That’s usually not true. Most people are purged because they’re supposedly dead or moved. Those people usually aren’t voting (in that location) anyway, so failing to purge them does little. Even for people who might actually vote there, such as felons or non-citizens, they face severe legal consequences for voting when they’re not allowed to, even if registered, so they usually won’t vote either.
Incorrectly purging people is way worse than incorrectly not purging people.
No, it's not. People have a right to vote. As with criminal prosecutions, the standard should be very high to remove that right from someone - mistakes are a big deal.
In some states, the standard for purging has been intentionally made overly strict - "Hyphenated-Name" doesn't match the "Hyphenated Name" the state has on file, so they get purged. It helps when the Secretary of State making the rules is also running for Governor:
> Minority voters are more likely statistically to have names with hyphens or suffixes or other punctuation that can make it more difficult to match their name in databases, experts noted. That makes them more likely to get caught up in the "exact match" law.
People don't have the right to vote, at least not unconditionally. That's not how this works, nor how it has ever worked.
If you register to vote in Georgia, then move to Ohio and register there, you might have the right to vote in Ohio. You don't have the right to vote in Georgia, nor does anybody else have the right to vote in Georgia with your identity.
If you register with "Hyphenated-Name" after having previously registered with "Hyphenated Name", that doesn't mean you get to vote twice! You don't have that right.
Mistakes are a big deal. An improper vote is a denial of the rights of the legitimate voters to have their votes properly counted.
Fixing all the issues is difficult, but there is one simple improvement: have the federal government, perhaps the social security administration, publish a mapping from human to voting district.
> People don't have the right to vote, at least not unconditionally.
None of our rights are unconditional. You can give up free speech rights by joining the military, and we've got things like noise ordinances. You can lose your right to bear arms by being a felon. Et cetera, et cetera.
> If you register to vote in Georgia, then move to Ohio and register there, you might have the right to vote in Ohio. You don't have the right to vote in Georgia, nor does anybody else have the right to vote in Georgia with your identity.
No one has argued otherwise.
> If you register with "Hyphenated-Name" after having previously registered with "Hyphenated Name", that doesn't mean you get to vote twice! You don't have that right.
That's not what's being discussed, at all.
People register to vote as "Hyphenated-Name". The state checks their databases and doesn't find a matching name because they got their driver's license years ago as "Hyphenated Name" (or because the DMV doesn't support a hyphen, or any number of other reasons). They get purged off the rolls.
> Mistakes are a big deal. An improper vote is a denial of the rights of the legitimate voters to have their votes properly counted.
Most people improperly on the rolls aren't improperly voting. If they moved to another state, they're almost certainly not coming back to double their vote. If they died, the chances of someone else pretending to be them is vanishingly small given the severe repercussions of getting caught (which has to be balanced against the small chance of a single vote making a big difference).
Please, read the linked Politifact article. There's a reason I included it.
> Under a 2017 Georgia law, a voter registration application is complete if information on that form exactly matches records kept by Georgia’s Department of Driver Services or the Social Security Administration.
Driver's license isn't required to vote, but if you have one, your voter registration form has to exactly match it. If you don't have one, you've got the same issue with the Social Security Administration with hyphenated versus non-hyphenated, misspellings, character limits (NYS DMV knows me as "C, M" for example), etc.
I said that if they have one, the State of Georgia checks that your voter registration matches your name exactly on your driver's license, and rejects your registration if it doesn't.
