Republican Party voter purges put voting rights under attack
Ever since the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder ruling, which eroded the Voting Rights Act, Republican-led states and politicians have tried to make it harder for people of color to vote.
This year, as the crucial presidential election arrived, the GOP and Republican National Committee (RNC) were strategic in chipping away at voter rolls in several states. They filed lawsuits nationwide, pushed for the enforcement of stricter voting regulations, and made attempts to oversee elections.
By midday on Election Day, November 5, the NAACP reported that it had received more than 800 reports of questionable incidents at polling locations in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and Texas through its Voter Protection Hub program.
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“We heard a little bit of everything,” Phaedra Jackson, the NAACP’s vice president of unit advocacy and effectiveness, told the AmNews: “In some states, we heard people who had been voting previously for many years, they go to vote and they are not being found on the rolls; they are saying that they are not an eligible voter. And folks are facing difficulties getting provisional ballots, so we are working on making sure folks are at least able to get provisional ballots.
“We have had folks who were given incorrect ballots. Some folks were given ballots that were only federal, and they should have been able to vote in some of their local elections too and so we have been tracking that. Then we have a few places where some of the polling systems have either been down or delayed, leading to extended wait times for folks to be able to vote.”
Here are a few examples of states where attempts were made to reduce the voting rolls.
Virginia
Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Virginia could remove 1,600 registered voters from its rolls based on an order by Governor Glenn Youngkin.
The governor had called for the purging of voters identified as noncitizens through DMV cross-checks. People who had been identified by the DMV were given a 14-day window to prove their U.S. citizenship, or they would be classified as non-citizens trying to vote fraudulently.
The state’s purge program “relies on out-of-date information provided to the Department of Motor Vehicles, and perhaps other sources, stretching back 20 years,” claimed the Virginia Coalition for Immigrant Rights (VACIR) and League of Women Voters of
Virginia in a court challenge to Youngkin’s order. They complained that Youngkin’s order violated the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA).
“The state knows or should know that countless individuals who obtained driver’s licenses while legal permanent residents have become naturalized citizens, many even registering to vote during naturalization ceremonies. But defendants make no effort to conduct any individualized analysis. Instead, they have classified any person who has ever indicated they were a noncitizen as presumptively ineligible to vote unless they receive and respond to a state missive within 14 days and provide more evidence of their citizenship.”
“This emergency action of the Supreme Court continues to sow huge confusion for the Virginia electorate,” noted Stephanie Owens of the NAACP’s Election Protection group in a press conference following the Supreme Court’s decision.
“But not just Virginia, for states across the nation who have their eyes on these actions,” Owens continued: “These ongoing voter suppression lawsuits create confusion, especially with these last-minute changes to voting laws. And they… more often than not impact marginalized groups like African Americans and Hispanics, even people with disabilities who struggle to meet many of these new requirements… These shifts put strains on local election offices, causing delays and mistakes and reduced services.”
North Carolina
RNC and GOP officials attempted a similar voter purge in North Carolina. In a lawsuit against the North Carolina State Board of Elections (NCSBE), the RNC alleged that the NCSBE had allowed 225,000 people to register to vote without guaranteeing they were U.S. citizens.
The RNC wanted those names purged from North Carolina’s voting rolls, but the state countered that any invalid entries should be carefully scrutinized rather than indiscriminately deleted, risking the disenfranchisement of legitimate voters.
Just before ballots were cast on November 5, the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the RNC lawsuit.
Georgia
In Georgia, Gov. Brian Kemp signed Senate Bill 189 permitting residents to challenge the citizenship status of an unlimited number of their fellow citizens. The challenger simply had to state that they did not believe the challenge actually lived in the area.
The ACLU of Georgia said the law “lowers the barrier for making biased and baseless voter challenges around the state, creates confusion for unhoused voters, makes it more difficult for county elections boards to interpret the law, and increases requirements for already overworked elections officials.” While Damon Hewitt, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, deemed SB 189 “ill-conceived.” He added that “this law threatens the integrity of our democratic process by creating unnecessary barriers that will likely disenfranchise eligible voters from historically excluded communities, including students [who live in school dormitories], nursing home residents, and people experiencing homelessness or housing insecurity.”
Alabama
This past August, Secretary of State Wes Allen announced the removal of 3,251 individuals from Alabama’s voting rolls. “I have been clear that I will not tolerate the participation of noncitizens in our elections,” Allen had stated in a press release when he announced his efforts. “I have even gone so far as to testify before a United States Senate Committee regarding the importance of this issue. We have examined the current voter file in an attempt to identify anyone who appears on that list that has been issued a non-citizen identification number.”
Allen claimed that while these individuals were registered voters, they had also been assigned noncitizen identification numbers by the Department of Homeland Security.
By mid-October, this particular voting purge was stopped by way of a federal court order from the Justice Department. Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division had noted that “… Alabama [needed to] redress voter confusion resulting from its list maintenance mailings sent in violation of federal law. …. The Quiet Period Provision of federal law exists to prevent eligible voters from being removed from the rolls as a result of last-minute, error-prone efforts.”
The GOP’s efforts to toughen voting regulations sometimes succeeded, but even when they fell short, they reinforced Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election had been stolen from him. Accompanying Republican Party lawsuits fueled voter fraud conspiracy theories, and the purging of voter rolls helped undermine Black voting power.
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