The Most Brazen Attempt at Voter Suppression Yet

[KingOrfeo]

From Slate:

The Most Brazen Attempt at Voter Suppression Yet

New revelations show GOP officials in key battleground states are attempting to purge millions of minorities from the voter rolls.

By Jamelle Bouie

Let’s assume—despite what most liberals suspect—that the most vocal voter ID boosters are sincere. That, as National Review’s Rich Lowry argues in Politico, they want nothing more than to protect the vote from fraud with a minor imposition on the time and effort of prospective voters. “Where you come down on this issue,” he writes, “really depends on whether you think it’s reasonable to require the minimal effort to establish your identity by producing an ID at the ballot box or not.”

Fair enough. That’s a reasonable sentiment. Despite substantial evidence to the contrary, Republicans and other voter ID supporters don’t want to make it harder for more vulnerable voters to cast a ballot—although that’s the practical outcome of an ID requirement—they just want to secure the process and protect the integrity of the vote.

But this doesn’t explain the Republican-led push to end or limit same-day registration (condemned by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie as a “trick”) and early and weekend voting, procedures used most by minorities, black Americans in particular. Nor does it explain an incredible effort just uncovered by Al Jazeera America that could shift the direction of the midterm elections.

According to a six-month-long investigation conducted by Greg Palast for Al Jazeera, “voting officials in 27 states, almost all of them Republicans, have launched what is threatening to become a massive purge of black, Hispanic, and Asian-American voters. Already, tens of thousands have been removed from voter rolls in battleground states, and the numbers are set to climb.”

Specifically, officials have a master list of 6.9 million suspected “potential double voters.” And in Virginia, Georgia, and Washington the lists are “heavily over-weighted with names such as Jackson, Garcia, Patel, and Kim,” all common to Democratic-leaning minority groups.

The process for checking those names, a computer program called Crosscheck—touted by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a vocal supporter for voter identification—is incredibly inaccurate. “The actual lists,” notes Al Jazeera America, “show that not only are middle names mismatched, and suffix discrepancies ignored, even conflicting birthdates are disregarded. Moreover, Crosscheck deliberately ignores any Social Security mismatches, in the few instances when the numbers are even collected.”

Given the tight races in Georgia and other battleground states, even a small number of false positives could turn the tide of an election, giving a strong advantage to Republican candidates for statewide and congressional offices.

Yes, voting officials have to prune the rolls of deceased or inactive voters. The question is whether they’re taking the narrowest route and trying to avoid mistakes. They aren’t; compared with other voter lists, Crosscheck is incredibly broad with a strong bias toward removing people from the rolls. And the means for verifying voter identity—sending postcards to addresses on file—puts the burden of proof on individual voters and is almost designed to take people off the rolls; with false positives and duplicate names, there’s no guarantee that anyone gets their verification card, to say nothing of voters who have moved or don’t have a permanent address.

Whether Republican officials are trying to nudge the electorate in the GOP’s favor is almost beside the point—since, intentions aside, that’s what’s happened. And when you take this out of its isolation chamber and put it in context—a world where Republicans want voter identification and reduced early voting and stiffer registration laws—it looks like a pattern of deliberate suppression, where some officials prune voter rolls with lists of minorities while others make it harder to vote altogether.

This news comes just a day after the verdict in Georgia, where a state judge denied a petition from the New Georgia Project—a group that spearheaded registration drives across the state—to process 40,000 missing registration forms, striking a blow to voter mobilization efforts in the state. Last month, after it submitted 80,000 forms, Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp accused the group of fraud and opened an investigation into its voter drives. Soon after, thousands of forms went missing, prompting this lawsuit.

Again, it’s the pattern that makes this suspect; the consistent effort from GOP officials, lawmakers, and judges to make voting more difficult, or facilitate efforts in that direction. Conservatives across the country are working to weaken voting laws and put new barriers to the ballot box. And in every case, Democratic constituencies are those most affected.

Which is why it’s hard to take pro-ID arguments—like Rich Lowry’s—in good faith. Liberal and Democratic claims of voter suppression aren’t just about voter identification, they’re about the package of policies and techniques that burden voters and shrink the electorate in the process. Indeed, it’s worse than this. Voter ID advocates insist that their reasonable moves are intended to protect the integrity of the process and the sanctity of the vote, but the reality is that their policies have created confusion and chaos for hundreds of thousands of voters. Put another way, there’s not a serious Republican effort to expand the electorate and bring new people into the process. But there is a major one to do the opposite. And it hasn’t popped up in response to threats to the sanctity of the vote—even conservatives are beginning to acknowledge there isn’t much voter fraud—it’s emerged in a world where electorates are increasingly filled with people who don’t support Republicans. It’s brazen, it’s indefensible, and it needs to end.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Anyone care to defend the practices described above? Anyone? Beuller?

 

[KingOrfeo]

Remember Jeb Bush's Florida voter-roll purge pre-2000?

Rick Scott tried to do the same in 2012. Federal court ruled it illegal.

 

[KingOrfeo]

From Al Jazeera:

Jim Crow returns

Millions of minority voters threatened by electoral purge

By Greg Palast for Al Jazeera America

Published on Wednesday, Oct. 29, 2014

Election officials in 27 states, most of them Republicans, have launched a program that threatens a massive purge of voters from the rolls. Millions, especially black, Hispanic and Asian-American voters, are at risk. Already, tens of thousands have been removed in at least one battleground state, and the numbers are expected to climb, according to a six-month-long, nationwide investigation by Al Jazeera America.

At the heart of this voter-roll scrub is the Interstate Crosscheck program, which has generated a master list of nearly 7 million names. Officials say that these names represent legions of fraudsters who are not only registered but have actually voted in two or more states in the same election — a felony punishable by 2 to 10 years in prison.

Until now, state elections officials have refused to turn over their Crosscheck lists, some on grounds that these voters are subject to criminal investigation. Now, for the first time, three states — Georgia, Virginia and Washington — have released their lists to Al Jazeera America, providing a total of just over 2 million names.

The Crosscheck list of suspected double voters has been compiled by matching names from roughly 110 million voter records from participating states. Interstate Crosscheck is the pet project of Kansas’ controversial Republican secretary of state, Kris Kobach, known for his crusade against voter fraud.

The three states’ lists are heavily weighted with names such as Jackson, Garcia, Patel and Kim — ones common among minorities, who vote overwhelmingly Democratic. Indeed, fully 1 in 7 African-Americans in those 27 states, plus the state of Washington (which enrolled in Crosscheck but has decided not to utilize the results), are listed as under suspicion of having voted twice. This also applies to 1 in 8 Asian-Americans and 1 in 8 Hispanic voters. White voters too — 1 in 11 — are at risk of having their names scrubbed from the voter rolls, though not as vulnerable as minorities.

If even a fraction of those names are blocked from voting or purged from voter rolls, it could alter the outcome of next week’s electoral battle for control of the U.S. Senate — and perhaps prove decisive in the 2016 presidential vote count.

“It’s Jim Crow all over again,” says the Rev. Joseph Lowery, who cofounded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Martin Luther King, Jr. Lowery, now 93, says he recognizes in the list of threatened voters a sophisticated new form of an old and tired tactic. “I think [the Republicans] would use anything they can find. Their desperation is rising.”

Though Kobach declined to be interviewed, Roger Bonds, the chairman of the Republican Party in Georgia’s Fulton County, responds, “This is how we have successfully prevented voter fraud.”

Based on the Crosscheck lists, officials have begun the process of removing names from the rolls — beginning with 41,637 in Virginia alone. Yet the criteria used for matching these double voters are disturbingly inadequate.

Millions of mismatches

There are 6,951,484 names on the target list of the 28 states in the Crosscheck group; each of them represents a suspected double voter whose registration has now become subject to challenge and removal. According to a 2013 presentation by Kobach to the National Association of State Election Directors, the program is a highly sophisticated voter-fraud-detection system. The sample matches he showed his audience included the following criteria: first, last and middle name or initial; date of birth; suffixes; and Social Security number, or at least its last four digits.

That was the sales pitch. But the actual lists show that not only are middle names commonly mismatched and suffix discrepancies ignored, even birthdates don’t seem to have been taken into account. Moreover, Crosscheck deliberately ignores Social Security mismatches, in the few instances when the numbers are even collected. The Crosscheck instructions for county election officers state, “Social Security numbers are included for verification; the numbers might or might not match.”

In practice, all it takes to become a suspect is sharing a first and last name with a voter in another state. Typical “matches” identifying those who may have voted in both Georgia and Virginia include:

■ Kevin Antonio Hayes of Durham, North Carolina, is a match for a man who voted in Alexandria, Virginia, as Kevin Thomas Hayes.

■ John Paul Williams of Alexandria is supposedly the same man as John R. Williams of Atlanta, Georgia.

■ Robert Dewey Cox of Marietta, Georgia is matched with Robert Glen Cox of Springfield, Virginia.

Are you on the crosscheck list?

Al Jazeera America visited these and several other potential double voters. John Paul Williams of Alexandria insists he has never used the alias “John R. Williams.” “I’ve never lived in Georgia,” he says.

Jo Cox, wife of suspected double voter Robert Glen Cox of Virginia, says she has a solid alibi for him. Cox “is 85 years old and handicapped. He wasn’t in Georgia. Never voted there,” she says. He has also never used the middle name “Dewey.”

Twenty-three percent of the names — nearly 1.6 million of them — lack matching middle names. “Jr.” and “Sr.” are ignored, potentially disenfranchising two generations in the same family. And, notably, of those who may have voted twice in the 2012 presidential election, 27 percent were listed as “inactive” voters, meaning that almost 1.9 million may not even have voted once in that race, according to Crosscheck’s own records.

Al Jazeera America met with Kevin Antonio Hayes at his home in Durham. He is listed as having voted a second time, in Virginia, with the middle name Thomas, Hayes and his mother insist that he did not vote at all.

Minority last names are overrepresented in Crosscheck lists

Mark Swedlund is a specialist in list analytics whose clients have included eBay, AT&T and Nike. At Al Jazeera America’s request, he conducted a statistical review of Crosscheck’s three lists of suspected double voters.

According to Swedlund, “It appears that Crosscheck does have inherent bias to over-selecting for potential scrutiny and purging voters from Asian, Hispanic and Black ethnic groups. In fact, the matching methodology, which presumes people in other states with the same name are matches, will always over-select from groups of people with common surnames.” Swedlund sums up the method for finding two-state voters — simply matching first and last name — as “ludicrous, just crazy.”

Helen Butler is the executive director of Georgia’s Coalition for the Peoples’ Agenda, which conducts voter drives in minority communities. Any purge list that relies on name matches will contain a built-in racial bias against African-Americans, she says, because “We [African-Americans] took our slave owners’ names.” The search website PeopleSmart notes that 86,020 people in the United States have the name John Jackson. And according to the 2000 U.S. Census, which is the most recent data set, 53 percent of Jacksons are African-American.

Georgia Democrats angered by stealthy purge

In North Carolina, Republican officials are loudly proclaiming their hunt for alleged double voters using Crosscheck. But in nearby Georgia, Democratic leaders say they are shocked that they have been kept in the dark about the state’s use of Crosscheck lists — and the racial profile of the targeted voters.

“It’s biased, I think, both in form and intent,” says Rep. Stacey Abrams, leader of the Democrats in the Georgia state legislature. “But more concerning to me is the fact this is being done stealthfully. … We have never had this information presented to us.”

Abrams, in her second role as founder of New Georgia Project, a nonpartisan voter registration group, has, in coordination with the NAACP, already sued Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brian Kemp, on behalf of 56,001 voters who filled out registration forms but have yet to see their names appear on voter rolls.

Abrams is especially concerned that the Crosscheck list was crafted by GOP official Kobach. “I believe that Kris Kobach has demonstrated a very aggressive animus towards people of color … in voter registration,” she says. Abrams is now threatening legislative and legal action against Kemp.

Butler is particularly incensed that she was not informed of the use of Crosscheck’s list, because she is also a member of the board of elections in Morgan County, Georgia.

Butler invited Al Jazeera America to join a group of elderly African-Americans taking a van to Adamsville Recreation Center in Atlanta on Oct. 13, the first day of early voting. All were from a senior home next to Ebenezer Baptist Church, from where, six decades ago, King, Jr. led the movement for voting rights for African-Americans. It is also, according to Crosscheck, a hive of suspected double voters, 10 at that single address. One of them, Joseph Naylor, 62, told Al Jazeera America that to save his vote he had to file a sworn and witnessed affidavit that he had not voted in both Georgia and Louisiana.

“That is just total voter suppression,” Butler says. According to her, the idea of hundreds of thousands of Georgians illegally voting twice is “crazy. That is totally crazy, for someone to vote in two places. That’s kind of odd because we have a hard time getting them to vote [in] one place.”

Kemp did not respond to requests for comment.

The Asian-American Crime Wave

Al Jazeera America showed the Crosscheck lists to Martin Luther King III, who succeeded his father and Lowery to lead the SCLC. He notes that using shoddily put-together lists of supposed matches is not a new tactic. The capture of common names is certain to ensnare black voters, he says, and reminds him of the presidential race of 2000, when Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris wrongly purged voters from a list of nearly 58,000, many of them African-American. They were purged on the grounds that they were felons and thus banned from voting, which helped to hand the presidency to George W. Bush. Yet not one was found guilty of voting illegally. Once again, King notes, this minority-heavy list falsely flags fraudulent voters. Compared to the prior purge, this new one is more sophisticated, he says. “I hate to characterize it as a trick [but] it really is. It really is about trying to control who can and cannot vote.”

Interviewed at his home, King stands in front of a photo with his father and grandfather, taken when he was nine years old. “And I think [of] my dad, my grandfather, my mother and so many others who fought and gave their lives … so we might have the right to vote,” King says. “We purport to be the greatest in the world. But yet, in 2014, we are tying people’s hands and keep — trying to keep them from voting?” he asks. “We should be making it easier.”

Now, for the first time, the accusation of double voting threatens a new, fast-growing demographic: Asian-Americans.

“I think the Asian community would be shocked to see that we are the most criminally suspect of the bunch,” says Helen Ho, commenting on the number of Chungs, Parks and Kims on the suspected double-voter lists.

Ho is a civil-rights attorney who heads Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta, based in Doraville, a legal-advocacy center in the heart of the Asian immigrant community in Georgia.

“Most of us are naturalized citizens,” she says. “Most of us have to take the citizenship exam. So we know the Constitution and the rules much better than most Americans. … So the question is, ‘Why would a disproportionate number of Asian-Americans risk breaking the law to vote twice?’ ”

On seeing his name on the list of potential double voters, Sang Park, an elderly volunteer with the advocacy center, mutters, “It’s outrageous!” Park is not upset that his name appears in the list — Sang Park is roughly as common in Korea as John Jackson is among African-Americans — but that Crosscheck has obviously not cross-checked Social Security numbers.

Ho explains that a crude purge based on common names is sure to include disproportionate numbers of Asian-Americans. “I think anyone that actually paid some mind to the way Asian-American names work, our last names and first names in common usage, would know that there’d be a disproportionate impact. I’m sure the Latino community’s the same.” In fact, a sixth of all Asian-Americans share just 30 surnames and 50 percent of minorities share common last names, versus 30 percent of whites.

AAJA is a nonpartisan group, but Ho understands, she says, why one party would be tempted to purge voters from her community. While it was widely reported that more than 90 percent of African-Americans voted for Barack Obama in 2012, many may not realize that 73 percent of Asian-Americans, whether from India, China or the Pacific Islands, favored the Democrat.

A crime wave without criminals

With millions of suspects, one question keeps arising: Why have there been no mass convictions? Kobach proudly proclaims that Kansas has “referred” 14 voters for prosecution for double voting. And none of them has been convicted.

Yet demands to purge lists of double voters have reached a histrionic volume. In April of this year, former presidential counselor Dick Morris told Fox TV audiences that “probably over a million people that voted twice in [the 2012] election. This is the first concrete evidence we’ve ever had of massive voter fraud.”

In North Carolina, state officials have hired former FBI agent Charles W. “Chuck” Stuber, who played a major role in the campaign finance fraud case brought against former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, to, in the words of their press release, “investigate cases of possible voter fraud identified by an interstate cross-check comparing election records from 28 states.”

But despite knowing the names and addresses of 192,207 supposed double voters in the state, Stuber has not nabbed a single one in his five months on the job. Josh Lawson, a spokesman for the board of elections, says, “This agency has made no determination as to which portion of these [lists] represent data error or voter fraud.” In fact, to date, Lawson admits that Stuber has found only errors and not one verified fraudulent voter.

But Lawson did shine a light on the great benefit of the Crosscheck manhunt to the state’s Republican Party, now locked in a tight battle over the U.S. Senate seat of incumbent Democrat Kay Hagan. While the use of Crosscheck has yet to produce a single indictment of a double voter, Lawson says, the program could be used for “list maintenance.” That is, voters on the list, proven guilty or not, could be subject to a process of removal from the voter rolls.

Purge by postcard

Crosscheck instructs each participating state to send a postcard or letter to suspected double voters, requiring them to restate and verify their name and address, sign the card and return it. While this seems a benign way to save one’s voting rights, the problem, says voter advocate Butler, is that few people are likely to notice, fill out and return such a card. She reviewed the one being sent out in Georgia, which she says “looks like a piece of trashy mail that you get every day that you just throw away.”

Direct-mail expert Michael Wychocki was shown a sample postcard. First, he says, 4 percent to 20 percent of any mailing goes astray — leaving voting rights at risk for more than a million citizens simply from wrong and changed addresses. And, crucially, there’s an enormous difference between rich and poor. “The African-American Williams family, renters, may move every year,” he says, “but the Whitehall family in the million-dollar home is barely likely to have moved.”

“It looks as if they’ve broken every direct-marketing rule,” creating a card that seems guaranteed to not be returned, says Wychocki. He explains that marketers know people glance at unsolicited mail for no more than two seconds apiece, and this “single-touch” approach — no follow-up phone calls, emails, radio campaigns or other secondary-outreach methods — ensures a low response rate. Notably, neither Kansas nor other Crosscheck states will reveal how many cards are returned or how many people thereby lose their vote.

To Wychocki, the mailings are suspect, designed by people who “attempted to purposely suppress response through obfuscation.” These are likely quite different than Kansas’ income-tax demands, he says, and from Kobach’s campaign mailings. The direct-mail expert questions why people are asked to prove where they live. “American Express knows where you live,” he says.

Washington state drops Crosscheck

According to Crosscheck, close to a quarter of a million voters in Washington state are potential double-voting fraudsters. The Republican secretary of state, Kim Wyman, has no plans to use the Crosscheck list, preferring instead a far narrower matching program, the Electronic Registration Information Center, funded by the research and public-policy nonprofit the PEW Charitable Trusts. Notably, the ERIC lists require an exact match in several of these fields — among them, driver’s license number, Social Security number, email and phone — as opposed to just name and date of birth. Eleven states, plus the District of Columbia, are members of ERIC.

Virginia agreed to supply Al Jazeera America with the state’s ERIC match list despite a contract requiring confidentiality. That list, with only 37,405 names, was a fraction the size of Crosscheck’s, which tagged over a third of a million Virginians.

Al Jazeera America reached one of ERIC’s creators, the Pew Trusts’ David Becker, in Baltimore. He is dismissive of Crosscheck’s claim of finding legions of fraudulent double voters. Even of ERIC’s own lists, he says, “99.999 percent of those people would not be thinking of voting twice in two states.” He adds, “There’s no widespread evidence of voting in two states. There’s a real problem of millions of people registered in more than one state — though this is hardly an indication of fraud.”

In fact, the purpose of ERIC is not just to remove names but also to add those who are eligible to vote but have not yet registered, Becker says. States that use the ERIC lists must agree, by contract, to find those who have moved or who have an outdated registration in another state and add them to the voter rolls. Postcards or letters must be sent to the unregistered to get them on to the rolls and to the dual registered to update their information.

The Vigilante Integrity Project

What pushed North Carolina to use an ex-FBI agent in tracking down alleged double voters through the Crosscheck list? Al Jazeera America traced the state’s involvement in Crosscheck to lobbying by a group of self-proclaimed vote-fraud trackers, the Voter Integrity Project. Al Jazeera America met the vote-theft vigilantes at their offices in a strip mall in Raleigh.

VIP’s director, Jay DeLancy, exhibits a stern and sincere concern over keeping fraudsters off the voter rolls. His group has garnered much media attention for exposing suspected voting by the dead, by foreigners, by felons and, now, by double voters. This has made him a welcome guest at Tea Party events. Unfortunately for DeLancy and VIP, not a single zombie, alien, criminal or body double has, in fact, been captured based on their accusations. Nevertheless, DeLancy says his group did convince the Republican leadership of North Carolina’s legislature to adopt Crosscheck and hire FBI agent Stuber.

DeLancy says he is on the trail of an unnamed double voter who is “currently on the run.” The unnamed man is, he admits, a traveling salesman, so “on the run” may mean “on the job.”

What DeLancy does not have, however, are the Crosscheck lists. Stuber has denied all requests, including several from Al Jazeera America, for a copy of the North Carolina list of supposed double voters. But unlike VIP, Al Jazeera America was able to construct much of the North Carolina roll from lists released by other states.

One of those suspected of voting twice lives a five-minute walk from the VIP offices. When confronted with his name on the Crosscheck list as a voter in both Fairfax, Virginia and in Raleigh, North Carolina, Robert Blackman Finnel Jr. confesses that he indeed once lived and voted in Virginia. But, he protests, “I swear on a stack of Bibles” that he was not in, nor voted in, that state in the 2012 election. His oath is in doubt, however, as, from his wheelchair, the senior-home resident did not appear to be able to lift more than one Bible at a time.

 

[unregistered]

 

[RobDownSouth]

Al Jizz? Really? KO now goes to an enemy Third World propaganda source for information on American voting.

Shoot dat messenger, Gunny Pantload!

Add to that phenomenal body count you bragged about in Vietnam!

#PewPewPew

Oooooh Rah!
http://i1239.photobucket.com/albums/ff502/Soonyigump/Warhero_zps72a8b46b.jpg

 

[KingOrfeo]

Al Jizz? Really? KO now goes to an enemy Third World propaganda source . . .

Not even you believe that.

What gives weight and credibility to the story in particular is the name on it: Greg Palast. He has a very good track record in this kind of journalism.

 

[unregistered]

 

[unregistered]

 

[KingOrfeo]

Read an American source instead:

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/391474/non-citizens-are-voting-john-fund/page/0/1

You tell a brazen lie about Al Jazeera English being a "propaganda source," and then you offer me up something from the National Review, which has never since it was founded pretended to be anything else?! That's both dishonest and stupid even for you.

 

[unregistered]

 

[Sean]

Al Jazeera America was born as the opposite of Current TV, possessing no political point of view and no opinion program in favor of hard news and in-depth reporting.

Do you ever actually read the stuff you c+p?

 

[unregistered]

 

[Sean]

That's what they claimed but this is the reality:

"Being the unofficial cheerleader and pseudo-mouthpiece for Hezbollah, Hamas and ISIS won’t endear you to American audiences."

But that just isn't true. The very piece you quoted said they are losing viewers because Americans are too fucking dumb to appreciate unbiased, in depth news.

 

[Colonel Hogan]

From Al Jazeera:

Jim Crow returns

Millions of minority voters threatened by electoral purge

By Greg Palast for Al Jazeera America

Published on Wednesday, Oct. 29, 2014

Election officials in 27 states, most of them Republicans, have launched a program that threatens a massive purge of voters from the rolls. Millions, especially black, Hispanic and Asian-American voters, are at risk. Already, tens of thousands have been removed in at least one battleground state, and the numbers are expected to climb, according to a six-month-long, nationwide investigation by Al Jazeera America.

At the heart of this voter-roll scrub is the Interstate Crosscheck program, which has generated a master list of nearly 7 million names. Officials say that these names represent legions of fraudsters who are not only registered but have actually voted in two or more states in the same election — a felony punishable by 2 to 10 years in prison.

FACT:

1. The Interstate Crosscheck program is a voluntary, cooperative effort among member states to share voter registration information for one purpose only: to identify POTENTIAL DUPLICATE VOTING RECORDS of the SAME INDIVIDUAL in TWO OR MORE DIFFERENT STATES. The inference that a "master list of 7 million names" represent "legions of fraudsters" who have "actually voted in two or more states" is a crock of shit which no sane individual associated with the program would or, I wager, has EVER claimed.

2. NOTHING in the Crosscheck program AUTHORIZES CRIMINAL INDICTMENT of ANY PERSON charged with violating federal or state election laws, NOR DOES IT STIPULATE THE CONDITIONS OR FACTS BY WHICH ANY VOTER WOULD LAWFULLY BE PURGED FROM ANY VALIDATED LOCAL OR STATE VOTER REGISTRATION DATABASE. All criminal enforcement and maintenance authority of voter registration records remain with the individual states. (See bullet point four, page 9 of this link http://www.empowerthevotetx.org/uploads/KANSAS.pdf).

3. Authority to reconcile APPARENT duplicate records between different states remains with those respective states, and common sense and even a cursory knowledge of law should make it obvious to anyone that, where no evidence of illegal activity exists or successful prosecution has taken place with regard to any individual associated with a duplicate voting record, the interest between the affected states is not to PURGE BOTH VOTING RECORDS, but rather to VALIDATE THE EXISTING voter registration in the APPROPRIATE STATE OF RESIDENCE.

4. The Crosscheck program DOES NOT in any manner ADDRESS APPARENT DUPLICATE VOTER REGISTRATIONS WITHIN A SINGLE, GIVEN MEMBER STATE, but neither has it any ability nor does it expend any effort to identify and/or exclude such records from the universe of records which any state submits to the program for comparative analysis with that of other member states. Obviously, such unscrubbed lists are where the initial estimates of “millions of duplicate records” originate from. BUT THAT'S NOT CROSSCHECK'S FAULT. BLAME THE INDIVIDUAL STATES SUBMITTING THE DATA.

Already, tens of thousands have been removed in at least one battleground state, and the numbers are expected to climb, according to a six-month-long, nationwide investigation by Al Jazeera America.

TRUE!! If for no other reason than more states keep joining Crosscheck every year. The program had only four participants in 2005, but grew to 15 in 2012, 21 states in 2013 and added another seven last year. More participating states mean more presumably duplicate records submitted for possible matching.

And for those of you assuming that all new states represent eager initiates fervently desirous of joining the latest government racial conspiracy, you would have to explain why traditionally liberal states like Michigan, Illinois, Ohio and most recently Pennsylvania found themselves in the Crosscheck fold.

Does Crosscheck's use of fewer rather than a greater number of search elements result in a return of more, rather than less, FALSE duplicate records between states? Almost certainly. But again, the impact of "bad data," to whatever degree it exists, IS NOT THE PROXIMATE CAUSE OF RACIAL DISCRIMINATION, OVERT OR OTHERWISE, PRACTICED BY THE PARTICIPATING STATES. One may need to repeat that as many times as is necessary for it to penetrate "one's" thick skull.

Crosscheck instructs each participating state to send a postcard or letter to suspected double voters, requiring them to restate and verify their name and address, sign the card and return it.

The Crosscheck program might “suggest,” but it has no authority to “instruct” any state or local jurisdiction on how to maintain their voter registration records. No better evidence of this fact is illustrated than by this observation in the same Al Jazeera article:

According to Crosscheck, close to a quarter of a million voters in Washington state are potential double-voting fraudsters. The Republican secretary of state, Kim Wyman, has no plans to use the Crosscheck list, preferring instead a far narrower matching program, the Electronic Registration Information Center, funded by the research and public-policy nonprofit the PEW Charitable Trusts.

Of course, the big news in Washington was that such considered, fair-minded action was actually unilaterally taken by a Republican. Who would have thunk it?

Certainly not King Orf of LIT.

 

[NeverEndingMe]

KingofAssTards ... you are a fucking idiot

 

[Colonel Hogan]

Remember Jeb Bush's Florida voter-roll purge pre-2000?

Rick Scott tried to do the same in 2012. Federal court ruled it illegal.

Which has absolutely nothing to do with the Interstate Crosscheck Program or the larger issue of validating either of two duplicate voter registrations between states and purging the other.

 

[Colonel Hogan]

Not even you believe that.

What gives weight and credibility to the story in particular is the name on it: Greg Palast. He has a very good track record in this kind of journalism.

Consider his sterling track record substantially tarnished.

If Greg Palast does not understand the authority and mechanism by which states maintain accurate voter registration records and the total LACK of DIRECT LEGAL EFFECT Crosscheck has on either that authority or those mechanisms, then he is not qualified to write graffiti on the side of a city bus.

Either that or he intentionally slanted a story to create an impression he most certainly knew was false. I don't see any other options here.

Bueller? Bueller?

 

[patient1]

Anyone care to defend the practices described above? Anyone? Beuller?

I think "Voter fraud" and "voter suppression" are hot-buttons the political operators use to get their base/ organization outraged and motivated to overcome those perceived injustices.

Since I know nothing of these computer programs, save what I read here, I have nothing to add on that account.


I'll stick to what I do know, and I think purging the voter roles is a good thing.

In my birth state of Pennsylvania, there was a primary and a general election held every year. I can't remember a single special, run-off, or re-call election.
Everything was decided in the spring or fall elections, at the usual times.

You had to register at least 30 days before the election. You could do that with a free form found in your local post office, no postage required. Then you got a registration "card" in the mail. It's really easy, although there are still organized efforts by the parties as well.

You might need to show it the first time you voted, but basically comparing signatures was all that was needed ever after, and the election officials and workers would tend to recognize you if you were a regular voter.

Now, that registration could last you the rest of your life if you exercised your franchise.

If you missed 4 consecutive elections ( either in person or by absentee ballot ) you would be purged from the voting rolls. You would have to re-register.

1) It removes dead people that stop voting.

2) It removes people that move away, pursuing careers.

Now that may not seem very important to you, but allow me to explain PA.
It used to be the third most populous state, behind CA NY. Now TX has nearly twice the votes in the electoral college, and FL half again as many as PA has now.

It hasn't been that great at creating jobs over the decades, and a lot of the ones it had have been shipped overseas or to the sunbelt, where you don't have the added costs of unionization and constructing for snow and ice loads. So people move away.

There are something like 260 institutions of higher learning in PA ( still #3 !) Lots of people come to the state or move within it to get educated, then go away again. Lots of Poli Sci students and other idealists eager to get students registered and voting for one reason or another.

Others move to be near their grandchildren, or to retire in a milder climate.

I never heard of criminals trying to vote being a factor, but old people don't commit as much crime.

Not only are these surplus names on the voter rolls a temptation for shenanigans, they clog up the system, making the lists longer, the files fuller, slowing down the voting process as well as impeding get out the vote efforts.

 

[Beachbum18966]

From Slate:

The Most Brazen Attempt at Voter Suppression Yet

New revelations show GOP officials in key battleground states are attempting to purge millions of minorities from the voter rolls.

By Jamelle Bouie

Let’s assume—despite what most liberals suspect—that the most vocal voter ID boosters are sincere. That, as National Review’s Rich Lowry argues in Politico, they want nothing more than to protect the vote from fraud with a minor imposition on the time and effort of prospective voters. “Where you come down on this issue,” he writes, “really depends on whether you think it’s reasonable to require the minimal effort to establish your identity by producing an ID at the ballot box or not.”

Fair enough. That’s a reasonable sentiment. Despite substantial evidence to the contrary, Republicans and other voter ID supporters don’t want to make it harder for more vulnerable voters to cast a ballot—although that’s the practical outcome of an ID requirement—they just want to secure the process and protect the integrity of the vote.

But this doesn’t explain the Republican-led push to end or limit same-day registration (condemned by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie as a “trick”) and early and weekend voting, procedures used most by minorities, black Americans in particular. Nor does it explain an incredible effort just uncovered by Al Jazeera America that could shift the direction of the midterm elections.

According to a six-month-long investigation conducted by Greg Palast for Al Jazeera, “voting officials in 27 states, almost all of them Republicans, have launched what is threatening to become a massive purge of black, Hispanic, and Asian-American voters. Already, tens of thousands have been removed from voter rolls in battleground states, and the numbers are set to climb.”

Specifically, officials have a master list of 6.9 million suspected “potential double voters.” And in Virginia, Georgia, and Washington the lists are “heavily over-weighted with names such as Jackson, Garcia, Patel, and Kim,” all common to Democratic-leaning minority groups.

The process for checking those names, a computer program called Crosscheck—touted by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a vocal supporter for voter identification—is incredibly inaccurate. “The actual lists,” notes Al Jazeera America, “show that not only are middle names mismatched, and suffix discrepancies ignored, even conflicting birthdates are disregarded. Moreover, Crosscheck deliberately ignores any Social Security mismatches, in the few instances when the numbers are even collected.”

Given the tight races in Georgia and other battleground states, even a small number of false positives could turn the tide of an election, giving a strong advantage to Republican candidates for statewide and congressional offices.

Yes, voting officials have to prune the rolls of deceased or inactive voters. The question is whether they’re taking the narrowest route and trying to avoid mistakes. They aren’t; compared with other voter lists, Crosscheck is incredibly broad with a strong bias toward removing people from the rolls. And the means for verifying voter identity—sending postcards to addresses on file—puts the burden of proof on individual voters and is almost designed to take people off the rolls; with false positives and duplicate names, there’s no guarantee that anyone gets their verification card, to say nothing of voters who have moved or don’t have a permanent address.

Whether Republican officials are trying to nudge the electorate in the GOP’s favor is almost beside the point—since, intentions aside, that’s what’s happened. And when you take this out of its isolation chamber and put it in context—a world where Republicans want voter identification and reduced early voting and stiffer registration laws—it looks like a pattern of deliberate suppression, where some officials prune voter rolls with lists of minorities while others make it harder to vote altogether.

This news comes just a day after the verdict in Georgia, where a state judge denied a petition from the New Georgia Project—a group that spearheaded registration drives across the state—to process 40,000 missing registration forms, striking a blow to voter mobilization efforts in the state. Last month, after it submitted 80,000 forms, Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp accused the group of fraud and opened an investigation into its voter drives. Soon after, thousands of forms went missing, prompting this lawsuit.

Again, it’s the pattern that makes this suspect; the consistent effort from GOP officials, lawmakers, and judges to make voting more difficult, or facilitate efforts in that direction. Conservatives across the country are working to weaken voting laws and put new barriers to the ballot box. And in every case, Democratic constituencies are those most affected.

Which is why it’s hard to take pro-ID arguments—like Rich Lowry’s—in good faith. Liberal and Democratic claims of voter suppression aren’t just about voter identification, they’re about the package of policies and techniques that burden voters and shrink the electorate in the process. Indeed, it’s worse than this. Voter ID advocates insist that their reasonable moves are intended to protect the integrity of the process and the sanctity of the vote, but the reality is that their policies have created confusion and chaos for hundreds of thousands of voters. Put another way, there’s not a serious Republican effort to expand the electorate and bring new people into the process. But there is a major one to do the opposite. And it hasn’t popped up in response to threats to the sanctity of the vote—even conservatives are beginning to acknowledge there isn’t much voter fraud—it’s emerged in a world where electorates are increasingly filled with people who don’t support Republicans. It’s brazen, it’s indefensible, and it needs to end.

Yes it's about time we purge the voter rolls, from illegals, dead people, people who moved, and any other illegal tricks the libtards plan