By Samuel Rubenfeld

Oh, Ohio, there you go again. But now you have five other swing states joining you.

Late Wednesday night, The New York Times reported that six swing states-Colorado, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina-and three other states, Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana, purged tens of thousands of voters from the rolls in ways that might be illegal. According to the report, all nine states may be violating the Help America Vote Act of 2002, a law designed to reform and update how elections are run across the country.

Under the law, states were required to create electronic voter lists, as well as remove duplicates, people who moved or died and others deemed ineligible to vote. However, voters cannot be removed from the rolls 90 days before an election unless they die, move out of state or are deemed unfit to vote, nor can states verify registration information using a Social Security database that is less reliable than state records, except as a last resort.

The nine states are not acting together, the Times article indicated, saying instead there were widespread mistakes during the updating process.

“For every voter added to the rolls in the past two months in some states, election officials have removed two,” the Times reported.

The purge appears to disproportionately affect Democrats, who have been much more aggressive at registering voters in this election cycle. And in Ohio, Republicans filed a lawsuit in federal court on Monday to get a list of every name flagged by the Social Security database since Jan. 1, and to have those voters cast provisional ballots, which are often not counted because they require much higher levels of identification.

Ohio is not a stranger to voting problems: in 2004, nearly 360,000 voters were prevented from casting ballots, and 80,000 votes actually cast for John Kerry were instead counted for George W. Bush, a swing of 160,000 votes in a state Bush won by little more than 110,000, according to a report in Rolling Stone. The purge efforts in Ohio during 2004 occurred much more widely in major cities, which vote Democratic, than did the traditionally Republican rural areas.

Swing states determine the election, and with voters being removed from the polls, it is unclear how the race could pan out. Experts quoted in the Times story expressed deep concern as to what this means about the U.S. electoral process.

There is no indication in the Times story about specific locations within the six states where the purges are happening most frequently, but disenfranchisement efforts usually occur in cities against low-income voters who are less likely to have the necessary identification required to cast a provisional ballot.

With only 26 days until the election, time is running out for these problems to be fixed.