Georgia struck almost 100,000 voters from its rolls. In Wisconsin, a state with only 3.3 million registered voters, perhaps 200,000 are set to be purged. Some of them might have moved out of their states or died. But many will unjustifiably fall victim to Republicans' relentless drive to disenfranchise Democratic-leaning voters on the pretext of preventing voter fraud.
A recent Georgia law calls for people who have not voted or contacted election officials for several years to be removed from the rolls. About 100,000 people are subject to the loss of their registration status after three years of inactivity, before state lawmakers lengthened the period to five years. Voting advocates argue that those 100,000 should get the benefit of the lengthened five-year period. State officials disagree and want to continue with their purge. A federal judge ruled that the state may proceed.
The United States does not require people to vote. How often they vote should not affect their access to the ballot box. States can keep their voter rolls clean without disenfranchising people who choose to vote occasionally or who missed a postcard in the mail.
In Wisconsin, a judge ruled that 200,000 voters must be struck because they failed to respond within 30 days to notices that asked if they had moved. These letters did not mention that voters who failed to respond would be purged, because the commission had not planned to remove them. After the commission sent its letters, a conservative activist group concocted a reading of state law that would require the commission to move to immediate purges, and a state judge ordered quick removal.
The records on which the state election commission relied to target these 200,000 people were imperfect. Despite the tight turnaround period, 2,300 said they still live at the same address in a state in which a margin of 23,000 swung its electoral votes to Donald Trump. Thousands more no doubt failed to respond because the notice got overlooked in the shuffle of their lives.
It should not be up to Americans, on penalty of disenfranchisement, to help governments with their record-keeping. Officials should strive to make voting easier, not harder. States should build automatic voter-registration systems that update voter rolls whenever people interact with state agencies, and they should impose no arbitrary time limits on those registrations.
