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1 Jonathan Brater, Voter Purges: The Risks in 2018 1 (2018)

handle is hein.brennan/votepug0001 and id is 1 raw text is: BRENNAN CENTER FOR JUSTICE at New York Univemiy School ofLaw VOTER PURGES: THE RISKS IN 2018 by Jonathan Brater Introduction Voter purges - the often controversial practice of removing voters from registration lists in or- der to keep them up to date - are poised to be one of the biggest threats to the ballot in 2018. Activist groups and some state officials have mounted alarming campaigns to purge voters without adequate safeguards. If successful, these efforts could lead to a massive number of eligi- ble, registered voters losing their right to cast a ballot this fall. Properly done, efforts to clean up voter rolls are important for election integrity and efficiency. Done carelessly or hastily, such efforts are prone to error, the effects of which are borne by vot- ers who may show up to vote only to find their names missing from the list. Many of the voter purge efforts examined by the Brennan Center for Justice here not only risk disenfranchisement, but also run afoul of federal legal requirements. These efforts point to a decentralized, hard-to-trace mode of voter suppression - one that is perhaps less sweeping than voter ID, proof-of-citizenship, and similar legislation enacted by 23 states over the last de- cade. But the effect of voter purges can be equal- ly devastating. One example? In 2016, Arkansas' secretary of state sent county clerks the names of more than 50,000 people who were supposedly ineligible to vote because of felony convictions. Those county clerks began to remove voters without any notice. The state later discovered the purge list was riddled with errors: It included at least 4,000 people who did not have felony convic- tions.' And among those on the list who once had a disqualifying conviction, up to 60 percent of those individuals were Americans who were eligible to vote because they had their voting rights restored back to them.2 Counties scrambled to fix the mistakes right be- fore a school board race and weeks before the presidential election, but clerks admitted they VOTER PURGES: THE RISKS IN 2018

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