Today’s entry: I’ve listened to your report on voter trends in Florida many times. The one piece of information missing is the amount voters from each party that were purged by the state. Please, if you know let us know. Thanks
Bottom Line: It’s three weeks until Florida’s Primary Election Day and as the election cycle heats up, so too are political inquiries. Your question is one which comes up every so often and it’s one I’m happy to address. In the monthly voter registration updates I provide, the breakouts I include are net of all changes in voter registration. The reason there isn’t a more detailed analysis in lieu of the net effect, is in an effort to not overwhelm you with numbers coming from different places. When discussing voter registration changes, there are no shortage of numbers. Related to your question, what I have included is this – the year-to-date changes in voter registration by party:
- DEM: -125,675 (-4,816 last month)
- GOP: +33,544 (+21,594 last month)
- NPA/Other: +60,604 (+15,267 last month)
Those are the net results of purges with voter rolls along with new voter registrations and voters who’ve reregistered in a new party. The Florida Division of Elections regularly reconciles Florida’s voter rolls. This includes monthly purging of ineligible voters which occurs at county level, through Supervisors of Elections, and the state level. Purging happens for the following reasons:
- Moved out of state
- Deceased
- Felony conviction
- Voter requests in writing to be removed
- Inactive for two or more years and unresponsive to state requests to remain active
Through June there are a total of 160,504 previously registered voters who have been purged from Florida’s rolls through the reconciliation process. There are two categories purged voters fall into. “Removed-Active” and “Removed - Inactive” based on the conditions I mentioned. 157,030 of the removed voters had been taken off were “removed-active”, with only 3,474 having been removed due to being characterized under Florida law as “inactive”. The two-leading causes of purges in Florida have been death and relocation out of state. This has led to my hypothesizing that part of Florida’s net loss of Democrat voters is potentially in reverse response to what's brought many more new Floridians into the fold. Governor DeSantis’ policies and the state’s political shift towards the right generally.
Now, you’d wanted a specific partisan breakout of purged voters. That’s not something that’s specifically broken out by the state. Just the net changes as recorded by county Supervisors of Elections and aggregated by the state. What we know is that Florida’s long been among the most diligent in reconciling voter rolls to aid in preventing the opportunity for voter fraud through illegible registrations. And to that end, the state the added another tool to the toolkit for voter integrity in recent years. The ERIC system.
Three years ago, the state joined ERIC or the Electronic Registration Information Center, created by the Pew Trust, for the purpose of helping reconcile voter rolls between states. The 2020 election cycle marked the first cycle the state was fully up and running with it for the purpose of comparing voter rolls in our state for duplicate registrations in other states. A total of 31 states and Washington D.C. are members of ERIC and thus able to compare rolls across states. In this regard, not only does Florida have an additional fail safe to aid in preventing multiple state registrations/voting, but we’re also able to aid others with their efforts to right their voter rolls. It’s my hope that eventually all states will join ERIC, but then again, the remaining nineteen states must want to ensure they have more accurate voter rolls.
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