Slate - "How Trumps DOJ Will Try to Purge Voter Rolls"
And what states can do to fight back.
By Leon Neyfakh
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2017/07/how_trump_s_doj_will_try_to_purge_voter_rolls.html
On June 28, Donald Trump’s Department of Justice sent letters to state election officials asking them to demonstrate their commitment to maintaining accurate voter rolls. The DOJ noted that, according to federal law, states are responsible for regularly pruning their lists of registered voters to remove people who’ve died, moved away, or become ineligible to vote for other reasons.
Taken in isolation, the DOJ’s request might seem innocuous—who doesn’t want clean, well-maintained voter rolls? Against the backdrop of the president’s obsession with voter fraud, however, these letters look like something more ominous: a first step toward bringing back a George W. Bush–era strategy of forcing states to aggressively purge their voter rolls under threat of litigation. According to voting rights advocates, such purges frequently result in large numbers of eligible voters being removed from the rolls by mistake.
A campaign by Trump’s Department of Justice to pressure states into conducting such purges would be waged using the National Voter Registration Act, or NVRA, a law passed in 1993 in hopes of making it easier for low-income people and minorities to become registered voters. The law, which called for agencies such as DMVs to offer opportunities for voter registration, had previously been vetoed by George H.W. Bush, who called it an “open invitation to fraud and corruption.” More than a decade later, government attorneys working for his son’s administration found a creative use for the NVRA, focusing on the one part of the law that pertains to taking names off the rolls as opposed to getting more of them on.
Section 8 of the NVRA mandates that states “conduct a general program that makes a reasonable effort to remove the names of ineligible voters from the official lists.” As David Becker, a former senior attorney in the voting section at DOJ who is now the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, noted in a recent op-ed, it’s telling that the letters sent out by the DOJ last month asked states about their compliance with only this part of the NVRA. “If the DOJ is going to enforce the NVRA, as it should, it would seem appropriate to enforce ALL of the NVRA, and not just select sections,” Becker wrote.
snip - read the rest at the above link. Long, but worthwhile.
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