Low-income, minority areas hit by voter purges
Maricopa County residents have been purged from the voter rolls nearly 1.1 million times since the 2008 election.
Nearly half, or 491,944, of the removals happened, as required by state statute, after the Maricopa County Elections Department mails a notice — an early ballot or a voter guide — to a voter and it is returned undelivered by the U.S. Postal Service.
If the initial and subsequent notices are undelivered, the individual is designated “inactive.” Inactive voters who do not update their registrations or vote in the following two general elections are removed from the rolls.
It’s a policy intended to ensure the rolls include only people who are eligible to vote, and, supporters say, it helps prevent fraud. The remainder of the purges are largely voters who moved out of the county or died.
But an Arizona Republic analysis of Recorder’s Office data since 2008 shows the voter-purge policy isn’t experienced equally across Maricopa County, home to 61 percent of all registered voters in the state. Purges of inactive voters in Maricopa County over the past 10 years have disproportionately affected lower-income communities, where minorities make up a larger share of the population, according to the analysis.
Critics of the county policy say the result is thousands of people who are eligible to vote will run into problems at the polls Tuesday, when they learn they are no longer on the rolls.
The Republic analysis shows that will happen more often to poor and minority voters, groups that are less likely to own a home and are more likely to change addresses.
Civil-rights groups argue the state could do more — by automatically updating voters’ registrations with new addresses when they are changed on their driver’s licenses, for example — to avoid disenfranchising citizens.
“It shouldn’t be this difficult,” said Darrell Hill, a staff attorney with the ACLU. “You shouldn’t have to jump through so many hoops to make sure you can cast a ballot.”
The Republic analysis, which incorporated data from the Census Bureau, found:
❚ The highest purge rates were in ZIP codes with larger minority populations and poverty rates that were at least 2.5 times that of the state.
❚ The three ZIP codes with the highest purge rates — 85281, 85034 and 85007 — were in Tempe and Phoenix. Voters in those areas were purged at more than twice the rate of the county as a whole.
❚ The lowest voter-purge rates were in ZIP codes in Gilbert, Waddell and Peoria — 85298, 85355 and 85383 — areas that on average have smaller minority populations and have less poverty.
❚ Although the voter purges tended to be in areas with larger minority populations and higher poverty rates, it wasn’t the case in every area.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona sued the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office this year, claiming the state doesn’t update voter-registration information when individuals change their address on their driver’s license.
The suit was filed on behalf of the League of Women Voters of Arizona, Arizona’s chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens and multiple voter-registration organizations.
ACLU sued after requesting in early August that Secretary of State Michele Reagan’s office update the addresses of more than 500,000 people to reflect new addresses they provided when they updated their Arizona driver’s licenses. The intent of the lawsuit was to ensure those individuals could vote in Tuesday’s general election.
Reagan said she was working with the Arizona Department of Transportation to make those changes next year. But Reagan’s bid for re-election ended in the primary, which means it will be left to Arizona’s new secretary of state to implement any potential changes.
Reagan said the current system has been in place for more than 10 years and any changes must be managed carefully, given that it involves several systems and state agencies, including ADOT and county recorders, so voters’ information is handled securely.
“What they were asking for was not good for voters because it could have led to massive confusion of people’s addresses getting changed right before an election,” she said. “These changes or upgrades are planned for 2019, which is a non-election year, and to us that makes the ACLU lawsuit just a moot point.”
Hill, the ACLU staff attorney, said a judge refused an emergency request to force Reagan to immediately update the addresses.
The case continues, he said, but thousands of voters may run into problems at the polls Tuesday.
The National Voter Registration Act requires that, unless a voter opts out, election officials automatically update addresses on voter rolls when a person moves and updates the address on their driver’s license.
Arizona requires voters to opt in to have their registration automatically update, or to affirm the address change.
That’s a violation of federal law, Hill said.
It’s also one example of the confusing policies that create hurdles for eligible citizens to cast a ballot, Hill said.
“The system is so confusing across Arizona, there’s little uniformity for a voter who’s just trying to vote,” Hill said.
The ACLU and the Arizona voter-registration organizations it represented won a parallel fight in August. The settlement covered voting-rights violations that disenfranchised Spanish-speaking, minority and low-income voters.
Hill said certain Arizona social-services agencies weren’t providing voterregistration forms to their clients as required by federal law.
Federal voting laws, recognizing that low-income and minority voters have been historically disenfranchised, have protections to ensure voter-registration opportunities.
Under the settlement, the Department of Economic Security and the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System, or AHCCCS, agreed to send voter-registration forms in English and Spanish to about 300,000 people who had contact with the agencies between Aug. 1, 2017, and July 31.
The letters were to be mailed by the end of August to give voters time to register for Tuesday’s general election.
Additionally, ADOT, under the settlement, agreed to translate driver’s license/ID card applications into Spanish. The forms, provided at ADOT offices,include an option to register to vote.
Federal law requires that voter-registration information distributed in the four Arizona counties named in the lawsuit — Maricopa, Pima, Santa Cruz and Yuma — to be available in Spanish as well as English.
Petra Falcon, executive director of immigrant-rights advocacy group Promise Arizona, applauded the agencies.
“While the Arizona Secretary of State makes excuses as to why she can’t send a similar letter to at least 500,000 Arizonans who may have been denied their voting rights, these agencies are taking an active step to protect our fundamental right to vote,” she said in a statement following the settlement. “The right to vote is one of the most powerful tools the Latino community has.”