Voters disappearing from rolls in secret purges
It's normal for states to periodically review lists of voters and remove any who have moved, died, or been convicted of felonies. BUT, something has to be done to oversee and control this process so it doesn't become easy to manipulate for partisan purposes.
A new study by the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice reports that secret voter purges were conducted this year, including 10,000 voters knocked off the rolls in Mississippi and another 21,000 purged in Louisiana...areas hit hard by recent hurricanes.
And at least 19 states are disregarding a federal law banning systematic voter purges within 90 days of a federal election.
The U.S. Public Interest Research Group says that massive purges of registered voters have occurred recently in Alabama, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Texas and Washington.
The Brennan Center reports:
* In Columbus, an official purged 700 people from the voter lists, according to the study, because they were ineligible to vote due to criminal convictions. The list included people who had never even received a parking ticket.
* And in Wisconsin, some voters discovered they had been purged after they tried to cast ballots in September’s primary election.
* In Mississippi earlier this year, a local election official discovered that another official had wrongly purged 10,000 voters from her home computer just a week before the presidential primary.
* In Muscogee, Georgia this year, a county official purged 700 people from the voter lists, supposedly because they were ineligible to vote due to criminal convictions. The list included people who had never even received a parking ticket.
The purges happen in secret with no public accountability...voters are being improperly removed from the rolls because of clerical errors, or small mismatches in names or addresses and don't know about their removal from the rolls until they show up at the polls and are denied a ballot.
Read about it here:
http://www.brennancenter.org/content/resource/voter_purges
And CBS did a piece on it:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/09/30/eveningnews/main4490682.shtml
Voters can check their registration status and confirm their polling place here:
http://www.votersunite.org/info/RegInfo.asp
As a solution, the Brennan Center recommends that we need the government to start a nationwide universal voter-registration system.
Waldman said: "...when you register once, you stay registered. The government keeps the list. You can prevent fraud. You can prevent people who aren't eligible from voting. But everybody who's eligible gets to vote."
Doing something like this could add up to 50 million more people to the voter rolls every year.
Hey, the government keeps track of our taxes and social security...why not voters too?
There's the possibility of voter purges being used to target minorities or other groups for partisan purposes. "We don't know all the problems, but we know that there's a huge potential for partisan mischief," Waldman stated.
The Republicans will try to steal this election any way they can. For examples of this see www.republicantricks.com
Remember back in 2004, when Florida tried to remove 48,000 "suspected felons" from its voter rolls...even though many of them were eligible to vote? They compiled a list of 22,000 African Americans (who usually vote Democratic) to be purged and -- get this -- only 61 voters with Hispanic surnames, in spite of Florida’s large Hispanic population. Voting rights groups finally pressured Florida officials to not use the purge list.
The last arrow in the GOP quiver is vote suppression.
