Maureen Edobor Featured on NPR’s ‘All Things Considered’ Edobor contributed to a story about voter roll purges.

By Law Communications
August 3, 2026

Washington and Lee law professor Maureen Edobor was featured on NPR’s “All Things Considered” in a story examining the legal battles over how states remove ineligible voters from registration rolls in the months leading up to federal elections.

The report focuses on the National Voter Registration Act’s “quiet period,” which generally prohibits states from conducting systematic voter roll maintenance programs within 90 days of a federal election. Congress adopted the provision to help ensure that eligible voters who are mistakenly identified for removal have sufficient time to correct errors before Election Day.

Following a 2024 U.S. Supreme Court order allowing Virginia to continue removing suspected noncitizens from its voter rolls shortly before the election, several states have argued that their voter list maintenance efforts fall outside the law because they involve individualized reviews of voter records rather than the kind of systematic removal programs prohibited by the statute.

“It’s a really interesting distinction,” Edobor told NPR. “But if a state runs a database search that identifies thousands of voters using the same criteria, is that really individualized? So it seems that in many ways, we’re sort of playing this very dangerous textualist semantic game that is going to give states broad authority that Congress never intended under the statutory framework of the NVRA.”

Edobor noted that eligible voters need to take an active role in protecting their registration status as litigation over voter list maintenance continues by watching for election-related mailings.

Edobor, whose scholarship focuses on election law, constitutional law, and democratic theory, frequently provides legal analysis on issues affecting election administration and democratic governance. Her scholarship examines how constitutional and election law doctrines influence access to democratic participation and shape collective understandings of civic identity.