If there is one thing Americans agree on, it would be that elections are the best way to select our leaders – a mainstay of democracy – and that elections should be fair and honest.
The beginning of the electoral process is the system for registration of voters. This system ensures that only persons legally eligible to vote do so. For example, persons 18-years-old or older are generally eligible to vote. While undocumented immigrants are not eligible to vote. So they cannot register.
Elections follow a simple formula. Candidates solicit votes from registered voters in their district. On election days – now plural rather than singular – registered voters vote. The person securing the most votes wins the election and takes the office.
Every election has a loser. Thus, it is not a humiliation to lose. But it is hard to lose, for people who have invested so much of their time and treasure, and others people’s time and treasure, in pursuing victory. This makes people very sensitive to the matter of fairness in elections.
A key element in election fairness is the belief that only legal voters, i.e., registered voters, can vote. Which leads to the issue that has recently precipitated concern in some quarters: the purging of voters from the voter list.
The state Board of Elections has recently announced that over 220,000 Kentucky voters have been purged. This large number has caused concern among many.
I have recently been appointed by Gov. Beshear to the Board of Elections. Since being appointed I have been learning about the Board’s work in overseeing Kentucky elections, to ensure that they follow federal end state law, and that they are basically fair.
The two most common reasons voters are removed from the rolls are death or having moved. Death notices are regularly provided to the Board of Elections by the Social Security Administration and by funeral homes. Notices of persons having moved are regularly provided by the Postal Service. These may or may not include a forwarding address.
A common misperception among the public is that voters are purged simply for not having voted for a number of elections or for a period of time.
This is not the case. When the Board of Elections receives a notice from the Postal Service that someone has moved, it sends a postcard to that person at that address, asking for confirmation of their address.
If the original notice from the Post Office includes a forwarding address, it will go there. If not. It will go to the original address. If the person responds with a proper address, either the original one or a new one, the Board then takes the appropriate action.
However. If there is no response to the postcard, the system notes that. Subsequent postcards are sent. If after two federal elections the person has not voted, has not responded to any of the postcards, and has not otherwise notified the Board of Elections of their actual address, they are purged.
What should be clear from this description is that it is not simply not voting for two elections that results in a purge, but rather the notification of a move coupled with no response to the Board of Election postcards and no other communication, that results in a purge.
The other issue gaining attention now is the number being purged. Board staff state that this process was not being done regularly as it was supposed to be, for a period of time, resulting in a large backlog. They believe that the next time purging is done it will probably involve less than 100,000 people.
Hopefully this explanation will make clearer how voter list maintenance works, and in particular, how the voter purging process works.
Col Owens is a retired legal aid attorney and law professor, author of Bending the Arc Toward Justice, longtime Democratic Party activist, and member of the Boards of Directors of Kentucky Voices for Health and the Kentucky Board of Elections.