AM I ON THE LIST? Purging Eligible Voters & Counting Provisional Ballots

Erroneous purges were a problem nationwide during the 2000 electionand issues continue to persist. The US Census Bureau estimates that in the 2000 elections, 7.4 percent of the 40 million people registered to vote did not do so due to registration problems. Election boards, charged with maintaining accurate voter rolls, deleted more than 13 million people from lists as a matter of regular list cleansing, but many were erroneously removed due to system failures. The Advancement Project, which strives for universal opportunities and a racially just democracy, did case studies of some of the most problematic election problems in 2000 and found that in addition to the fiasco in Florida, particularly egregious overbroad purges of "inactive" voters occurred in St. Louis, MO and Boston, MA, and computer glitches in St. Louis and Georgia left thousands off the rolls. In both St. Louis and Boston, officials failed to follow proper procedures in compliance with the 1993 National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) that requires verification of the purge lists. Untrained poll workers and other administrative failures exacerbated the situation for thousands of voters erroneously purged, many of which spent hours trying to vote and many others just gave up.[more ]