Erasing Voters Pt. II: The Menace of Voter "Challenges"

Happy Friday!

Before you head into the weekend, check out this wild story from Pennsylvania:

Clara Osburg has lived in Allegheny County since 2011 and is a regular voter — including in last fall’s municipal election. So it came as a surprise when she received a letter in late January from the county: “Your Allegheny County, Pennsylvania voter registration has been challenged on the basis of residence.”

“At first, I thought perhaps I had done something wrong, like misfiled my taxes or something really concerning like that,” Osburg said. She hadn’t. 

Osburg didn’t know it, but she was caught up in a push by local Republicans to “clean” the voter rolls of people they think may have moved out of the county. 

An informal group of dozens of activists has filed more than 16,000 challenges since the 2022 election, with plans to file another 10,000 by year’s end….

I wrote on Wednesday that a voter “purge” is the often-unreliable process of election officials de-registering voters who may have died or moved from the area. Now, a similar threat of voter “challenges” has emerged.

A challenge is when another voter objects to any other voter’s rights simply by saying the person isn’t eligible. Once challenged, a person might have to submit evidence or even attend a hearing to stay registered and vote.

As I wrote, we already know that when election officials conduct purges, eligible voters end up wrongfully erased from the rolls. We can expect even more disenfranchisement and confusion with amateur MAGA extremists using untested AI to compile challenge lists.

And it should come as no surprise that many of the challenge lists we’ve seen so far from the extremists are made up of Black, Brown, and young voters.

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Challenges are why I write this newsletter: On one hand, they’re technical, in-the-weeds, and—honestly—boring. No one other than lawyers and election officials should know about them.

But guess who knows about challenges? The people out to undermine democracy by discriminating against voters, overburdening election officials, and creating mistrust in elections. They know about challenges, and they’ve weaponized them.

So we also need to learn and fight back. Awareness and education are step one, so we’re on our way.

My Resources page has some other ideas:

• Support groups like Power to the Polls so we have enough well-trained election workers to deal with challenges when they arise.

• Use oath.vote to direct your political donations to pro-democracy candidates who will pass less-extreme challenge laws.

• Finally, visit vote.org to check your own registration and make sure you haven’t been challenged.

And, as always, you can share this newsletter to spread the word.¹

Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend.

1. The app shows me how many times each of you have shared the newsletter. You never know when I’ll start a leaderboard and give away some major prizes!