States purge voter rolls to prevent non-eligible voting

As the presidential election looms, conservatives are intensifying scrutiny of state voter rolls as part of their get-out-the-vote efforts.

Republicans are focused on removing voters who have died, moved out of state or are otherwise ineligible, say election security advocates. On the Democrat side, progressive partisans claim that purges of the voter rolls prevent legitimate voters from casting votes.

In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, announced in August that 1.1 million voters had been removed from the voting list, including 6,500 noncitizens who were illegally registered to vote, reported The Center Square.

The state said 1,930 of those noncitizen voters had a voting history and have been referred for prosecution.

The remainder were people who moved out of state or who died, said the governor’s office.    

In Pennsylvania, a lawsuit rages between the state and Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) about records related to 100,000 non-citizens recently purged from the voter rolls. 

The illegal voters were registered by the state under the National Voting Rights Act (NVRA) of 1993. 

The state called the registrations a “glitch,” the lawsuit says, but the state’s expert admitted that 11,198 noncitizen voters are still registered, according to a statement by the legal foundation’s communications department. 

PILF wants more transparency on how the state decided who to purge, and how the illegal voters were registered to begin with. By contrast, the state wants its investigation to remain secret, claiming privacy concerns. 

In Virginia, Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin also purged the voter rolls by about 80,000 voters who had died and another 6,300 who were noncitizens. 

The conservative education foundation Judicial Watch said about 4 million voters were removed from various state voter rolls using laws under NVRA. 

Judicial Watch Senior Attorney Robert Popper says there are three categories of voters that need to be purged under the NVRA laws: voters who have died, voters who have some sort of disqualifying event, such as a felony and – the biggest category of all – voters who have moved from the state. 

“In November 2022, there were 110 million total ballots cast in the whole country, so 4 million is a lot,” the attorney said. 

Under NVRA, a voter registration is required to be removed if a voter doesn’t respond to an address verification letter and fails to vote after two general elections. 

For example, last year in Washington, D.C., Judicial Watch used Census data to calculate voter registrations comprised 131% of the voting age population, revealing bloated voter rolls. 

Once notified, officials sent out 103,000 federally required notifications to start clean-up on the registrations, the Washington Examiner reported.  

The watchdog group also told the Examiner it notified California and Illinois of “dirty voter rolls,” which increase the potential for fraud.  

Both states promised to start the clean-up process.   

Secretaries of State are ultimately responsible for following NVRA. 

Popper says the root of the problem is with the federal government’s failure to enforce the law. 

“The Department of Justice is empowered to enforce this law in all of the states where it applies,” said Popper. “And it ought to be doing so, and it’s not.”  

Noncitizen voting has also become a significant concern in light of record illegal border crossing under the Biden-Harris administration, though the exact numbers are difficult to determine. 

The Heritage Foundation’s corruption-fighting Oversight group’s investigation has found the following: 

• Evidence of non-citizens being registered to vote in North Carolina, Georgia, and Arizona; 

• A voter registration that was mailed to a Chinese illegal immigrant in LA; 

• Evidence of non-citizens being given fake residency documents in New York City, one of the requirements to register to vote; and 

• A flyer at a border camp encouraging illegal immigrants to vote for Joe Biden.  

“Seeing that the Biden administration willfully breaks federal laws, we can suspect that laws prohibiting aliens from voting are also being broken – and are being ignored by an administration that has explicitly encouraged illegal immigration into this country,” wrote Heritage’s Matthew Tragesser.