“If this is [a] really important thing to you in your life, voting, you probably would have done so within a six-year period,” Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State Jon Husted told The Hill on Thursday.
Husted asserted that over 2 million records of people who have moved or died since 2011 were deleted, and that the same process is being carried out for infrequent voters. He claims that those being purged are sent a postcard to inform them of the revocation of their right to vote.
Over 144,000 voters have been purged in the three biggest counties, but it remains unclear how many have been expelled statewide. In a potentially revealing development, an analysis conducted by Reuters found that Democrats are being purged at twice the rate of Republicans in the key swing state.
In New York, over 100,000 voters were purged by the New York City Board of Elections prior to the state’s April 19 primary. The issue is currently under investigation by the state attorney general’s office.
The board has refused to take responsibility for the purge and has consistently blamed voters for the confusion.
“A certain amount of this does come down to voter responsibility. You can’t impart information on an audience that is not hungry for it,” Michael Ryan, the board’s executive director, told CBS2. “So folks who are going about their lives, and if they’re not paying attention to the process until the last minute and they just go to the poll site without doing any further investigation, they’re doing themselves a disservice and they’re doing a disservice to the other folks who might be inconvenienced because they’re coming to the poll site to vote and the process is being slowed down by people who shouldn’t be there in the first place.”
