Voter Rolls & List Maintenance

The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 did two opposite things at once, on purpose. It required every state to run a program that removes ineligible voters — a real, enforceable duty that private parties can sue over. And it forbade states from removing anyone for the sin of not voting, imposed a notice-and-wait procedure that stretches over two federal elections, and banned systematic removal programs inside the 90 days before a federal election. Congress was legislating against a specific history: states had spent decades purging non-voters wholesale, and the Act's sponsors wanted the rolls clean without that. Every fight since — Husted, ERIC, the Justice Department's demands, the litigation on both sides — is an argument about where the floor ends and the ceiling begins.

Nobody goes straight from the rolls to nowhere. A signal arrives — a change-of-address filing, a newer DMV address, returned mail, a cross-state match. If the voter moved within the jurisdiction, the record is simply updated. If they appear to have moved out of it, the state mails a pre-paid, pre-addressed confirmation notice. If the card comes back, the file is corrected. If it does not, the voter is marked inactive — still registered, still able to vote, but now on a clock.

The clock runs until the day after the second federal general election after the notice. Vote once in that window, or update your address, and the clock resets. Do neither and the record can be cancelled. In the 2022–24 cycle states sent nearly 40 million confirmation notices; roughly 70% were never returned, and 6.69 million registrations were eventually cancelled at the end of that four-year path — the single largest removal category in the country.

As of the 2024 general, 23.2 million people — 10.6% of all registrants — were sitting in inactive status. Whether that number is evidence of bloated rolls or evidence of a working safeguard is, almost exactly, the disagreement this page is about.

Sources: FEC NVRA reports for 1995–96 through 2001–02; EAC NVRA reports for 2003–04 through 2011–12; EAC EAVS comprehensive reports 2014 — 2024. The series starts at the earliest national total that exists — the 1995–96 cycle, the first the NVRA was in force. Solid dots are exact integers printed by the source; hollow dots are the rounded national totals the EAC published before 2016. Reporting coverage rose from 41 states (2003–04) to 52 states and territories, so read the count as a floor. The rate line is the fairer comparison and only begins in 2003–04, when the EAC first published one.

Source: EAC, 2024 EAVS, Voter Registration Table 5 (items A12b–A12k over A12a). The EAC applies casewise deletion at state level when computing each national percentage, so the shares are each valid against their own reporting base and do not sum to 100%. The top bar and the third bar are the whole argument in miniature: the largest single category is the notice-and-non-voting process the access side calls a purge, and the third largest is death, which nobody disputes.