House Republicans endorse stricter state and federal-led voter roll purges despite dearth of evidence on fraud

GOP lawmakers say they’re committed to altering national voting laws to make it easier for states to purge potentially eligible voters. 

In a congressional hearing on state voter registration practices Tuesday, Republicans on the House Administration Committee were united around common sentiments: It is too easy for citizens to register to vote and too easy for them to stay on voter rolls, states aren’t doing enough to remove ineligible voters, and it’s all led to the country’s elections being vulnerable to mass voter fraud and noncitizen voting.

There was little evidence presented to back up most of those claims.

Yet, the hearing focused on how states and the federal government could better review voter registration databases, with lawmakers hearing from two conservative nonprofit representatives  and a North Carolina voter who was wrongly removed from the state’s voter rolls last year. 

J. Christian Adams, a former Department of Justice official under George W. Bush who has since become president and general counsel of the conservative Public Interest Legal Foundation, told lawmakers that U.S. courts have interpreted the National Voter Registration Act’s requirements on voter list maintenance too loosely, by specifying only that states must make a “rational effort” to keep their voter lists updated and remove ineligible voters.

He claimed states like Michigan under Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson received an “A for effort in court” but deserve an “F for outcome.”

“Never mind if someone is registered multiple times, nevermind if a registration is missing the date of birth,” Adams said. “None of this matters under these court rulings; only whether a state makes a rational effort. Results don’t matter.”

Notably absent from Adams’s testimony was any claim or evidence that Michigan’s system for verifying citizenship has led to higher rates of voter fraud or noncitizen voting.

Justin Reimer, president and CEO of Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections, is part of a growing chorus of Republicans who are calling for changes to the 1993 National Voter Registration Act to allow states to remove voters from voter rolls closer to elections. He also called for Congress to “exempt” noncitizen removal from any restrictions.

The hearing aligned with a larger push by the GOP and President Donald Trump to argue that state voter rolls are woefully out of date and that more stringent deregistration efforts are needed to ensure noncitizens aren’t voting en masse.

The administration has waged lawsuits and filed inquiries with multiple states in recent months alleging deficiencies in their voter registration maintenance. In North Carolina, Republican Judge Jefferson Griffin convinced several state courts, including the State Supreme Court, to hold tens of thousands of voter ballots for additional scrutiny and curing around identity, leaving voters just 15 days to cure any defects before their ballots were thrown out.  

But most states do indeed conduct regular maintenance of their voter rolls, and numerous post-election audits — in some cases going back decades — conducted in Republican-leaning states like Ohio, Iowa and Georgia have failed to find more than a few dozen cases of noncitizens being registered to vote, while an even smaller fraction were found to have cast a ballot.

In a letter sent to House Administration Committee Chair Bryan Steil, R-Wis., Georgia Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger urged the committee to use his state’s policies as a “blueprint” for national election laws, including Voter ID, banning ballot harvesting of mail-in and absentee votes, and robust use of tools like the Federal SAVE database to identify and purge voters suspected of being noncitizens.

One “federal barrier” cited by Raffensperger was a section of the National Voter Registration Act that prohibits states from conducting voter roll purges less than 90 days before an election. This “quiet period” was explicitly designed to prevent states from disenfranchising large numbers of voters right before an election — when relief from the courts could come too late.

But Raffensperger pressed Congress to lift those restrictions, saying the 90-day period “restricts us from conducting systematic list maintenance in federal election years precisely when clean voter rolls are most scrutinized.”

When states like Georgia use the SAVE system, most people flagged as “potential noncitizens” are actually eligible voters. They are often citizens who were misidentified due to minor paperwork errors by election offices years ago, or individuals who have since become citizens and are now legally permitted to vote.  

A comprehensive audit of Georgia’s voter rolls by Raffensperger’s office last year found just 20 registered noncitizens out of 8.2 million registered voters. Of those 20, just nine ever cast an actual ballot in an election, with most of them prior to the implementation of citizenship verification requirements by the Georgia Department of Driver Services in 2012.

Rep. Joe Morelle, D-N.Y., ranking member of the committee, decried GOP efforts to increase voter roll purges, citing evidence that supposed noncitizen expulsions carried out by states historically disenfranchise more eligible voters. “The majority is more interested in promoting illegal and sloppy efforts to manipulate elections” than finding fraud, he said.

Mary Kay Heling, who has lived in North Carolina since 2016 and voted in prior elections, said she is one of 200,000 voters who had their ballots challenged last year by Judge Griffin, then a Republican candidate for the state’s Supreme Court. 

Heling said she registered to vote using the last four digits of her Social Security number and voted in person on Election Day, but her ballot was flagged along with 200,000 other voters as potentially suspect. She said she was told by the State Board of Elections that there was a potential mismatch around her voter information, but never clarified the actual error.

While Griffin eventually dropped his lawsuit, the Department of Justice under Trump is now suing North Carolina to force those voters to prove their identity and citizenship or lose their voting privileges. The North Carolina State Board of Elections, which recently fired its executive director and replaced her with the general counsel for state Republican Speaker Sam Hayes, has said it is beginning the process of notifying voters.

Heling said the process of proving her identity repeatedly to North Carolina officials was exhausting. She worried that “there are 200,000-plus more voters that are going to have to go through what I did,” adding that she will never truly be certain whether her vote will count in future elections.

“I will check before the next election, I will verify it again, but you should be able to register and not worry about this,” Heling said. “I will not be assured until I see it.”

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