Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler (R) has decided not to pursue a voter purge he initiated by sending letters asking almost 4,000 voters to prove their citizenship. After 482 people responded with proof and almost 90 percent of the suspected non-citizens were verified through a federal database, Gessler planned to challenge 141 names still in question, but does not have enough time to handle the hearings before Election Day.

Instead, he is handing over the names to county clerks who may challenge them at the polls or when they receive absentee ballots. So far, one person has voluntarily come forward as a non-citizen in Larimer County. The county clerk explained:

It was a guy with a work visa. He didn’t even know he was registered to vote. Somehow we think it was a clerical mistake at the Department of Motor Vehicles when he got his driver’s license.

These remaining 141 people comprise .004 percent of Colorado voters. Gessler blamed the Department of Homeland Security for the time crunch, saying the department “dragged its feet” when Colorado and other states fought for access to a federal database of immigrants and legal residents. DHS eventually gave Gessler access, but Gessler found “no confirmed non-citizens.”

Nine thousand citizens in Harris County, Texas recently received letters warning them their voter registrations may be cancelled because they might be dead. If they were in fact still alive, these voters had 30 days to respond or be purged from the rolls.

But on Monday, Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector and voter registrar Don Sumners announced he would not purge any of the contested names from the voter roll, at least until after the election. After receiving about 300 complaints from the allegedly deceased voters, Sumner decided the list of names compiled by the Texas Secretary of State was too unreliable.

“We’re not even going to process any of the cancellations until after the election. Because we’ve gotten such a response from people that say that they are still alive,” he said.

Harris County is the birthplace of the Tea Party group True the Vote, which champions voter purges and voter ID laws.

While the state regularly purges dead voters from the rolls using data from the Bureau of Vital Statistics, Texas passed a bill requiring the Secretary of State to use data from the Social Security Administration to widen the net. The Houston Chronicle reports:

“The process is nothing new,” [Secretary of State spokesman Rich Parsons] said. “What’s new is the use of the Social Security Administration’s death master file. The Social Security Administration, as I understand it, had made clear to our office that they don’t guarantee or provide any assurance of the accuracy of their list.” [...]

In some cases, the voter’s birth date, name, or other identifying data is considered a strong enough match to death records to remove the voter from the roll automatically; when the match is weaker, the voter is sent a letter giving him an opportunity to prove he is alive. Last week’s batch mailing was unusually large, local and state officials said.

The dead voter is a popular phantom in voter fraud lore. South Carolina launched an investigation in the winter but could find no evidence of dead people voting.

GOP efforts to purge the voter rolls in Florida and Colorado have so far come up with almost no noncitzens, NPR reports. The two states fought to gain access to an immigration database compiled by the Department of Homeland Security to compare against their voter rolls. Armed with this federal database, Florida claims the purge has identified “several” noncitizens out of 2,600 names, while Colorado admits they have “no confirmed noncitizens”:

Colorado, which along with Florida was initially denied access to the database, says that an automated check of more than 1,400 names has flagged 177 people as possible noncitizens. Colorado has asked the Department of Homeland Security, which maintains the database, to assign a person to verify their status.

“For the moment, we have no confirmed noncitizens, but I would expect that most of those people would come back as noncitizens,” says Andrew Cole, a spokesman for Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler.

Colorado’s Secretary of State sent letters to 4,000 voters asking them to prove their citizenship. 482 people have provided proof, while 1,000 letters were returned because of wrong addresses.

The database is being used to check for legal residents possessing green cards or work visas, who are prohibited from voting. Nearly 60 percent of Florida’s list of suspected noncitizens are Latinos. The state’s past voter purge lists have been riddled with errors, including hundreds of citizens who were given just 30 days to prove their citizenship or be barred from voting.

Both states are planning new purges before November. Voter purges are currently ongoing dozen states, all of which have Republican election officials.

Since 2009, a Tea Party organization called True the Vote has been stoking the recently ignited fervor for voter purges and voter ID requirements currently winding their way through state courts. The Houston-based group has involved itself in every major election in the past three years, purporting to defend election integrity from widespread voter fraud.

Wisconsin’s election to recall Gov. Scott Walker (R) was the most recent test drive for True the Vote’s vote suppression project. During the June recall election, a voting hotline received numerous calls from college students claiming True the Vote “poll observers” challenged their right to vote. These poll observers exploited a provision in the state’s new GOP-sponsored voter ID law to claim it was illegal for students home for the summer to vote in local precincts if they had been home for less than 28 days. Others were hassled for proof of residency.

Minority voters in Wisconsin also reported harassment by True the Vote’s white poll watchers, who took notes and watched as the predominantly black line of voters cast their ballots. When Walker survived the recall election, True the Vote congratulated their poll watchers on “a victory of their own making.”

Prior to their efforts in Wisconsin, a judge ruled that their use of poll watchers in Texas’ 2010 elections amounted to an illegal contribution to the Republican Party.

Now, Colorlines reports, True the Vote is planning to take this localized strategy national in November. A major component of this effort will be gathering “evidence” to assist the group’s longer term work to enact voter ID laws and other legislation addressing the nearly nonexistent problem of in-person voter fraud.

As it is more likely that a person will be struck by lightning than that they will commit in-person voter fraud, proponents of voter ID laws have had trouble coming up with enough fraud examples to justify potentially disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of low-income and minority voters. True the Vote is hoping to change that by policing elections with untrained poll watchers heavily recruited from Tea Party events. These poll watchers will record common irregularities like mismatched addresses, typos, or dual registration errors as “fraud” to create the false impression that voting restrictions are justified:

As one strategy, the group buys voter rolls from states and counties, then disseminates the lists to thousands of largely unsupervised volunteers, who are urged to submit to election officials names from the rolls that may be improperly registered.[...] True the Vote encourages recruits to “build relationships with election administrators” because “they control the access to the vote,” as [elections coordinator] Ouren told a gathering in Houston. In 2010, the group was able to get a list of voter registration data from Republican Harris County registrar Leo Vasquez, who reportedly refused the same to the Democratic Party, for which the party sued. When the King Street Patriots submitted to him their list of fraudulent actions they claimed to see at the polls, Vasquez accepted them without verification and held a press conference with Engelbrecht asserting Harris County polls were “under a systemic and organized attack.”

As ThinkProgress has documented, these purge lists are often riddled with errors and frequently disenfranchise legitimate voters. But volunteer voter purges are just one part of the multi-pronged strategy True the Vote will use, in the courts and at the polls, to influence the November election — and, if they can, every election to come.

Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler (R) sent a letter to approximately 4,000 registered voters asking them to prove that they are actually eligible to vote. The letter targets voters who “presented a non-citizen document when [they] applied for a driver’s license,” although it admits that the fact that someone once applied for a license before becoming a citizen is not proof that they did not become naturalized before registering to vote. The letter includes a form and instructions to return it if the voter is indeed a citizen.

It’s not yet clear what Gessler plans to do to people who do not return the attached form — according to the Denver Post, Gessler merely said that he would “work with county clerks to decide what to do with registered voters who do not respond.” Gessler does have a history, however, of heavy-handed efforts that disenfranchise lawful voters.

In 2011, Gessler prohibited elections officials from mailing ballots to voters who did not vote in 2010 and had not returned a postcard asking them to reactivate their registration. When Denver’s county clerk defied this order, a judge ultimately ruled in her favor, warning that Gessler’s order could irreparably prevent voters from casting their ballot in the next election. Notably, Gessler’s 2011 voter suppression effort was so overbroad it even targeted many military voters who were deployed overseas.

Gov. Rick Scott’s (R-FL) handpicked Secretary of State Ken Detzner announced on Tuesday that the administration will soon begin another voter purge to remove “ineligible” voters from the rolls before the November 6 election. Florida county election supervisors remain wary of the effort, however, telling ThinkProgress that they may not have enough time to implement the purge.

Last month the U.S. Department of Homeland Security agreed to a request from Florida and other states to allow them to compare voter rolls against the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database. Though it is unclear how this list can logistically be used by the states, Detzner told elections supervisors the state would be developing a list of names for “additional actions in accordance with applicable laws.”

But even if Scott’s purge survives multiple lawsuits challenges its timing and legality, the mechanics of removing people from the voting rolls between now and the November elections may render Detzner’s efforts moot.

Volusia County Supervisor of Elections Ann McFall (R) told ThinkProgress that she has received no communication from the state whatsoever and does not see how she would have time to carry out the effort:

The law hasn’t changed for the process we have to go through. You’re looking at the letter going out [to those identified by the state as potentially non-citizen voters], then they get 30 days to respond, [then the county would] advertise the names in the paper, [and after that it would require an additional] 30 days to remove [the voters] from the records. I don’t think we can do it. Physically, I don’t think we can do it. That doesn’t mean we can’t check to see after the election [if any non-citizens voted]… I don’t want anyone on the books who isn’t eligible, but that’s what the odd-numbered years are for.

In other words, it would take at least 60 days between when the counties sent out letters and when the counties could remove any voters from the rolls. With the election just 83 days away, that does not leave much time.

Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher (D) — who refused to comply with the initial purge effort after determining that the Scott administration’s error-riddled list was “not credible” — expressed similar skepticism about the viability of a new purge effort. In an interview with ThinkProgress, she noted that before even sending out letters to voters, county supervisors must determine whether the allegation against the voter is “is credible and reliable.” She added:

We’re in election mode. We have a lot of responsibilities in the presidential election cycle. Our major focus is to be prepared to hold general election. Logistically [any new purge effort] would be challenging. We’d like to work with the Division of Elections and the Secretary to make sure our rolls are accurate. We want to have clean voter rolls, but we want to make sure we are not unduly taking people who shouldn’t be taken off off.

If these two supervisors are any indication, Scott’s Ahab-like quest to purge voters from his state’s voter roles may have to wait until after November.

More than 170,000 people have been purged from New Mexico’s voter rolls — and among them are a prominent voting rights activist, as well as the wife of a Democratic state representative.

State Rep. Brian Egolf (D) told the AP that his wife received a letter saying that the state government considered her an inactive voter, and that she would need to, essentially, re-register before she could vote in the fall.

In an even more ironic move, a woman whose job is to ensure voting rights for New Mexicans was rendered an “INACTIVE” voter by the state. Diane Wood, the Voting Rights Director for Common Cause New Mexico, has been an active voter since 1971, and has dedicated her life to making sure other people have the same right.

Wood released a video expressing her disappointment:

Yesterday, I got a postcard… telling me I had to maybe confirm my address when I went to vote. I’m not even sure what I would need to confirm my address, because I’ve looked over the statute, since I do voting rights, and it doesn’t even have anything in the statute telling me how I would confirm that. I’m just shocked that I took my job to fight for other people’s right to get their vote counted, and now I’m having to fight for my own.

About 14 percent of New Mexico’s registered voters were mailed the same letter that Wood and Egolf’s wife received, because, according to New Mexico’s Secretary of State Dianna Duran, the state is required to begin the voter purge and will send the mailing to anyone whose address bounced back since 2005.

Those people will still be able to vote without verifying their information until 2014, though many may be confused by the letter, which is arriving right before the 2012 elections.

Catalist, a company that provides voting list data to progressive organizations, is among the closest observers of changes to voting rolls around the country. In analysis shared with ThinkProgress, the company observes that since November 2008, certain groups of living residents have been far more likely to be purged from the voting roles than others.

Their data suggests that beyond the wide variation in purge rates across states, there is significant variation within states:

In many states, certain parts of the state electorate, both geographically and demographically, are much more likely to be dropped off of the voter rolls than others. More specifically, some general trends that we see are focused on:
a. Urbanity – cities are getting disproportionately purged
b. Race – minorities are getting disproportionately purged
c. Marital Status – unmarried people are getting disproportionately purged
d. Age – younger (< 40 years old) and older (> 65 years old) voters are purged more frequently than middle-aged voters
e. County effects – there are big differences across county lines, pointing to sharp discontinuities based on arbitrary political boundaries that do not correspond with inherent behavioral differences

Catalist notes that more than 2.7 million living people who voted in 2008 have since been purged from the voter rolls. Among those, African American voters are “1.5 times more likely to be purged than Caucasian voters, nationally.”

These findings are consistent with what we have seen in Florida with Gov. Rick Scott’s (R) error-riddled purge attempts. A Miami Herald analysis showed that “Hispanic, Democratic and independent-minded voters [were] the most likely to be targeted” by that effort.

Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), who led the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s efforts in the 1960s to ensure voting rights for all Americans, said last month that these purges of eligible voters from the rolls make him “want to just cry, after people gave a little blood, after some people were beaten, shot and murdered trying to help people become registered voters.” He lamented that “states throughout the nation come along with tactics to make it hard, to make it difficult for people to participate. We should be making it easy and simple and open up the political process and let all of the people come in.”

Instead, Scott and others are pushing efforts that may make it impossible for these millions of U.S. citizens to exercise their right to vote. These numbers show that regardless of whether the intent of these purges is discriminatory, their effect clearly is.