Congress must strengthen Federal Voter Protections before coming elections

The 90-day blackout period in the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) is essential for protecting the voting rights of eligible citizens. Calls to eliminate or modify this provision are misguided attempts to enable widespread voter purges that will disproportionately disenfranchise marginalized communities. The blackout period serves as a critical safeguard against mistaken removal of legally registered voters from rolls in the lead-up to elections when registration data is closely scrutinized. As multiple court rulings have affirmed, purges conducted too close to Election Day inherently risk improperly stripping citizens of their fundamental right to vote due to inevitable errors in matching data across records. Claims of rampant voter fraud enabling by inaccurate voter rolls are simply not supported by evidence. Exhaustive audits, such as the one recently conducted in Georgia, have consistently found vanishingly small numbers of noncitizen registrants - in Georgia's case just 0.0002% of all voters. Meanwhile, the negative impacts of purges on communities of color are well-documented, such as the disproportionate numbers of Black voters targeted in Raffensperger's ongoing removal of over 400,000 Georgia registrations. Rigorously maintaining accurate voter rolls is certainly important, but must be balanced against the real and significant risk of disenfranchising eligible voters through overly aggressive purges enabled by gutting the NVRA's 90-day protection. I urge you to reject any calls to weaken this vital voting rights safeguard and instead uphold the NVRA's provisions as passed to increase access to the ballot for all Americans.