The case for more transparency in voter file changes

Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash

Co-authored with data scientist Susanna Supalla.

At long last, the never-ending 2020 Election cycle finally finds itself coming to a close, and campaign organizers across the country take a well-deserved moment to breathe, to sleep, and to prepare themselves to fight another day in the next campaign cycle.

Voter protection organizations, however, are entering a new period of high alert: in the period following elections, mandatory voter file maintenance takes place, and Secretaries of State across the country are reviewing voter rolls to determine who should be dropped from their voter files.

Regular maintenance of the voter file is a good and healthy thing: as time goes on, people move, and people die, and Secretaries of State uphold the responsibility of maintaining an up-to-date list of their voters.

However, the course of history has shown that voter roll maintenance can quickly become an agent for voter disenfranchisement: sometimes through honest clerical errors, and sometimes through malicious intent, voters may be purged from the rolls who legally still have a right to be on those rolls. And, you guessed it: the voters who are purged in these situations are more likely to be younger, poorer, and/or people of color.

The problem: we can’t find, and we can’t fix, what we can’t measure.

There are good, legal reasons why voters drop from the voter file — but there’s no systematic way to measure whether a state dropping a group of people from its list is “good” list maintenance, or “bad” voter purging. This is the crux of the matter: we can’t easily discern the “good” or “bad” nature of voters being dropped, because there exists no publicly available data that compares changes in the voter file across states and across time.

Individual states release their voter files at different intervals and varying price points, and the files require varying levels of difficulty to interpret. Of these 50 (+DC) individual state voter files, there currently exists no public (or affordable) national summarization of voter file statistics that demonstrates how voter files have changed since the previous voter file. Voting rights organizations are left to cobble together this information on an ad-hoc basis, state by state, making choices where to spend their already precious resources in chasing down voter files and analyzing changes over time.

To put it another way: these voting rights organizations are (currently!) working tirelessly to ensure that voter file maintenance does not disenfranchise some of our most vulnerable voting communities, but they must be able to find problematic purges, and be able to measure problematic purges, for our electoral system to work better. And our current system doesn’t make either of these things an easy feat.

A wish list, and a recommendation.

We applaud the transparency and ease of access that certain states already provide with their voter files, such as North Carolina, which posts its voter file online for public download and maintains publicly available and accessible historical snapshots going back to 2005. We certainly hope that this type of data transparency becomes the baseline norm for all states.

However, as we collectively strive to build a more perfect union, we need to keep moving the needle: Secretaries of State, as well as organizations who are already gathering a national voter file, should also analyze voter files for changes over time, and publish their statistics for the benefit of the public. We feel there is a moral imperative for the public to have access to their state’s information such as:

• How many voters have been added since the last voter file update?
• How many voters have been dropped since the last voter file update?
• How many of those dropped were due to moving out of state? Due to deaths? Due to other reasons?
• How do both the added and dropped voters break down by demographics, such as race, age, gender, and party affiliation?
• How do both the added and dropped voters break down by county, electoral district, or even precinct?
• How many people who cast provisional ballots in the most recent election were previously on the voter file and dropped at some point?

Why is making data on voter file changes more accessible such a big deal?

Protecting voters from being erroneously dropped from voter files is better accomplished with transparent, summarized data of the changes to voter files over time, and across states. We see four reasons why this is paramount:

1. Transparency for transparency’s sake. Democracy works best when we the people can know what the heck is going on with the systems that are designed for us and our benefit. Knowing what populations of people are dropped from the voter file, and why, should never be a hidden story.
2. Makes it easier for policy makers. Policy makers and academics alike could help us understand long-standing historical trends and patterns, if they had easier access to voter file data changes.
3. Identify problems and fix mistakes BEFORE Election Day. For most of modern history, purges in the voter file were only discovered after an election had concluded and vote counts were certified. While litigation for improper purges can still occur, fingers can be pointed, and systems can be updated ex post facto, it cannot undo the voter suppression that took place, nor the years-long impact on a community during the term of the newly elected leader (who might not have been elected, had the wrongly-purged voters been able to cast their vote). More transparent, faster, and easier-to-access data can help voting rights groups identify erroneously purged voters, help those voters get re-registered in time for their voice to be heard on Election Day, help campaigns know to include them in their GOTV efforts, and even help Election Protection organizations process litigation in advance of Election Day — all of which protects a community’s democratic process.
4. Social justice is at stake. Improper voter purges have historically impacted the most vulnerable of our communities: the poor, the young, those who move more often, and most notably, people of color. This nerdy work we do, we data practitioners — this data is the very bedrock of a system that has been unjust to members of our most vulnerable communities. Making changes at this foundational level is a necessary step in making our voting system more just, more equitable, and closer to the perfect Union our country has been chasing after these past two centuries.

Take our historical reports on changes to the voter file. Do good with them!

Click here to request access to historical Alloy Protect reports. This folder will be live until February 12, 2021.

At Alloy, we had the distinct honor to start building this dream. Leading up to the 2020 Election, we analyzed 8 battleground states, and provided 120 voter protection organizations with access to analysis of the voter file changes over time (providing counts and demographic trends of people who were added and dropped in time intervals as small as one week), along with free access to the aggregated data upon which we built our analysis. We know the importance of historical data for future analysis, and we want you to have these reports.

Click here to request access to download these reports for your own records before Alloy winds down its operations. Access to this data will be available until February 12, 2021.