GOP Lays Groundwork for a New Attack on Federal Voter Protections

Republicans and their allies are laying the groundwork for weakening the crucial federal law that blocked many of their attempts to purge voter registration rolls on the eve of the 2024 election. 

At a recent congressional hearing, both GOP witnesses urged Congress to consider changes to the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), the landmark 1993 law aimed at increasing voter registration. Their proposals would bolster the NVRA’s requirement for states to regularly remove voters from the rolls, while weakening the measure’s protections against voters being wrongly removed — in other words, restricting access in both directions.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R), who has sought to be a leader on voting issues in his party, this month urged Congress to take similar steps.

The NVRA is among the most important voting rights advances ever achieved by the federal government, credited with making it significantly easier for Americans of all backgrounds and political stripes to get on the rolls and stay there. Any successful effort to weaken the law’s protections would be a major step backwards for access to the ballot.

Over the last few months, Republicans in Congress and across the country have focused increasingly on the issue of inaccurate voter rolls. They have argued that the presence on the rolls of some people who recently moved or died can allow for illegal voting. In fact, such incidents of voting fraud are exceedingly rare and the few perpetrators are often caught. 

“Voter list maintenance is crucial to election integrity,” Rep. Bryan Steil (R-Wisc.), chairman of the House Administration Committee, said at a recent hearing on voter list maintenance standards. “Inaccurate voter rolls can open the door to election fraud and can hinder public confidence in our elections.”  

While there is nothing wrong with periodically scrubbing voter registration lists, officials inevitably make mistakes — for example, the wrong John Smith gets removed. That’s why the NVRA bars states from completing “any program the purpose of which is to systematically remove the names of ineligible voters from the official lists” in the 90 days before federal elections. The provision ensures a mistakenly removed voter has nearly three months to fix the error. 

In the run up to the 2024 elections, outside anti-voting groups sued state election officials, aiming to force them to purge thousands of voters from the rolls. As Election Day neared, GOP state election officials in at least five states sought to systematically remove voters within the 90-day period.

In Alabama, South Dakota, and Texas, federal courts blocked those attempts, which, as some GOP officials conceded, would have culled thousands of legally registered voters. But in an unexplained, 6-3 emergency order, the Supreme Court allowed Virginia’s purge to go ahead just days before the election, even though it excised legally registered citizens.  

At the recent House Administration committee hearing chaired by Steil, J. Christian Adams, president of the Public Interest Law Foundation and a leader of the push for more restrictive voting rules, noted that the NVRA also requires states to make a reasonable effort to remove ineligible voters. (That provision was included in the 1993 law in order to win some Republican support).

But Adams argued the courts aren’t requiring states to be as pro-active about removing voters as the NVRA intended. So, he suggested, Congress should consider fixing the law to leave no doubt that states must aggressively cull their voter rolls.

“Here’s a question Congress might ponder: What does the Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act mean when it mandates that states must ‘conduct a general program that makes a reasonable effort to remove the names of ineligible voters from the official lists of eligible voters?’” Adams asked. “According to federal courts, unfortunately, it means next to nothing. That isn’t what Congress intended.”

“Section 8 of [the NVRA] won’t get the job done unless Congress fixes these court decisions,” Adams added.

Another GOP witness, Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections President J. Justin Riemer, made a similar case. Reimer, a former chief counsel to the Republican National Committee (RNC), argued that the NVRA not only doesn’t do enough to encourage states to maintain accurate registration records, but that it actively thwarts state efforts to do so.  

“Congress should consider either eliminating or modifying the 90-day blackout period by reducing its length and by applying it only to federal general elections, rather than federal primaries and special elections,” Reimer said in his written testimony. 

On the same day as the hearing, Raffensperger wrote to Steil with a list of election policy recommendations, including removing the “federal barriers” that make it harder for states to purge their rolls.

“Specifically, the NVRA prohibits systematic list maintenance within 90 days of a federal election,” Raffensperger wrote. “This 90-day blackout period restricts us from conducting systematic list maintenance in federal election years precisely when clean voter rolls are most scrutinized.”

“Another vestige of the earlier era in which the NVRA was passed,” Raffensperger added, “is the length of time that states must keep voters on the rolls, despite clear evidence that they have left their jurisdiction.”

He continued: “Congress must modernize this outdated law.”

Raffensberger is in the midst of a massive purge of Georgia voters, targeting more than 400,000 registrations. According to Fair Fight Action, a pro-voting group founded by Stacey Abrams, the registration cancellation notices were sent to a disproportionate number of Black voters. 

There have also been blunter efforts to target the NVRA’s voter protections. A bill cosponsored by Reps. Andy Biggs of Arizona and Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, which looks unlikely to be taken up, would repeal the law in its entirety. And the SAVE Act, which passed the House earlier this year, would explicitly allow states to remove people from the rolls who did not provide proof of citizenship when they registered.

So far this year, the RNC has also filed or threatened lawsuits against a number of state election officials, demanding they scrub their voter records. 

Meanwhile, since President Donald Trump took office, the Department of Justice has gone from defending voters’ ability to cast ballots to leading the charge against it in at least 17 voting rights and election cases. A day after the House Administration hearing, Harmeet Dhillon, the head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights division told the Senate Judiciary Committee that her office was actively looking for violations of the NVRA rules requiring states to clean their rolls.

“We are opening investigations; we are seeking information from states,” Dhillon said. “Numerous states have received requests for list maintenance requirements and failures thereof, their noncompliance with the [NVRA.]” 

These attacks on voter registration list maintenance policies, much like the arguments in support of photo ID laws like the SAVE Act, end up harming the voting rights of countless citizens in an attempt to keep a hypothetical handful of non-citizens out of voting booths, said Michelle Kanter Cohen, policy director and senior counsel at the Fair Elections Center.

“When anti-voter folks come in and say, ‘we should be able to remove non-citizens at any time,’ what that really means is, ‘we should be able to attack citizens’ voting rights at any time,’” she said.

Kanter Cohen noted that an exhaustive audit of Georgia’s voter rolls last October found just 20 non-citizens registered out of 8.2 million voters, or 0.0002 percent, suggesting the large-scale purges attempted in other states would’ve disenfranchised thousands of U.S. citizens. 

“I don’t know about you, but when I go to clean my kitchen, I don’t burn down my kitchen,” she said. “The disproportionality in these types of policies is really concerning.”