Most Republican states have made voting harder since 2020. Our research shows how successful they’ve been – The Conversation
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Excerpt:
In late September, the governor of the state of Oklahoma, Kevin Stitt, boasted that election officials had removed 453,000 people from the state’s voter rolls since 2021. In a state with only 2.3 million registered voters, it appears that roughly one in six registered voters had been purged.
While some of these people were dead or disfranchised owing to felony convictions, nearly 200,000 of them were removed for being “inactive voters”. This means they likely failed to respond to a postcard sent to their mailing address.
Voters can re-register if they were incorrectly removed, but this “voter list maintenance” process still creates a barrier to democratic participation.
Unsurprisingly, Oklahoma historically has one of the lowest voter turnout rates in the United States.
This bucks the national trend. Overall, across the United States, electoral turnout has increased in presidential and midterm elections since 2018. Americans feel, now more than ever, that elections have high stakes.
And some states have made it easier to vote. Minnesota, for example, allows voters to register online or at the polls on Election Day.
