People often ask me: how and why is the purging of voters in Ohio so bad?
“Can it do that much damage?” some ask.
Yes it can. And yes it has.
Let me walk you through the simple but brutal math. (I’m teaching the topic this week in my law school class, so it’s top of mind).
In theory, states “purge” voters from their rolls to remove those voters who have moved away, and those who have passed away.
Done right, of course, that makes sense.
And the math is simple:
- only 1% of Americans die every year
- only 4% move to a new county
Best of all, there are lists generated when people either move or pass away, and most states use these lists to “clean” and update their voter rolls.
But Ohio does something else.
Beyond those lists, Ohio also treats the failure to vote in several elections as a proxy for a voter having moved or died, which then triggers a multi-step purging process.
And boy does that change the math!
Because even though only 1% pass away and 4% move, somewhere between 35% and 60% of voters don’t vote in most elections. (And that number is far higher in certain communities.) And as this simple graphic shows, that changes everything:
This “Failure to Vote Proxy” creates an enormous “net,” capturing within Ohio’s purging process millions of voters who have neither moved nor died. (Again, because those other lists capture who has actually moved or passed away, trapping this far larger number of voters in the purging net is totally unnecessary.)
But that far larger net means the baseline purging list explodes from 100,000s to millions.
Now, multiply those millions by the percentage of people who don’t respond to a postcard asking if they still live at their residence, and presto, you get massive purging of people who have neither moved nor passed away.
Again, it’s simple math. And brutal.
Now there are many other problems with the purging process (including that it is strewn with government and bureaucratic errors, leading to the purging thousands of people who did vote but somehow ended up on the wrong list). And when modern-day campaigns use pin-point targeting of voters, once purged, these voters are cast into a political netherworld, hardly hearing from campaigns again.
But that simple math, and its disproportionate impact on voters of color in Ohio cities and poor voters, is the single biggest reason that the Obama coalition that turned Ohio blue in 2008 and 2012 has been decimated.
And beyond Ohio, the other bad news is that a few years ago, the US Supreme Court upheld Ohio’s purging process in a 5-4 decision. So other states can now adopt the Ohio approach as a model for more aggressive purging of their voters.
So, how do we fix this?
How do we re-engage this entire world of purged and unregistered voters, which we must if we are going to compete in states like Ohio?
That involves both reforms and hard work at the federal, state, and local levels. It involves solutions at the government level, and new approaches by political, non-profit and even business organizations. And it will involve a whole lot grassroots work.
Bottom line: while fighting to stop the purging (a very tough fight), it requires scaling up voter registration and engagement efforts to match the immense scale of voter purging taking place.
I’ll lay that out in future newsletters.
This article fails to note that Ohio purging of voter registrations occurs after four to six years of total inactivity. I believe annual purge rates are in the 1-to-2% range. What are reasonable purging criteria and how do they vary by state/county? Does anyone have some detailed history?
One small question, where do the lists used to purge voting rolls of moved/dead come from?