Voter Purging

Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp incorrectly canceled some 340,000 voter registrations.

Missouri participates in the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck (Crosscheck) used by officials in 26 other states, including Georgia. Missouri first implemented it in 2006.

The Chief State Election Official signs the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) who then assigns two staff members, an election administration person and an IT person. In 2006, democrat Robin Carnahan held the position.

Crosscheck is a database used to identify voters potentially registered to vote in more than one state. The database, developed in 2005 by Kansas Secretary of State Ron Thornburgh, recognizes voter fraud by comparing people’s names, social security numbers and birthdates.

Registered citizens go to their voting poll and discover their names have been removed from the voter lists.

Purges ensure the voter rolls are accurate and up-to-date when done correctly.

In 2017, Crosscheck deemed 7.2 million of 98 million voting records as potential duplicates representing 3.6 million voters supposedly registered in two states, according to the St. Louis American.

The database identifies duplicate surnames, for example, voters who are registered twice who may have moved from one state to another. It then eliminates the name from the voter list without the knowledge of the voter.

A 2012 study conducted by the Pew Center found that at least 2.75 million people were registered to vote in more than one state. Missouri explicitly prohibits voting in more than one state.

Election officials across the country strike millions of voters from the voter rolls through an often controversial process which is sometimes clouded in secrecy, according to “Voter Purges” author Myrna Pérez.

The practice is known as voter purging, which removes voters from registration lists in order to update state registration rolls, Pérez said.

But the practice is under scrutiny. Nearly every “flagged” match from Crosscheck is a false positive, according to the Washington Post.

A 2017 study led by Stanford professor Sharad Goel found that if applied nationwide, Crosscheck would “impede 300 legal votes for every double vote prevented.”

People of color have experienced racial discrimination with Crosscheck as 50 percent of communities of color share a common surname while only 30 percent of white people do, according to the Health of State Democracies, who measures the accessibility of the ballot factors.

Depending on the commonality of a surname, which is frequent among some minorities, it can lead to confusion in tracking redundancies. For example, there are 1,166,000 people in the country who share the surname Garcia. Other examples, according to the St. Louis American, are surnames such as Rodriguez (1,094,924), Jacksons (708,099), Washingtons (177,386), Kims (262,352), Patels (229,973), Lees (693,023) and Parks (106,696).

“It’s unacceptable,” Democratic candidate Renita Green said. “I see this purging as a deliberate movement to select the voters.”

Democratic candidate Kathy Ellis said she has heard of voters being misinformed about voting. For example, voters are told they can not vote or their polling place has closed.

Voters have had to protect their rights by checking their voter registration at least a month before the election date as many are misinformed and unaware of their removal from the voter list.

The Brennan Center for Justice later continued their work with Pérez with “Purges: A Growing Threat to the Right to Vote.”

The Brennan Center investigation has examined data for more than 6,600 jurisdictions that report purge rates to the Election Assistance Commission and calculated purge rates for 49 states. They found that between 2014 and 2016, states removed almost 16 million voters from the rolls.

“We need the input from voters,” Republican incumbent Kathryn Swan said. “We can not function as efficiently or as well if we do not know what our voters see as important.”