Rhode Island Secretary of State Nellie Gorbea has found 150,000 people wrongly placed on the state’s voter rolls, The Providence Journal reported Wednesday.
During the 2016 election, the state held a total of 781,770 registered voters. According to The Providence Journal, almost 65,000 names were cleared away since Gorbea became R.I. Sec of State in 2015. An additional 30,000 were classified as “inactive.”
Gorbea said she would not describe it as “fraud.” She added, “It’s really just inaccuracies.”
It is a difficult process to purge voters from the rolls as a result of Rhode Island law and federal law. The Providence Journal notes that if an official election mailer is sent back as undeliverable, the voter can be simply called inactive. But if the voter does not cast a ballot in the next two federal elections, that voter can be removed from the rolls.
Last month, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case in their next term to examine how the state of Ohio purges names of registered voters who do not regularly cast ballots.
“Maintaining the integrity of the voter rolls is essential to conducting an election with efficiency and integrity,” Ohio Sec. of State Jon Husted, the plaintiff in the case, said in a statement to The Washington Post last month.
“I remain confident that once the justices review this case they will rule to uphold the decades-old process that both Republicans and Democrats have used in Ohio to maintain our voter rolls as consistent with federal law,” he added.
