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The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law is a non-partisan public policy and law institute that focuses on fundamental issues of democracy and justice.

from The Brennan Center for Justice mission statement

The Brennan Center for Justice recently released two reports on the "barriers to voting" preventing eligible voters from casting their ballots. The first report deals with the purging of voter registration records.

A citizen typically cannot cast a vote that will count unless her name appears on the voter registration rolls. Yet state and local officials regularly remove-or "purge"-citizens from voter rolls. In fact, thirty-nine states and the District of Columbia reported purging more than 13 million voters from registration rolls between 2004 and 2006...

Officials strike voters from the rolls through a process that is shrouded in secrecy, prone to error, and vulnerable to manipulation.

The report goes on to state that the absence of transparency and consistency in the purging process makes it nearly impossible to determine the number of voters erroneously removed from the rolls.

The Brennan Center's second report addresses the de facto disenfranchisement from a criminal conviction.

State laws vary widely on when voting rights are restored. Maine and Vermont do not deny the franchise based on a criminal conviction; even prisoners may vote there. Kentucky and Virginia are the last two states to continue to permanently disenfranchise all people with felony convictions unless they receive individual, discretionary clemency from the governor. The remaining 46 states fall somewhere in between, with the varied state laws forming a patchwork across the country.

The lack of training for election officials in the local felony disenfranchisement policies, and the little or no communication between the criminal justice system and election offices:

result in the mass dissemination of inaccurate and misleading information, which in turn leads to the de facto disenfranchisement of untold hundreds of thousands of eligible would-be voters throughout the country.

Voter Purges - by Myrna Pérez
(September 2008; pdf, 52pp/644kB)

De Facto Disenfranchisement - by Erika Wood and Rachel Bloom
(October 2008; pdf, 24pp/272kB)