The GOP is campaigning against voting — and it’s winning in some states
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Version 0 of 1. GEORGIA STRUCK almost 100,000 voters from its rolls. In Wisconsin, a state with only 3.3 million registered voters, perhaps 200,000 are set to be purged. Some of them might have moved out of their respective states or died. But many will unjustifiably fall victim to Republicans’ relentless drive to disenfranchise Democratic-leaning voters on the pretext of preventing voter fraud. A recent Georgia state law calls for people who have not voted or contacted election officials for several years to be removed from the rolls. About 100,000 people are subject to the loss of their registration status after three years of inactivity, before state lawmakers lengthened the period to five years. Voting advocates argue that those 100,000 should get the benefit of the lengthened five-year period. State officials disagree and want to continue with their purge. A federal judge ruled Friday that the state may proceed. The legal wrangling should not disguise the bigger point: Georgia’s underlying law is wrong. The United States does not require people to vote. Americans may exercise their franchise or decline to do so. How often they do one or the other should not affect their access to the ballot box. States can keep their voter rolls clean without disenfranchising people who choose to vote occasionally or who missed a postcard informing them that their registrations were to be purged. The disenfranchisement in Wisconsin is even worse. A Wisconsin judge ruled this month that 200,000 voters must be struck because they failed to respond within 30 days to notices sent from the Wisconsin Elections Commission, which asked whether the voters had moved. These letters did not mention that voters who failed to respond would be purged, because the commission had not planned to remove them from the rolls, at least not anytime soon. After the commission sent its letters, a conservative activist group concocted a reading of state law that would require the commission to move to immediate purges, and a state judge ordered quick removal. Though the legal reasoning is a stretch, the conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court seems likely to agree. The records on which the commission relied to target these 200,000 people were imperfect. Despite the tight turnaround period, 2,300 said they still live at the same address — in a state in which a margin of 23,000 swung its electoral votes to Donald Trump in 2016. Thousands more no doubt failed to respond because the commission’s notice got lost in the shuffle of their daily lives. At least Wisconsin allows Election Day registration — a hassle, but better than Georgia, which offers no such option. It should not be up to Americans, on penalty of disenfranchisement, to help state governments with their record-keeping. Officials should strive to make voting easier, not harder. States should build automatic voter-registration systems that update voter rolls whenever people interact with motor vehicle departments or other state agencies, and they should impose no arbitrary time limits on those registrations. If there were any sign of massive in-person voter fraud, the case might look different. But there is no evidence of such a threat — only of a disturbing push to purge voters who disagree with those in power. Read more: Paul Waldman: Voter suppression could become more important to the GOP’s election plans than ever Karen Tumulty: Where the hunt for voter fraud is worse than the crime itself Jennifer Rubin: Just how big a problem is voter suppression? David Gans: The Voting Rights Act is in tatters. Let’s honor King’s legacy by saving it. Jennifer Rubin: Republicans are anti-voting and anti-democratic |