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The Urge to Purge
Another Chapter in the Voter Suppression Playbook
Are you one of the 9200 Baldwin County voters who has been purged from the voter rolls?
That’s something you need to know before the last day to register to vote on Oct. 21.
According to the Voter Purge Project, 9200 of Baldwin County’s 17,779 voters, 5.17 percent, were washed from the registrar’s list since 2022.
Statewide, the numbers are even scarier. Alabama has seen 6.6 percent, or 247,000, of its 3.7 million voters purged in the last two years. That’s the third-highest percentage in the U.S., trailing Mississippi and Nevada. The project’s data shows the highest percentage of voters removed from registration lists are in small, rural counties in the Black Belt region and the Wiregrass.
Voter purging is supposed to help states maintain up-to-date voter rolls and data by canceling registrations for voters who have died, moved, or have duplicate listings. But political parties and partisan groups have weaponized voter purges to disenfranchise voters and to manipulate elections for decades.
States often rely on faulty data that purport to show that a voter has moved to another state. Often this data gets people mixed up. Multiple people can have the same name and date of birth, making it hard to be sure that the right voter is being culled when perfect data is unavailable.
Troublingly, minority voters are more likely to have identical names than white voters, potentially exposing them to a greater risk of being purged. Voters often do not realize they have been purged until they try to cast a ballot on Election Day. And then its too late.
The Voter Rights Act of 1965 sought to address voter suppression via nationwide legislation and enforcement. Shelby County v. Holder alters which areas fall under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, making it easier for states like Alabama with a history of voter discrimination to use voter purging.
All states maintain digital voter files, but each state determines how – and at what cost – people can access the list of registered voters in that state. Some states make access straightforward and even free. But not Alabama. Alabama’s price tag is one of the highest in the country; It pockets $378,000 per year for voter information.
In a court decision handed down within the last few weeks, Greater Birmingham Ministries v. Al. Secretary of State, the 11th Circuit ruled Alabama must provide a Birmingham nonprofit with the purged list containing the names of 135,074 people at a cost of $1,350.74. But the Birmingham ministers asked the secretary’s office to waive the fee and to send an electronic list instead of copies of the names of felons who have been purged from voter rolls.
The National Voter Registration Act “squarely” requires states to produce the records nonprofit Greater Birmingham Ministries seeks, said Judge Britt C. Grant, of the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. But the NVRA’s mandate that states allow “public inspection” of voter information doesn’t say how a state must make the how a state must make the disclosures, the judge said.
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