Abstract
Voter list maintenance has received increasing attention in the popular press and from advocacy groups in the past few years. Little scholarly work, however, has detailed who is removed - or "purged" - despite no change in their legal eligibility to vote. This paper leverages data from North Carolina to investigate the characteristics of purged individuals between 2010 and 2016. Although we find that minority voters were less likely than white voters to be purged, they were significantly more likely to cast a provisional ballot after being purged despite no change in their eligibility to vote. Purged minorities who cast a provisional ballot were also less likely to have their provisional ballots counted than white voters. This paper presents the first evidence that imprecise voter list maintenance disproportionately disenfranchises voters of color.