Legal techniques to obstructing elections? analyzing the effects of voter purging on voter turnout in Georgia

Voter purging is a federally mandated process used by state legislatures to routinely clean voter registration rolls. Georgia's Secretary of State, Brian Kemp, has been criticized for using purging as a political tool to suppress voter participation by removing certain blocs of voters to influence election results of his own 2018 gubernatorial election. Using county-level panel data of Georgia's voter purging and election turnout from general election years of 2008-2018 to conduct a fixed effects regression, this paper finds that voter purging causes a negligible -0.022% effect on votes. Though voter purging may have miniscule effects to election outcomes, further discussions must be made on the effects of purging on other electoral processes.