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Californians across the state could find that they are no longer registered voters now that a suit by a pair of conservative groups has been settled by Los Angeles County and Secretary of State Alex Padilla.
The settlement, which requires counties to purge inactive voters from their registration lists, could eliminate as many as 1.5 million people from the rolls in Los Angeles County alone and an unknown number elsewhere in the state. The agreement considers registered voters to be inactive if they miss two consecutive federal general elections — a presidential election and a midterm — and then miss two more after failing to respond to a mailed query from county registrars.
“This is a major victory,” said Ellen Swensen, chief analyst for the Election Integrity Project California, who described her group as nonpartisan but “liberty-minded.” It joined with the conservative legal group Judicial Watch to file the suit.
A registration roll bloated with inactive voters “opens the door for voter impersonation and fraud,” Swensen said.
Registration roll trims are an increasing point of friction between Republicans and Democrats. Before the November election, Democrats in Georgia and other states charged that GOP officials purposely purged occasional voters, many of them poor and minority residents, leading to close Republican victories in governor and Senate races.
The California court case followed a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in June that allowed Ohio to continue to aggressively purge its voting rolls, dumping people who failed to cast ballots and respond to a notice from the registrar.
But the 5-4 decision, with conservative justices in the majority, went further than that. Its language means that, in the words of the Los Angeles County settlement, “current federal law requires the cancellation of a registrant” who misses two consecutive federal general elections, doesn’t respond to a registrar’s notice and then misses two more.
“In the Ohio case, a message was sent,” said Justin Levitt, an election law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and a consultant for the secretary of state in the voting-roll case. If there’s no response to that registrar’s notice, “once someone misses a midterm and a presidential election, you have to take people off the rolls.”
Many of those who fall into the inactive-voter category have moved or died, but the lists also include those who for reasons of their own just didn’t vote.
Counties across the country have been slow to clean up their rolls.
A 2012 study commissioned by the Pew Center on the Statesfound about 24 million voter registrations, or about 1 of every 8, were “no longer valid or are significantly inaccurate.” More than 1.8 million dead people were still listed as voters and about 2.75 million people were registered in more than one state, the study said.
That doesn’t mean voters are trying to game the system. When someone dies, relatives typically aren’t quick to call the county registrar, and when someone moves from California to Montana it doesn’t mean they’re voting in both states. National studies have found that voter fraud — particularly individual tampering — is virtually nonexistent in the U.S.
But with President Trump arguing that fraud in California and other states cost him millions of votes in 2016, partisan battles about bulging inactive voter lists and the potential for election mischief are growing.
“Most election observers agree there needs to be adequate list maintenance,” Levitt said. But conservatives and progressives disagree about what is not enough and what is too much.
Both Padilla and Los Angeles County Registrar Dean Logan shrugged off the impact of the settlement, which was revealed Jan. 4, as little more than business as usual.
“Los Angeles County prioritizes the maintenance of voter records and works hard to maintain protections that ensure eligible voters stay on the rolls in compliance with state and federal voter registration laws,” Logan said in a statement. “The settlement includes no admission of wrongdoing. ... We owe it to taxpayers not to squander funds engaging in indefinitely protracted litigation.”
The agreement could slash the number of inactive voters in Los Angeles County in less than a month. Under the settlement, voters who are already on the inactive list will have their registrations canceled if they don’t reply to one last mailing by Feb. 18.
Padilla argued that statewide, nothing much will change.
“California elections officials have and will continue to work to meet the goals of the National Voter Registration Act: maintaining the accuracy of the voter rolls and increasing the number of eligible citizens who register and vote,” he said in a statement. “California will continue its work to adhere to modern list maintenance procedures under the NVRA.”
That’s a different tack from the one Padilla took in 2017, when California joined 11 other states to oppose the Ohio purging plan when it went before the Supreme Court.
“Aggressive purging of voter rolls jeopardizes the fundamental rights of American citizens,” Padilla said in a September 2017 statement. “States should not have free rein to kick voters off the rolls merely because they sit out elections.”
In a conference call Wednesday, Padilla told county registrars he will be revising the state’s version of the national voting manual to make it clear that counties now must oust inactive voters.
Counties that have kept their voting rolls up to date will have few problems dealing with the new rules. San Francisco, for example, has been following the new inactive voter requirements “for the past several years,” said John Arntz, the city elections chief.
“If people miss two federal elections, we send a notice,” he said. “If they don’t reply and miss two more,” the registrations are canceled.
The city has 501,400 registered voters and 98,921 people on the inactive list.
Except in Los Angeles County, where the settlement requires early action to purge inactive voters, nothing will happen quickly. While many counties will be required to mail the notices to voters who haven’t been casting ballots, those residents will still have to miss elections in 2020 and 2022 before they can be removed from the rolls.
“People don’t even have to vote, they can just update their registration,” Levitt said. “And if this serves as a reminder for people to vote, great.”
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