These Three Lawyers Are Quietly Purging Voter Rolls Across the Country
The Trump administration could soon follow their lead.
excerpts:
...In June 2014, Miller and her four fellow election commissioners received a letter threatening legal action if they did not purge voters from the rolls. The letter came from the American Civil Rights Union (ACRU), a Virginia-based group that has fashioned itself in recent years as a conservative counterpart to the ACLU. The ACRU requested that the commissioners reduce the number of registered voters by the midterm elections that fall because, it claimed, there were more people registered than there were voting-age citizens in the county. The commissioners wanted to fight back, but lacking the funds to hire an attorney, they decided not to respond and waited to see what would happen next.
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...In order to win broader support from Republicans, lawmakers added a requirement that states make a “reasonable effort” to keep the rolls up to date. It is under these list maintenance provisions that Adams and Coates sue counties to purge their voter rolls, with Popper preparing to join that effort. But the cases’ allegation that the counties have too many people on the rolls is not proof of a violation of the law. The NVRA also sought to protect eligible voters from purges by placing restrictions on when and how names could be removed. Election officials can’t take people off the rolls without specific indications that they are no longer eligible, and as a result, voter rolls often lag behind population shifts, particularly in rural areas where the population is decreasing. “Right now we err on the side of letting people’s names linger on the voter rolls rather than pushing them off prematurely,” says Burden, adding, “Registration rolls do have people on them who are not eligible to vote in those places, but that’s by design.”
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http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/07/these-three-lawyers-are-quietly-purging-voter-rolls-across-the-country/
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