Mary Tutwiler

La. voters illegally purged from rolls?

by Mary Tutwiler

Newly registered voters in nine states, including Louisiana, may have been illegally purged from rolls. According to The New York Times, the states have been violating federal laws by removing voters from the rolls within 90 days of a federal election, which is only allowed if voters die or move out of state.

In Louisiana, at least 18,000 people were dropped from the rolls in the five weeks after July 23. Over the same period, at least 1,600 people moved out of state and at least 3,300 died.

A spokesman for the Louisiana secretary of state said that about half of the numbers of the voters removed from the rolls were people who moved within the state or who died. The remaining 11,000 or so people seem to have been removed by local officials for other reasons that were not clear, the spokesman said.

A second way registrars of voters have been acting in violation of the 2002 federal law is by using Social Security information to screen registration applications, which is supposed to be used only as a source of last resort, if state data bases have no record of an applicant's driver’s license or identification card.

Other states which appear to have been acting illegally are the six swing states of Colorado, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Nevada and North Carolina; as well as Alabama and Georgia.