Below is an excerpt from David Litt’s article published in Medium on June 16, 2020. Read the full article here.

Don’t Just Register. Check your Registration. 

Perhaps you’ve heard of the “voter purge.” In case you’re unfamiliar, a purge is a registration drive but in reverse. The former adds people to a list of eligible voters. The latter takes that list and combs through it, hoping (in theory, anyway) to remove ineligible voters from the rolls. The other important difference between a purge and a drive is that in America, getting voters signed up is the responsibility of civic-minded volunteers while kicking them off is done at taxpayer expense.

In theory, voter purges remove deceased or relocated voters from the rolls. In practice, they’ve long been used as an excuse to shrink the electorate, often as a tool of white supremacists. In 1959, for example, the White Citizens’ Council of Washington Parish, Louisiana, conducted what it claimed was a routine cleanup of voter lists. As it happened, 85% of Black voters were kicked off the rolls compared to just 0.07% of whites.

But the modern voter purge began in Florida during the 2000 elections, when about 12,000 eligible, registered voters were taken off the rolls, about half of them African American. (Al Gore, as you may recall, lost that election by just 537 votes.) And in recent years, purges have dwarfed Florida’s in size and aggressiveness. Between the 2014 and 2016 elections, for example, 16 million Americans were taken off the rolls. One recent study from Ohio found that more than one in six voters caught up in a recent purge were on the purge list by mistake. If Ohio’s rates are consistent nationwide, more than 2.7 million eligible voters were taken off the rolls in a single two-year period.

That’s why these days, registering to vote is not enough. Before your state’s registration deadline, double-check your registration (I recommend using Vote.Org). States are supposed to tell you if they take your name off the list, but it won’t surprise you to learn they often fail to. If it turns out you’ve been de-registered, sign up at your current address as quickly as possible.

Overseas and military voters should visit Overseas Vote Foundation