New study shows voter purges escalated after Supreme Court gutted Voting Rights Act protections

The Brennan Center has released an updated analysis of voter purge efforts, and despite some high-profile Republican botches in their relentless efforts to remove mostly minority and Democratic voters from state voting rolls, county purges have resulted in about 17 million American voters being stripped from the rolls between 2016 and 2018.

Not all of those purges are malicious. Counties work to clean their voter databases because voters move (or die) without informing their computer-based overlords; not sending election materials to Americans who are no longer there to receive them can save a bit of cash and confusion.

But there is one bit of it that strongly suggests some purges are malicious, and that suggests (again) that the Roberts Supreme Court was being willfully gullible in its 2013 declaration that major protections of the 1965 Voting Rights Act were no longer needed because systemic discrimination against minority voters was no longer a “flagrant” or “widespread” thing.

"The median purge rate over the 2016–2018 period in jurisdictions previously subject to preclearance was 40 percent higher than the purge rate in jurisdictions that were not covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act," reports Brennan. That means that when you separate out only the counties previously blocked, due to a history of proven civil rights violations against minority Americans, from making changes to their voting procedures without federal approval, those counties have been purging voters at a 40% higher rate than counties that had not been subject to those federal constraints.

And there ain't no reason for such a wide disparity other than the obvious one.

After the Supreme Court nullified "preclearance" requirements against counties with a history of attempting to systematically disenfranchise voters, those same counties appear to have immediately launched into new efforts to ... systematically disenfranchise voters. Brennen backs this interpretation by noting that, after rough parity with those in non-preclearance counties in previous years, purge rates in preclearance-restricted counties shot up immediately after the 2013 Shelby County decision—and have stayed at those new rates in each election since.