New Orleans ACORN’s Voter Purge Project collects the current voter files from more than 45 states and the District of Columbia. We do so on a regular basis in order to monitor the active and inactive voter designations from month to month or quarter to quarter, depending on the cost of the list, so that we can determine whether the purges are done strictly by the book based on death or moving and not voting for two federal elections.
Because voter lists are managed by each state and often depend on the sub-jurisdictions at the county or parish level, there is a wide variety of systems and programs that different states use, which makes this a difficult, though important, task. Each state also sets the cost of acquiring the voter file. Some are free and as easy as pulling off the Secretary of State’s website. Others charge anywhere from the nominal $25 for Delaware and $100 for California to $5000 or more historically even in places like New Mexico and Virginia. Texas and Arizona charge pennies per voter, which drives their prices up. It all depends. Wisconsin, a frequent battleground state, that has seen contentious disputes between the legislature and the bipartisan election board over the voter lists, has charged $18,000 to acquire the list for no good reason other than to keep people from looking it seems.
Alabama, perhaps unsurprisingly, is the worst of the lot. Their outrageous per voter cost formula requires anyone trying to access the voter list to pay over $30,000. To do that ever would be difficult. To do it monthly would be close to $400,000 annually. Even quarterly would run close to $150,000. When Doug Jones beat Roy Moore for the Senate seat there a couple of years ago, the word was his campaign could only afford to buy the list once, even though these lists are the lifeblood of any campaign. Alabama just doesn’t want folks to know what they are doing with their voter list, so they make the barrier very high and hard.
Implicitly, this is voter suppression, but recently some of Alabama’s explicit voter suppression got a hard slap down, and this time it was by a federal judge. The Secretary of State Wes Allen had the bright idea to help his candidates and party that in August he would purge what he claimed were 3251 “noncitizens registered in Alabama.” He declared them inactive. They would have to go through a bunch of additional rigamarole to be able to vote in November. The Justice Department, joined by other groups, sued. His own chief of staff testified that 2000 were legally registered. Another 900 proved they were legal by September. Another 1000 were reactivated when Secretary’s office finally got around to double-checking with the Alabama motor vehicle office. Once it was all sweated down, they claimed “a few” were noncitizens.
The judge made them do right after all of this doing wrong, because the plain and simple federal law is that no one can be purged and made inactive within 90 days of a federal election or since August 5th, so they were wrong from front to back.