# Inactive Voter An **inactive voter** is a registrant who has been flagged as possibly ineligible — almost always because a forwardable change-of-residence notice under 52 U.S.C. § 20507(d)(2) was not returned — but who **has not been removed from the rolls**. Inactive status is the waiting room between a database match and a removal, and under § 20507(d)(1)(B) a registrant can sit in it for roughly four years: from the date of the notice through the day after the second federal general election following it. **An inactive voter may still vote.** § 20507(e) lets a registrant who did not return the card vote at the former polling place, at a central location, or at the new polling place where state law allows, after affirming their address orally or in writing. **Nothing in the statute requires anyone to tell the voter this.** The practical result is that inactive status is discovered at the polls, by a voter who is told they are not on the list. **Why the category matters more than the removal count.** In most states an inactive registrant drops out of the "registered voters" denominator, out of absentee-ballot mailing lists, and out of party and campaign contact files, while remaining legally entitled to vote. So an argument about purge scale that counts only removals is measuring the smaller number. Mississippi's 2025–26 use of Experian address data moved at least 50,000 voters to inactive status, and voters learned of it at the 10 March 2026 primary — these were inactivations, not removals. Expand with: the state-by-state rules on what inactive status costs a registrant, whether any state requires notice of the § 20507(e) affirmation right, the treatment of an inactive voter's absentee application, and the national inactive-registration totals from the EAC's Election Administration and Voting Survey. This is a stub — created in the 2026-10-09 ASCII map build for [[How a Voter Is Removed From the Rolls]]. Expand as noted above. ## See Also - [[How a Voter Is Removed From the Rolls]] · [[Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute]] - [[Provisional Ballot]] · [[National Voter Registration Act]] · [[Help America Vote Act]] - [[Voter Suppression]] · [[Electronic Registration Information Center]]