Last week, I wrote about controversial voter ID laws that aim to disenfranchise minorities. However, there is a simpler, less familiar way to disenfranchise voters: the purge. Not the trilogy of horror, action, and most recently, politically allegorical movies, but the purge of potential voters from voter rolls. At the center of the voter purge battle is Ohio, a key swing state that the winning presidential candidate has won in the last ten elections. Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted is currently being sued for illegally removing voters from the rolls. Under the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, a state can only remove names from the voter rolls if one dies, moves out of the state, or requests to be removed from the roll. Over the past five years, around 2 million names have been removed from the voter rolls, with 1.2 million of these purges being called into question.

Under an Ohio law that was passed after the Shelby County v. Holder Supreme Court decision that gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013, if a voter doesn’t vote in an election, the state will send the voter a letter asking if the voter’s address is still current. If the person doesn’t reply, the voter is listed as “inactive,” and if the voter doesn’t vote in the next two elections, they are automatically purged from the rolls. This means that voters can be purged after six years of not voting. This exploits citizens who voted in 2008, the year President Obama was elected, but haven’t voted since. And considering that turnout is always lower in midterm elections and elections of a presidential incumbent for his/her party, this law intentionally targets Democrats. And not just any Democrat, but research into the voting purges show that once again, minorities are being disproportionately removed from voter rolls. A Reuters analysis of the purge found that voters living in Democratic-leaning neighborhoods, especially those with high minority populations, were twice as likely to be removed from voter rolls than those living in Republican-leaning neighborhoods. Over 144,000 voters have been purged since 2012, and that’s just in the three largest counties of Ohio.

A similar instance of questionable voter purges happened in Georgia, in the small county of Sparta. According to an investigation by the New York Times, in 2015, 187 black Sparta citizens had been summoned to appear in person in order to prove their residency; if not, they would be purged from voter rolls. Although 187 seems like a small number, they made up about one fifth of the city’s registered voters, and 53 of them ended up being struck from voter rolls, roughly one out of every twenty voters. That year, William Evans, Jr., the black incumbent mayor of Sparta, lost his reelection race to R. Allen Haywood, a white candidate, by less than 100 votes (interestingly enough, Haywood was revealed to ineligible for office because he was convicted of a felony). On a statewide level, the state of Georgia is currently being sued for purging voters, with the lawsuit claiming that over 370,000 registered voters were purged between 2012 and 2014 for failing to vote.

Although this may seem like a partisan issue, as the voter ID laws certainly are, Democrats have seen their fair share of voter purge allegations. During the Democratic New York primary between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, over 126,000 voters were accidentally purged from voter rolls in Brooklyn, Sanders’ home borough, leading many to cry foul play. New York also has some of the strictest voting laws, with no same day registration or early voting. In addition, New Yorkers have to change their party affiliation over 190 days before the primary in order to vote, locking out many independent voters, who make up 27% of the electorate in New York. As a result of the mistaken purge and the strict voting laws, New York had the second lowest turnout in the nation, with only 19.7 percent of eligible citizens voting in the primaries.

Voter purges, when done right, can help keep records accurate by removing people who have died, moved, or have otherwise become ineligible to vote; however, far too many purges have been manipulated for electoral gain and have had dire consequences, the most severe being the 2000 election. Enter Florida, a crucial swing state and one of the eight states at the time to permanently disenfranchise ex-felons. Before the election, a list of 58,000 felons were purged from voter registration lists. There were multiple problems with this. One, there is no good reason for disenfranchising ex-felons (which will be the topic of my next article); two, 44 percent of voters on the list were black, when only 11 percent of Florida's population was black, leading to calls of racial discrimination; and finally, the list was full of errors and ultimately took voting rights away from 12,000 eligible voters, a disproportionate number of them African American. Florida was subject to many other controversies about its voting system that year and was ultimately subjected to a recount, where George W. Bush ultimately beat Al Gore by 537 votes and secured the presidency. The incorrect purge of 12,000 voters was 22 times larger than the margin of victory. Assuming that 44 percent of the aforementioned voters were black, and based on exit poll data that shows that Gore won 90 percent of the black vote, without the purge, Gore would have gained over 4,700 votes, over nine times Bush's margin of victory.

So let's "Keep America Great," as "The Purge: Election Year" promotes. However, unlike what the movie says, the way to do that is to purge less, not more.

This was part two of three in a series of articles on voter disenfranchisement. Check out part one here on voter ID laws, and come back next week for the final article on felon voting rights!