2020 was stolen from him. In May, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill (SB 7050) to increase fines for violations by voter registration organizations, reduce the time to submit voter registration forms from 14 to 10 days, and bar non-citizens from handling voter registration applications.

The bill prevents groups from retaining personal information about people who sign up to vote and requires them to provide receipts to individuals who register. Third party voter registration groups and nonprofits such as as the League of Women Voters of Florida and the Florida chapter of the NAACP filed two federal lawsuits against the state regarding certain parts of the bill. Last week, a federal judge temporarily blocked DeSantis’ administration from enforcing parts of the legislation.

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“Texas jettisons bipartisan voter list program ERIC”

Politico:

Texas is leaving the Electronic Registration Information Center, becoming the latest — and largest — Republican-led state to leave the bipartisan voting list maintenance program.

The move by the nation’s second-most-populous state, while widely expected for months, is still another serious break for the organization. Just five Republican-leaning states are still members.

The shrinking bipartisan nature of an organization designed to smooth operations of elections is yet another sign of how the normally nonpartisan nature of elections administration is under fresh pressure from conspiracy theories and partisan attacks.

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“North Carolina elections at risk of chaos with Legislature’s proposed overhaul”

NBC News:

North Carolina lawmakers are considering not only a spate of new election restrictions but also a major overhaul of state and county-level election boards, alarming advocates who say some of the proposals could grind the state’s democratic apparatus to a halt.

The changes would restrict same-day registration and mail-in voting. They would also give new powers to the state Legislature, where Republican lawmakers have been emboldened by a new veto-proof majority, along with a new Republican majority on the state Supreme Court.

The three bills, which could be considered in House committee hearings as early as this week, come as North Carolina begins to institute new voter ID rules. The state Supreme Court had previously declared the photo ID requirements unconstitutional, but the new Republican majority reversed that decision earlier this year, allowing the law to be enacted.

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Injunction Sought in Idaho Voter Registration/Identification Case

From the Idaho Capital Sun: “A new Idaho voter registration law that took effect July 1 requires voters to prove their identity and residency when registering to vote,  no matter how they register…. But a Boise-based youth voter advocacy group called Babe Vote announced less than a week after the new law took effect that it was suspending voter registration efforts and filed an injunction in Ada County District Court seeking to halt enforcement of the new law.”

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“Close to 100,000 Voter Registrations Were Challenged in Georgia — Almost All by Just Six Right-Wing Activists”

Pro Publica:

On March 15, 2022, an email appeared in the inbox of the election director of Forsyth County, Georgia, with the subject line “Challenge of Elector’s Eligibility.” A spreadsheet attached to the email identified 13 people allegedly registered to vote at P.O. boxes in Forsyth County, a wealthy Republican suburb north of Atlanta. Georgians are supposed to register at residential addresses, except in special circumstances. “Please consider this my request that a hearing be held to determine these voters’ eligibility to vote,” wrote the challenger, Frank Schneider. …

The March 2022 voter challenges were the first of many from Schneider: As the year progressed, he submitted seven more batches of challenges, each one larger than the one previous, growing from 507 voters in April to nearly 15,800 in October, for a total of over 31,500 challenges.

Vetting Georgia’s voter rolls was once largely the domain of nonpartisan elections officials. But after the 2020 election, a change in the law enabled Schneider and other activists to take on a greater role…. Georgia … is unusual in explicitly allowing citizens unlimited challenges against anyone in their county.

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