When Betty Burrus arrived at her Shelby County voting precinct to cast her ballot in May’s local election, she was told she couldn’t vote — because she was listed as deceased.
Her husband had died, and his name had been taken off the voter rolls, as Tennessee law requires. “They purged him but they purged me at the same time,” Burrus, 93, said in a phone interview. “I’ve been voting in every election my entire life since I was 21,” and she wants to keep voting, she said.
Tennessee voters can be taken off the voter rolls legally for a number of reasons. Just over 79,000 names were removed from the state’s rolls for the six months that ended on Dec. 1, 2021, according to the most recent information available online. Situations such as the one Burrus experienced do happen, but they are rare and can be corrected, election officials and observers in Tennessee said.
All states have voter list maintenance procedures, Amanda Zoch, the National Conference of State Legislatures’ project manager, elections and redistricting, said in an email. “Removing large numbers of voters from a list can be quite typical because each year a certain percentage of registered voters will die, move out of state, etc.”