Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Mass purges are the new voter suppression

Election deniers are trying to get huge groups removed from voter rolls

Mike Lindell speakin at a microphone

Pillow magnate and Donald Trump supporter Mike Lindell is among the leaders of the election denial movement, which is now trying to remove legitimate voters from the rolls, writes Waldman.

Leila Navidi/Star Tribune via Getty Images

Waldman is president of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.

The United States still has one of the world’s most decentralized voter registration systems. We want voter rolls to be up to date and accurate. People move, die, change party identification and so on. But election deniers exploit cracks in the county-by-county system. They challenge legitimate registrations, launch mass purges and seek to weed the voter rolls of citizens they don’t like.

In fact, there’s new evidence that abusive mass voter purges will be a major weapon in the political battles of the coming months. If you can’t win citizens to your side, it appears, then try to prevent them from voting.


The New York Times recently detailed an organized effort involving leaders of the election denial movement. One is Cleta Mitchell, who joined Donald Trump on the notorious phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger that is now the subject of two separate indictments. Another is a top deputy to pillow-magnate-turned-election-conspiracy-theorist Mike Lindell. Their acolytes are launching mass challenges of voter registrations, sometimes 1,000 at a time. They say it’s a citizen-led effort to update the rolls and reduce the potential for voter fraud. Don’t believe it for a second.

For one thing, their efforts appear to be focused on precincts that lean Democratic or are home to large communities of color. This seems to be about politics, not voter-roll hygiene.

Another clue: Their methods are bogus. In one incident, activists sent a local election office a list of people on the U.S. Postal Service’s mail-forwarding list who remained registered to vote in the district. Election officials know this is a shoddy approach to roll maintenance. People can ask for their mail to be forwarded for any number of reasons, including college, temporary work assignments, or caring for sick or elderly relatives elsewhere. Sometimes voters haven’t moved an inch; they’ve merely been listed as relocated because someone else in the household asked for mail to be forwarded. In all of these scenarios, the person remains eligible to vote.

A challenge alone should not, in theory, prevent someone from voting. But it can kick off an investigation that results in removal from the rolls if the citizen fails to respond to inquiries — in other words, if they miss a piece of mail. (My colleague Alice Clapman offers a detailed explanation of the right and wrong ways for states to identify ineligible voters and of the laws protecting voters in that process.)

These mass challenges also can resemble a distributed denial of service attack, with emails flooding a website, aiming to just gum up the works. Election officials who are responding to excessive numbers of abusive demands for action won’t have time to process new registrations.

There has been, of course, a tested way to keep the rolls updated: the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC. States use this nonpartisan information-sharing organization to reduce error in maintaining their rolls. For example, rather than relying on mail-forwarding requests, ERIC looks for information like an application for a driver’s license in a different state. It also has access to sensitive information such as encrypted Social Security numbers, reducing the number of false positives. People who move rarely vanish.

ERIC is undoubtedly the best way to avoid voter fraud and keep lists accurate and complete. Bizarrely, a right-wing conspiracy theory claims that it was all a nefarious plot. Nine GOP-dominated states have withdrawn from the system. Gov. Ron DeSantis, for example, boasted of bringing Florida into the ERIC system in 2019, then withdrew in 2023. Nothing changed but the politics.

A right-wing alternative called EagleAI has been launched, supposedly to search for fraud. As we have documented before, it’s poorly designed to catch real wrongdoing — but it could be a tool for disenfranchisement.

Let’s try to recover bipartisan agreement on how to keep voter rolls in shape. Meanwhile, we should brace for a year of efforts by election deniers to wreck what works in our system. Voting rights advocates in and out of government are getting ready to fight back in court. The ability of many of our fellow citizens to participate in this pivotal election will depend on the outcome of this fight.

This article was first published March 12 in Waldman's weekly newsletter, “The Briefing.”

Read More

Once Again, Politicians Are Choosing Their Voters. It’s Time for Voters To Choose Back.
A pile of political buttons sitting on top of a table

Once Again, Politicians Are Choosing Their Voters. It’s Time for Voters To Choose Back.

Once again, politicians are trying to choose their voters to guarantee their own victories before the first ballot is cast.

In the latest round of redistricting wars, Texas Republicans are attempting a rare mid-decade redistricting to boost their advantage ahead of the 2026 midterms, and Democratic governors in California and New York are signaling they’re ready to “fight fire with fire” with their own partisan gerrymanders.

Keep ReadingShow less
Stolen Land, Stolen Votes: Native Americans Defending the VRA Protects Us All – and We Should Support Them

Wilson Deschine sits at the "be my voice" voter registration stand at the Navajo Nation annual rodeo, in Window Rock.

Getty Images, David Howells

Stolen Land, Stolen Votes: Native Americans Defending the VRA Protects Us All – and We Should Support Them

On July 24, the Supreme Court temporarily blocked a Circuit Court order in a far-reaching case that could affect the voting rights of all Americans. Native American tribes and individuals filed the case as part of their centuries-old fight for rights in their own land.

The underlying subject of the case confronts racial gerrymandering against America’s first inhabitants, where North Dakota’s 2021 redistricting reduced Native Americans’ chances of electing up to three state representatives to just one. The specific issue that the Supreme Court may consider, if it accepts hearing the case, is whether individuals and associations can seek justice under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA). That is because the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, contradicting other courts, said that individuals do not have standing to bring Section 2 cases.

Keep ReadingShow less
Trojan Horse: How CA Democrats Might Use Voter ID To Turn Back the Clock

Voter IDs are a requirement in almost every democracy in the world. But legitimate concerns over voter suppression efforts in the American south led to a different ethic inside Democratic Party circles.

Image generated by IVN staff.

Trojan Horse: How CA Democrats Might Use Voter ID To Turn Back the Clock

Voter IDs are a requirement in almost every democracy in the world from Europe to Mexico.

But legitimate concerns over voter suppression efforts in the American south led to a different ethic inside Democratic Party circles. Over time, Voter ID plans have been presumptively conflated with claims of “voter suppression” without much analysis of the actual impact of proposals.

Keep ReadingShow less
Person voting

New York City’s election has gotten a lot of attention over the last few weeks, and ranked choice voting is a big part of the reason why.

Hill Street Studios/Getty Images

New York City’s Ranked Choice Voting: Democracy That’s Accountable to Voters

New York City’s election has gotten a lot of attention over the last few weeks, and ranked choice voting is a big part of the reason why.

Heads turned when 33-year-old state legislator Zohran Mamdani knocked off Andrew Cuomo, a former governor from one of the Democratic Party’s most prominent families. The earliest polls for the mayoral primary this winter found Mamdani struggling to reach even 1 percent.

Keep ReadingShow less