Between November 2015 and April 2016, over 63,000 Democratic voters in Kings County — the most populous county in New York, which houses Brooklyn — were removed from the county’s voter rolls. WNYC recently reported that out of all 63 counties in the Empire State, all but seven saw increased Democratic voter registration in the past six months. Erie County, which houses Buffalo, had approximately 3,000 fewer registered Democrats. Bronx County lost roughly 5,000 Democrats.
But Kings County’s drop in registered Democratic voters dwarfs all the other counties’ drops by a long shot. In fact, the drop amounts to a staggering 7 percent decrease in the number of registered Democrats in the borough.
To be moved from the “active” list of voters to the “inactive” list, a registered voter has to fail to participate in two consecutive federal elections, or for four years. But what’s peculiar about Kings County is that while the drops in Democratic voter registration in Erie County and Bronx County can be explained by a higher number of voters now listed as “inactive,” there are only 10,000 new “inactive” voters in Kings County. This means that some 50,000 voters are entirely unaccounted for in the system.