Election officials are gearing up to remove tens of thousands of Oklahomans from the state’s voter rolls – a controversial practice voting-rights advocates say can lead to disenfranchised voters.
Oklahoma is one of seven states that allow election officials to remove names from the state’s voter registration list if they haven’t voted in several election cycles and don’t respond to address confirmation mailings.
That process, which is done every two years in Oklahoma, will begin this April.
If it’s like the last voter purge in 2017, a sizable portion of the state’s nearly 2.2 million registered voters will come off the rolls.
A list obtained by Oklahoma Watch from the state Election Board shows that 291,233 names were deleted since 2017. Of that amount, more than half were deleted due to inactivity. The purge of inactive voters occurs in April in every odd year.
