Cleaning Files and Voter Suppression

Jennifer Rubin in the Post cites a Brennan Center report on voter list purges. The report emphasizes that counties which are no longer required to pre-clear changes in their electoral operations under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act have increased their purge rates (roughly from 8 percent to 10 percent a year).

Rubin is concerned. 

I'm not, likely because I had some experience with the problems of maintaining lists in the past.  The bottom line: it's difficult to keep a list of name and addresses up to date because there's really no cost, no push to identify errors.  An example: one of my past employees resigned from ASCS relatively quickly--IIRC her husband in another agency decided to take an early out and they decided to move to Florida.  So her exit process was rather hurried and incomplete.  After I retired I would occasionally search the online USDA employee directory, just to see who still worked there.  For about 10 years, I'd still find Jane's name in the phone directory.

The way FSA counties were supposed to update their name and address list was to do an address check (not the right terminology) requested with USPS once a year..  I'm sure some didn't do it, and it wouldn't have been fool proof.  I gather that some purging of voter lists done differently, bouncing a voter file against another  database.  The problem there is using names to match. One of my employees noted her home county had a lot of people named "Johnson".

Although the color coding of the report is poor, some of the higher ranking states in purge rates are Maine, Massachusetts, and Wisconsin.  In some states (Virginia, Indiana, Oklahoma, Wisconsin) the rates among counties are very similar; in other states (Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi) the rates vary widely among counties.

Without knowing the process being used to purge the files and the history of past purges at the county level, I think it's dangerous to draw general conclusions.  As a good liberal I am, of course, a bit suspicious of the actions of those counties which used to be covered by Section 5.  But I don't think the Brennan Center proved any wrongdoing. 

A final consideration: purging voter rolls isn't very important IMHO--having a dead or moved voter on list offends my bureaucratic sensibility and it wastes computer storage, but is very unlikely to open the door for any voting fraud