I sometimes wonder if Utah is a petri dish for ALEC and the GOP.
Most of the purged voters reside in Salt Lake County which has the largest Democratic Party voting block in Utah.
According to this 2010 report, there were approximately 500,000 registered voters as of 2010.
2010 Salt Lake County - Candidate Booklet
So the purge of 60,000 (divided by 500,000) in Salt Lake County is equal to 11%.
However, in 2008 approximately 370,000 voters voted in 2008. So 60,000 (divided by 360,000) purged votes equals 16%.
That's quite a chunk.
Utah purges tens of thousands from voter rolls
More than 76,000 Utah voters have been dropped off the voter rolls this year in a move that Democrats in the state say smells fishy, but elections officials say it’s a routine housecleaning move.
The vast majority of those who have been moved off the voter roles have been in Salt Lake County, where officials shifted about 60,000 voters to an "inactive status" if they hadn’t voted or signed a petition in the past several elections.
An additional 30,000 who hadn’t participated in between eight and 12 years were moved to "hold" status, meaning their names stay in the system, but they are not included in the official voter rolls sent to polling places.
Voter purging has a history.
Shelby County, Tennessee, 2009
'Caught Red Handed': Voting History Records of Black Dems Systematically Purged in Tennessee
488 voters had their histories erased. ALMOST ALL VOTERS WERE BLACK
Of course Florida has a long history with the issue of voter purging.
Florida’s Voter Purge is Part of a Long History
In 2000, Secretary of State Katherine Harris conducted a flawed purge of felons that resulted in thousands of eligible voters being stricken from the rolls, disproportionately Democrats and minority voters. The election won George W. Bush the Presidency. The purge was overseen by his brother, then-Florida Governor Jeb Bush. The election was decided by 537 votes, or perhaps by five: the majority of the Supreme Court that ruled in the case of Bush v. Gore.
I am not suggesting anything is fishy about the Utah voter purge this year. I have no information.
However, it seems obvious that voter purging is yet another tool for the GOP to use.
Federal Voting Commissioners AWOL As Election Approaches, Voter Roll Purges Could Spread To At Least 12 States
When John Rossler showed up at a mid-July gathering of the nation’s top election officials in San Juan, Puerto Rico, he delivered the kind of big election news that can easily get lost. Rossler is a U.S. Department of Homeland Security official who oversees a collection of immigrant information databases known as the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program. Rossler told the group that he was prepared to grant access to SAVE, even though the system was not designed to help states verify voter eligibility.
SAVE, I just love these acronyms.
Save what?
But voting rights advocates aren’t convinced concerns about voter roll integrity are driving interest in SAVE. ”The claim that this is all born of some kind of organic and emerging set of concerns is laughable,” said Judith Browne-Dianis, co-director of the Advancement Project, a Washington, D.C. nonprofit that advocates for voting rights.