Who Gets Flagged Inactive? Race, Party, and Geography in Louisiana's Voter Rolls

This repository contains the data-processing code and Quarto report for an ACLU of Louisiana analysis of Louisiana's inactive voter rolls.

Overview

Under Louisiana law, registrants who fail to respond to an address confirmation notice are placed on an "inactive" list, a status distinct from having one's registration canceled, but a required first step toward it. Using weekly inactive voter reports and monthly registration statistics published by the Louisiana Secretary of State, this project asks:

1. How has the volume of inactive voters changed over time?
2. Does inactivity fall disproportionately on particular racial or partisan groups?
3. Where, geographically, is inactivity concentrated?

Repository Structure

├── data/                      # Stored extracted data
├── fonts/                     # Brand fonts used in the rendered report
├── images/                    # Logo and figure assets used in the rendered report
├── records/                   # Source weekly inactive voter reports
├── cleaning.r                 # Extracts and cleans raw source data
├── references.bib             # Bibliography for citations used in the report
├── report.HTML                # The final report in HTML form
├── report.pdf                 # The final report in PDF form
├── report.qmd                 # The Quarto used to create the HTML report
└── report_pdf.qmd             # The Quarto used to create the PDF report

Data Sources

• Weekly Inactive Voter Reports: PDF reports published by the Louisiana Secretary of State, obtained via public records request, listing inactive voter counts by parish, race (White, Black, Other), and party (Democrat, Republican, Other/No Party).
• Monthly Registration Statistics: Spreadsheets published by the Louisiana Secretary of State, giving the same race-by-party breakdown for all registered voters, used as denominators for inactivity rates.
• Provisional Voting Analysis Reports: Historical PDF reports on provisional ballots cast and rejected in the last four presidential general elections.

Key Findings

1. The statewide inactive voter count more than doubled in June 2025 and never returned to its prior level — most plausibly linked to a 2024 state law (Act 2) directing a canvass of registrants with a decade of voter inactivity.
2. Inactivity rates are consistently higher for Black and other-race registrants than White registrants, and for Democratic and other-party registrants than Republicans, with White Republicans the least-affected group statewide.
3. The racial gap persists within every party; the partisan gap holds within every race except among Black registrants, where it reverses.
4. Inactivity is geographically concentrated, with the highest rates in northeast Louisiana and the Mississippi Delta region.

Replication

To replicate, run cleaning.R. After the data is processed and cleaned, run report.qmd. Note that the plots require the library "LAstyle". This is an internal library for the ACLU of Louisiana. All functions in this library need to be removed to render the Quarto file.

Acknowledgement

Thank you very much to ACLU National and Rebecca Pattichis [@rpattichis] for providing code review and revisions.

Contact

If you have any questions or notice a problem in this report, please contact Elijah Appelson (eappelson@laaclu.org).