It’s time to be proactive. Have you been purged?
4th May 2020 · 0 Comments
Louisiana has postponed several elections due to the coronavirus. The Presidential Primary and other primary elections are scheduled for July 11th. The Municipal Elections are set for August 15th. However, the coronavirus’ rising infection rates have even the most ardent voters weighing whether they should risk their lives to go out to vote if they live in a state that only allows absentee ballots for valid excuses, or just stay home. Not surprisingly, Louisiana is one of those states.
A hot war over access to the ballot box is taking place right in the Louisiana Legislature, where Republicans continue to resist bills for ‘no excuse’ absentee ballots, which would keep the COVID-19 virus from spreading during elections and lessen infections and avert deaths, within the electorate.
Trump is on record opposing universal mail-in ballots and some governors are forcing people to go to the polls to vote. The recent election in Wisconsin is a wake-up call for how dangerous going out to vote during this pandemic can be. Dozens of Wisconsin voters contracted the coronavirus while waiting hours in long lines to cast their votes.
But even before COVID-19, Republicans were on a tear to disenfranchise voters who they believe vote for Democrats. The most popular voter suppression tool in Republicans’ toolbox is voting roll purges. Thousands have been wiped off voting rolls for any number of nefarious reasons. Consider this case: Jim Hall is a registered voter who has a home address and business address. If both addresses appear on the voting roll, Hall may be considered to have committed voter fraud and when he goes to the polls to vote, there’s no Jim Hall on the list.
Or if a student gets mail at a home address but lives on campus, he or she may not get an address confirmation notice and the state then purges the student from the rolls. Students must deal with proof of residency, absentee ballot use, voter identification challenges, and, sometimes, straight-up lies. Take the case of the University of Maryland student who was told by election officials that students could not register using a campus address because it is not a permanent residence.
That was a lie.
Conventional wisdom suggests that purges if done properly, are an important way to ensure that voter rolls are dependable, accurate, and up-to-date.
However, in the hands of power-drunk Republican Secretaries of State, who will do anything to hold on to the reins of power and money, purging voter rolls ensures that they stay in control. Throw in the white supremacy ideation of racist GOP elected officials and it’s not hard to imagine voter rolls being purged by specific zip codes in communities of color.
“States maintain voter rolls in an inconsistent and unaccountable manner. Officials strike voters from the rolls through a process that is shrouded in secrecy, prone to error, and vulnerable to manipulation. Over the past several years, every single purge list the Brennan Center has reviewed has been flawed. States with a history of racial discrimination purge voter rolls at a higher rate than others,” according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
GOP extremists on the U.S. Supreme Court in 2018 handed down an opinion on voter purging that gave the green light to cancel voter registration if a person hadn’t voted in two years did not confirm their address and voter registration by returning a prepaid postage card and if they did not vote in the following four years.
In Louisiana, if a voter is on the inactive list for two general election cycles, his or her voter record is canceled. The Louisiana Weekly sent a Freedom of Information Act request to Louisiana’s legal division concerning the state’s voter roll purging process and the number of people on Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin’s Voter Inactive List. We’re waiting to hear back.
Voter purges in Georgia launched a national dialog about the GOP trickery during the gubernatorial race between lawyer and Democrat Stacey Abrams and Republican Brian Kemp, who won. Kemp was secretary of state and oversaw aggressive voter purges during his tenure. More than 1.4 million voter registrations were canceled in Georgia between 2012 and 2018. Having Kemp count the votes in his own gubernatorial bid was like allowing a fox to guard the henhouse.
This is all ludicrous, this purging thing. If voting is a Constitutional Right, how can you lose it, if you don’t use it? If we don’t sue for due process rights, will we lose that, too? What about our inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Do we lose them if we don’t use them during a specific time period?
No.
In October 2019, Georgia’s new secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, planned to purge more than 313,000 voters. With hundreds of thousands being purged, nationwide, the action can potentially swing the 2020 presidential election toward the Republican Party.
But you knew that.
As the most loyal voters for the Democratic Party, African-Americans have two choices. Either we can prepare for four more years of Trumpism by letting our vote be purged or simply not voting, or we can check the Secretary of State’s Inactive Voters List to make sure we have not been purged; then glove and mask up, turn up and turn out.
This article originally published in the May 4, 2020 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
