GOP Aims to Weaken Key Federal Protection Against Voter Purges

Congressional Republicans once again placed the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) in their crosshairs Wednesday, holding the second hearing so far this year on the landmark pro-voting law. 

“Currently, the NVRA requires that states conduct a general program that makes reasonable effort to remove the names of ineligible voters from the official list of eligible voters,” said Rep. Laurel Lee (R-Fla.), chair of the Elections Subcommittee of the House Administration Committee. “This ambiguous language has left courts to issue broad rulings about what constitutes general and reasonable.”

But those concerns, Democrats responded, have come entirely from right-wing organizations as they demand state election officials scour their registration lists while asserting false claims about widespread election fraud. 

“I believe that proper voter list maintenance is an integral part of an election administration,” said Rep. Terri Sewell (D-Ala.), the subcommittee’s ranking member. “But too often, we have seen anti-democratic purges of eligible voters conducted in the name of ballot list maintenance and extremists will stop at nothing to try to convince the American people that non-citizens and dead people are voting.”

The hearing came amid broader efforts by Republicans to make it harder for many Americans to vote. In March, President Donald Trump issued an executive order that attempted to ban mail-in ballot grace periods and require documentary proof of citizenship to register. Meanwhile, the Republican National Committee (RNC) and affiliated anti-voting groups have sued dozens of states in attempts to force officials to deregister voters, including one lawsuit that could be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court. Over the fall, Trump’s Department of Justice joined those efforts, demanding unprecedented access to state voter rolls and suing 14 states for refusing so far. 

And in Congress, the GOP has already introduced bills to weaken the NVRA’s protections, including the SAVE Act, which passed the House earlier this year and would explicitly allow states to remove people from the rolls who did not provide proof of citizenship when they registered.

The subcommittee heard from a pair of Republican witnesses urging lawmakers to remove some of the NVRA’s safeguards against improperly removing voters from registration rolls, while the ACLU’s Sophia Lin Larkin countered that they were hunting for a costly solution to a non-existent problem. 

“States have ample tools to keep their rolls accurate, and they’re using them,” Larkin said. “Elections officials removed more than 21 million voters from the rolls in the last two years through routine, lawful maintenance.”

Mark Braden, a former Republican National Committee lawyer now at Baker Hosteteler, argued that vote-by-mail poised a particular risk to election integrity. “Mail voting is definitely a more dangerous process for the security of the ballot process,” he said, without providing any evidence in support.

A database of documented incidents of election fraud maintained by the Heritage Foundation shows just 1,600 examples of election fraud since 1982, including 378 examples of improper postal ballots. Most involve a person submitting a handful of absentee ballots under false or assumed names. The handful involving larger scale operations were conducted by corrupt election officials. 

While Heritage maintains its dataset isn’t exhaustive, the more comprehensive News21 database provides similarly rare figures. According to News21, there were 491 cases of absentee ballot fraud (and 2,068 of election fraud in general) between 2000 and 2012, or roughly 0.6 incidents of absentee ballot fraud per 1 million votes. 

Wednesday’s NVRA hearing followed one in July. There, Christian Adams, a leading advocate of more restrictive voting rules, urged lawmakers to tighten the NVRA’s language requiring states to make a reasonable effort to remove eligible voters from the rolls. Another GOP witness urged Congress to remove or at least reduce the law’s 90-day “quiet” period before elections during which election officials cannot systemically remove voters from the rolls. 

Michael Morley, a law professor at Florida State University, echoed that concern, saying Congress should allow state officials to more frequently remove voters from the rolls, arguing that the law effectively prevents systemic maintenance for half of the year, given the ban ahead of both primary and general elections. 

While agreeing that no one wants inaccurate voter rolls that allow ineligible people to vote, Larkin argued there’s a democratic cost to overly aggressive maintenance measures, which often remove eligible voters. “We’ve unfortunately seen overzealous list maintenance efforts often framed as simple enforcement of existing voter requirements, but in practice, they rely on outdated data, flawed methodologies and bad proxies for eligibility,” she said. “My secretary of state [in Texas] conducted a voter purge, and it turns out that half of the voters that were on there were actually eligible voters.”

By holding the hearing, House Republicans implicitly acknowledged the invalidity of President Donald Trump’s March executive order on voting, as Braden noted in his written testimony. “The order is based on no Presidential authority of which I am aware,” he wrote. “States and Congress have the authority to make or change election laws, not the President.”

And in his written testimony, Morley seemed to agree that the hearing was focused on a minor, at worst, problem. To be sure, the extent to which non-citizen voting has actually occurred has sometimes been exaggerated in public debates,” Morley wrote. “When states have identified potential cases of non-citizens being registered to vote, they invariably involve a fraction of 1% of all voter registrations in the jurisdiction.”