By David Harsanyi
Wednesday, December 18, 2019
Maggie Haberman, the esteemed New York Times
reporter, recently tweeted out a Mother Jones article to 1.2 million
followers titled: “GOP-Led Voter Purges in Wisconsin and Georgia Could Tip 2020
Elections.” The chilling piece warns readers that “hundreds of thousands of
voters are set to be purged in two key swing states,” which “potentially” gives
Republicans “a crucial advantage by shrinking the electorate” in those states.
None of this, of course, is true. Cynical pieces of this
genre, an election-time tradition at this point, only allow Democrats to warn
of widespread disenfranchisement and preemptively give aggrieved Democrats such
as Stacey Abrams a baked-in excuse for losing elections and smearing
Republicans.
How many people who fall for these claims understand that
both federal law and state law mandate the updating of voter lists? In Georgia,
we already know that hundreds of thousands of “voters” were not purged, because
at least 62 percent of registrations that were canceled by the state this week
had surely moved away or died. Either their mail was returned as undeliverable
or they had officially changed their address to a different state.
Other registrations were purged because the person hadn’t
voted in years. Georgia has automatic registration. I know it’s difficult for
some people to believe this, but lots of Americans have no interest in voting.
And Georgia voters can be declared “inactive” if they haven’t participated in
elections, contacted officials, responded to officials, or updated their
registrations since the 2012 election.
That’s the state law. Georgia sends everyone letters
explaining how they can fix any potential problems. Georgia, in fact, publishes
a list of names online so anyone who has not received a letter can check if
they are still registered. Governor Brian Kemp signed a law recently that
lengthens the period before voters become “inactive” from three to nine
years.
As Justin Gray, a reporter in Atlanta, notes, the reason
you don’t hear complaints from these “hundreds of thousands” of disenfranchised
voters is because “most on [the] list are either dead, have moved, or as some
told me were registered automatically when they got [a] license and don’t ever
want to vote.”
It’s important to note, as well, that despite what you’ve
heard, and what is constantly being intimated by Democrats, an analysis by the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution uncovered no racial disparities in the voter-roll
purge in Georgia, finding that blacks and whites were purged in proportion to
their shares of the state’s registered voters:
Among those who identified their
race to state election officials, 31% of those whose registrations could be
canceled are black, while 33% of all registered voters are black. About 63% of
the cancellation list is made up of white voters, who account for 59% of all
registered voters.
Minority voting, despite state voter-ID requirements and
despite voter-registration purges, surged in Georgia, with black voter
registration increasing from 43 percent in 2014 to 60 percent in 2017 — higher
than the percentage among white registration. Georgia’s fortunes mirror a
national trend. According to the Census Bureau, black turnout nationally grew
around 27 percent in 2018. A Pew Research Center study found that “all major
racial and ethnic groups saw historic jumps in voter turnout.”
Oh, and if all else fails, Georgians can go online right
now and register to vote. If democracy is sacred, surely states can ask
citizens to take ten minutes, tops, to fill out a form.
Much the same goes for Wisconsin, where the Wisconsin
Elections Commission decided this summer to simply ignore the state law. A
judge reversed that decision last week and ordered the state to purge over
200,000 voter registrations. Most of those registration are also people who
have almost surely moved — the state uses the reliable Electronic Registration
Information Center, which reports on voters who make official government
transactions from an address different than their voter registration.
Then again, even if a voter in Wisconsin is somehow
inhibited by the system, the state also features same-day voter registration.
However you look at these situations though, “hundreds of
thousands of voters” are not losing their right to cast ballots. Even if judges
began forcing Wisconsin and Georgia — and the seven other states with “use it
or lose it laws” — to ignore the law, there’s no evidence that it would have
any bearing on the election. Because even if we conceded that a tenth of these
purges were inappropriate (and there’s zero evidence that suggests that even
one percent of them are wrong), and even if we conceded that every single one
of those voters would then cast their ballots for Democrats (which is
implausible), it still wouldn’t change the outcome. Not in Georgia. Not in
Wisconsin. Not anywhere.
None of this is to contend that there isn’t a single
person in the country who is being unfairly denied the right to vote. But the
notion that “hundreds of thousands of voters” will be stopped from
participating in the 2020 election through voter purges is nothing but
destructive scaremongering meant to undermine American belief in the veracity
of our elections.
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