"There were all sorts of groups out there doing voter registration," says Donna Brazile who worked for Jackson and is now campaign manager for Gore. "Some time after the '86 election, massive purging started taking place. It was a wicked practice that took place all over the country, especially in the deep South. Democrats retook the Senate in 1986, and [Republican] groups went on a rampage on the premise they were cleaning up the roles. The campaign then was targeted toward African-Americans."

Other Democrats point to Philadelphia and New Orleans, which undertook zealous voter roll clean-up efforts in largely minority areas.

The standards for cleaning up the voter rolls have always varied greatly from state to state, and even city to city. Some states were purging voters who missed one presidential election. Others were more zealous in their enforcement and did not allow people to cast votes if they had moved and not re-registered, even if they moved within the same voting precinct.

By and large the fights broke down along partisan lines. Democrats charged that voting officials were violating the spirit of election laws by not erring on the side of the voter. Republicans maintained they were simply enforcing the rules, and trying to clean up a system that was ripe for corruption.

The Republican claims certainly have historical precedent. Democratic corruption has been well documented in Daley's Chicago and Long's Louisiana. "I tell my students that Chicago and Louisiana had the most civicly active populations in the world," Sabato says. "They're so active, they continued to vote after they were dead."

But Democrats charge that reasoning is still used as a cover to unfairly target eligible voters in poor and minority neighborhoods, who overwhelmingly vote Democratic.

"The purges may have picked up in the late '80s, but they have been used consistently, oftentimes right before a major election," said Ellen Spears, associate director of the Southern Regional Council. "I think it's very safe to say this is a major post voting rights act method of continuing the old South practices of limiting the impact of the black vote."

"We always thought it was being used as a political tactic," agrees Moore, who also worked for Jackson during the 1980s. "The biggest purge was right before the 1988 primaries when there was massive purging in the Southern states from Virginia through Texas. We're talking about millions of voters being wiped off the roles, hundreds of thousands in each state."

The complaints over purging reached a fever pitch by the late 1980s, particularly among members of the Congressional Black Caucus. Finally, in 1993, Democrats passed a set of federal list-purging regulations in the National Voter Registration Act, better known as the Motor Voter bill.

The thrust of Motor Voter was to make it easier for people to register to vote. It placed voter registration cards in welfare offices and state departments of motor vehicles, and required those agencies to send voter registration cards to the county registrars of voters. But it also set in place federal guidelines for purging voter rolls, in an effort to stop some of the efforts Democrats deemed overzealous. For example, the bill prohibited localities from removing voters from lists simply because they didn't vote in one or two elections.

"It was designed to set up a uniform system of list cleaning for federal elections," said Moore, who worked on the bill in Conyers' office. "Various states and counties had different standards for purging voting lists -- some did it every year, some every six months. We wanted to have standards that would have one uniform method. This was designed to get rid of some of the discretion that was being granted to different localities because there was no uniform system."

After the bill was passed, both South Carolina and Virginia sued to block implementation of the NVRA in part because of this provision. "Ultimately, South Carolina dropped its appeal but they had to agree to reinstate all the people who had been purged from the registration rolls in 1995," said Spears.

Mississippi was another state that fought the new provisions tooth and nail, according to Spears, who said actual numbers of voters purged in the '80s have been hard to come by. "The county registrars wielded enormous power because they got to determine when a purge would take place. It all took place on a county by county basis."

While purging ballot rolls may be a longstanding political tactic, it is by no means uniquely the devise of Republicans. It was also a tactic employed by Richard Daley (father of the current mayor) to maintain power in Chicago in the 1960s and '70s. "Daley remained in power because he controlled the number of voters," said Frank Watkins, who worked for Operation PUSH in the 1970s.

"It's illegal to be a Republican in Chicago," joked Watkins, "so we're talking about an internal Democratic struggle. It was a fight between reform faction and the machine. We went out and registered 2,000 voters and they took 4,000 off the rolls," Watkins said.

"They targeted a lot of poor people and black people who had just begun to vote," Watkins said. He said new voters who were not bankable Daley supporters were issued a "show cause" notice. "If you didn't go downtown and show proof of residence and ID within 10 days you were removed from the rolls."

Watkins said it was an effective way of keeping new black voters in 1970s Chicago from registering. "You work hard to get them on, and then they're knocked off. They say, forget this, it isn't worth all this stuff. They just give up. That's the way the machine limited and controlled the vote in Chicago. There's a similar scheme that's alive in the South and interestingly enough and that history is rooted in Democrats. Democrats were the Confederates, Democrats were the Ku Klux Klan, Democrats were the resisters to civil rights. That's the legacy there. Now the Republicans have moved in on the race issue."

Salon News A Salon-eye view of the day's news, with investigative reports, analysis and interviews with newsmakers.