I can assume current reasons, but where did it historically come from to strike voters from voting lists? Who cares if they didn’t vote recently. People should just be able to vote…
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The “theory” is that they are removing those people not entitled to vote, so removing dead voters, or ones not US citizens, or ones who have moved out of the state. The reality of course is it is an attempt to gerrymander the elections, which can be seen as attempts by one party to remove people from the voting lists was put into reverse when the people they were removing turned out to be mainly from their party rather than the opposition.
It’s one of the ways to prevent people from voting multiple times and also to clear the voter rolls of people who have moved away and not registered in their new address, died, or been incarcerated (and maybe not eligible to vote). Someone who has not voted in the last two presidential elections, which are the elections that most people vote in if not any other election, they may no longer be living in the area, or alive, or freely among the public. There are other ways that registrars get this information, such as returned mail, vital statistics, or DMV reports, but they are imperfect. So it’s like layering many pieces of Swiss cheese over one another to prevent an ineligible voter from getting through.
The best way to keep your registration active is to vote every election you can and keep your address current.
In theory:
The point is to deregister people who have either moved out of the area or have died. There’s not a good system in place to automatically update the system for this, especially in the case of people who move.
So some jurisdictions adopt a position that if you haven’t voted in your district for a “long” time then that’s reasonable evidence you have probably moved house and are voting elsewhere, which isn’t all that unreasonable, except sometimes the “long time” can mean people who sit out an election cycle for some reason or another are at risk of having their names removed, and they’ll find out when they try to vote and either be unable to vote or have to jump through a bunch of hoops.
Some of the controversy is that in practice some of these purges are done in ways and at times that make it look like the intent is less about conforming the registration to current residents and more about purging voters that are statistically less likely to support the people doing the purging, with many of the voters only finding out at the polling station.
Let’s say you live in State B. Up until two years ago, you lived in and were able to vote in State A. You recently registered to vote as a Citizen of State B. You are now registered to vote as a citizen of both States. State A sends you a mail-in ballot for their elections, and State B send you a notification of where you can go vote in-person. You have two opportunities to vote potentially affecting the outcome of an election that no longer affects you, whereas the one for State B does. Would you want somebody who does not live in your state any longer to have a say in how things are done there? This is why we should clean voter rolls out on a more regular basis. Plus people also die between elections, those names and votes should be cleaned from the list to make maintenance easier for those who do it.
Technically, purging voter lists isn’t inherently bad and is something every state will need to do from time to time. I’m older than the average redditor and have registered to vote in multiple states over the years, because I’ve moved a lot. There is no problem with a state that I haven’t lived in for 20 years getting rid of my voter registration.
Between that and people passing away over time, it makes sense for states to clean up their voter lists every once in a while. Reasonable people can agree we don’t need an active voter list of every resident that has ever lived since the founding of each state.
The controversy comes from *when* states do it. If they’re acting in good faith, they would do this clean up months if not years before major elections. No bureaucracy is perfect, and occasional false positives are inevitable (meaning to purge 95 year old deceased Jack Smith but accidentally purging 22 year old Jack Smith, etc). So, these people need time to get their voter registration fixed when this happens. Governments acting in good faith would want to make sure *no voters are disenfranchised from voting*.
People who have died do not belong on the voter rolls.
People who have moved away don’t belong on the voter rolls here; they should register in their new locations.
There are valid reasons to purge inactive voters.
Unfortunately, some areas are notorious for overly aggressive or inaccurate purges that infringe on citizens’ right to vote.
It needs to be purged periodically. People move out of state or pass away or change their address so the roster needs to be kept current. Usually this is done by updating a drivers license but not every person has one. Cleaning up the voters list is standard operating procedure.
The big change in what you’re seeing recently is when it’s happening. Usually this is done after an election not 2 to 3 months before the next one. If you purge 600,000 voters, how are they informed? How is the administration equipped to deal with registering 600,000 applications in a short period of time? If you do the purge at the end of an election cycle there’s 2+ years to get it sorted out. Not a handful of weeks.
It’s a shitty tactic that is taking something normal and weaponize it.
An election’s legitimacy partially comes from whether the electorate believes the results are actually reflective of the will of the people. Part of that is confidence that everyone who voted in an election is eligible to vote in that election. This is why we have registration in the first place, so that people can’t “vote early and vote often”. But if we are going to keep a lost of people eligible to vote, we have to make sure that list is accurate. There are legitimate reasons to remove people from that list, chief among which would be the fact that they move to a different jurisdiction, and will be voting there. There may be process within a state to transfer registrations between cities, but there really isn’t anything in place for state to state moves. Further, you don’t want dead people on your list for obvious reasons. Again, there might be ways to automatically get people removed from voter registries if they die where they vote, but what about if they die on vacation? Removing people from voter registries if they haven’t voted for several election cycles accounts for situations like these. It isn’t perfect, but what is in politics?
Honestly, I don’t know why we don’t have to renew our voter registration more often. Seems like an easy way to keep the register current. Just have annual registration due by the day before the state primary.
doing it immediately before a general election is 100% tactical, and should be understood as fuckery.
Doing so, with measures to prevent false-positives and bad-faith activity, is practical.
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