14 ms·

Indiana Purging Voters Using Software That’s 99% Inaccurate

156 points by clumsysmurf 9y ago

mox1 9y ago
Too add a data point, here is a list of the 10 most common <FirstName, LastName> pairs in the United States. https://blogs.ancestry.com/cm/calling-james-smith-10-most-common-first-and-surname-combinations/ https://blogs.ancestry.com/cm/calling-james-smith-10-most-co... I hesitate to guess ethnicity based on names, but I see mostly Caucasian and Latin names (Smith is represented heavily).
- alphabettsy 9y ago
  Many immigrants and especially African-Americans that are decendants of slaves have/use anglo-ized names rather than traditional names associated with their ethnicity.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- thephyber 9y ago
  I think the goal is less to target racial groups directly, but rather to target those who are less likely to have the desire, the knowledge, or the resources to rectify the issue. This tends to target the poorest Americans -- either those who can't afford to take time away from work to get the documents required to re-register or those who simply would give up after finding out they are not registered.
- bcg1 9y ago
  It is correct to hesitate to guess ethnicity based on names. Quite sure there are plenty of people of color named Smith and Johnson. Also, even if these were Caucasian names, the article states that the system disproportionately targets people of color; looking at the 10 most common combinations proves nothing one or another with respect to the assertion in the article.
kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
New York purged me back in 2010 and I was forced to vote provisional despite voting there consistently for many years. The fail extends all around.
- wavefunction 9y ago
  Happened to me in 2016. In Texas, provisional votes are 'reviewed' by an unelected group of inhabitants of the county, in this case a very conservative one. Guess what? They tossed my vote despite me never having any issues voting in Texas before in a liberal county just to the south, both counties comprising a significant part of Austin. I feel like folks who arbitrarily strip other citizens of their civil rights should be imprisoned for lengthy periods of incarceration.
- fencepost 9y ago
  And odds are high that your provisional ballot was simply tossed unless you contacted your county Board of Elections, probably with documentation to prove that you were allowed to vote and probably within just a few days after the election. What happens with provisional ballots is very highly variable, but quite frequently ends up with them simply being tossed.
  - taserian 9y ago
    Are they tossed because of malicious intent, or because they can't change the outcome of the election? For example, if the outcome of the election has Candidate X ahead of Y by D votes (D = X - Y) and there are less than D provisional ballots to count, is there a reason to count them? (This being for a simple one-post election; if there are multiple posts where proportion of votes allows for a seat being won/lost by a party, the formula would have to be different.)
    - fencepost 9y ago
      > Are they tossed because of malicious intent, or because they can't change the outcome of the election? Highly variable, but I'm pretty sure it's a lot more to do with the laws of the states than with whether there are enough provisional votes to matter. In looking up some things for an earlier comment I saw one mention of persons casting a provisional ballot then having 3 days to bring proof of eligibility to the county Board of Elections and a separate mention (for another state) of the Board of Elections investigating provisional ballots and informing voters if their ballot was discarded instead. I'd be surprised if anyplace had a law of "you don't have to count them if there aren't enough to change the outcome," but I've been surprised before.
Bud 9y ago
This is a crime. The power to unregister voters must be forcibly taken away from states; especially red states, since they are the only ones abusing this power. It should require federal action, instead.
- simonh 9y ago
  Well that's a non-starter, I'm sure people are de-registered for perfectly legitimate reasons all the time. But yes clearly this is an egregious abuse of power. Here in the UK local councillors have been jailed and punitively fined for pursuing voter registration and de-registration policies that were politically motivated. It's considered a serious crime.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  > It should require federal action Shooting from the hip is a good way to trash a democracy. What you're proposing would allow a single, centralized actor to purge voters from the rolls. De-centralised systems will always have longer, more-idiotic tails. That's the tradeoff for their robust central tendencies.
  - pjc50 9y ago
    Most countries have centralised voter registration. Often tied to ID and other registration systems.
    - JumpCrisscross 9y ago
      > Most countries have centralised voter registration Most democracies haven't lasted more than a century. De-centralisation is an annoying but core feature of American democracy. It's wise to be conservative when discussing its dismissal, particularly in respect of something as fundamental as voting.
      - bjelkeman-again 9y ago
        New Zealand was one of the first countries to offer universal adult suffrage in 1893. Which is a decent definition of a modern democracy. Sweden, where I live, was a bit late and got it voted on in 1919 and the first election in 1921. So just under a century now.
pulisse 9y ago
De rigueur pointer to a discussion of the birthday paradox for those who don't understand why the combination of first name, last name, and birth date is an unavoidably flawed way of uniquely identifying individuals: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bring-science-home-probability-birthday-paradox/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bring-science-hom....
- ThrustVectoring 9y ago
  Personal anecdote: my parents used a pediatrician who identified minor patients by first + last + birth month. The office had to start using middle initial as well to disambiguate me from another patient.
  - fencepost 9y ago
    Separate personal anecdote. My wife changed gynecologists after receiving a message on our answering machine with very sensitive and concerning medical data that was not for her. She hadn't even seen the doctor in question for more than 9 months, had never had any indication of the problems in question (but had had tests done that could have identified such) and was generally thoroughly freaked out by this. Turns out the practice had another patient with the same name and was just a little sloppy about which person got called.
- mjevans 9y ago
  Natural keys are no substitute for unique fully synthetic identifiers... Synthetic identifiers SHOULD identify zero or one entities (zero if the reference is not presently valid). Upon lookup, /verification/ should still occur at an operator level.
adamw2k 9y ago
Lawsuit was filed shortly after SB 442 was passed (which is what allowed the process to begin): http://www.naacp.org/latest/naacp-files-lawsuit-indiana-unlawful-voter-purges/ http://www.naacp.org/latest/naacp-files-lawsuit-indiana-unla... Sadly, it will have to work its way through the court while names continue to be purged.
- rtkwe 9y ago
  Doesn't have to, the NAACP applied for an injunction that would stop the purges while the case is making its way through the court. It's basically the first step any time a law or something like this is challenged in the court. Couldn't find any follow up articles from a (admittedly super cursory) search saying if it was granted though.
danblick 9y ago
In the US, there's a lot of concern about making it easy for voters to register and stay registered, because in the past officials used this to disenfranchise blacks in the south and minority groups. I think they are not paying enough attention to the risk of intentional voter fraud (by hostile outsiders) in the modern world. In the last election, Russian election manipulation became a big topic because they hacked e-mail servers and placed some fake news ads. Can you imagine what it would have done to the country if they had actually placed fraudulent votes in key districts? Would you have accepted Donald Trump as president if there had been serious questions about whether he'd been elected by fraudulent votes? This is not really that hard to imagine! The system today is pretty vulnerable to manipulation by outsiders, and the discussion about voter disenfranchisement is keeping us from fixing that...
- ch4s3 9y ago
  That's complete nonsense. The Supreme Court and several district courts have found states like North Carolina to be actively using purges and registration changes for the purpose of disenfranchising voters. Furthermore, if you want to protect the integrity of the vote, registration is the last logical place to start, as in person fraud is vanishingly rare. Only 2 people were charged with doing so in this past election, 2. If we want to secure the machines, that is a totally different scenario, and unrelated to purging voter rolls.
  - wang_li 9y ago
    It doesn't get charged often because there are parties that fight tooth and nail to prevent the implementation of processes that would allow the detection of ineligible voters voting. It is shown in every election cycle that there are cases of voters voting who should not be because of their citizenship or felon status or voting in multiple districts. When you say that only 2 have been charged, why is that relevant? What number of people would be disenfranchised if the voting system required photo ID? And I mean people who literally cannot get a photo ID at all, not someone who has to pay $10 or who has to spend a few hours once every four to six years getting their ID renewed.
s73ver_ 9y ago
The inaccuracy is a feature, not a bug.
- awalton 9y ago
  Perhaps more specifically, it's its intended feature, not some goofy side-effect. The whole game here is voter suppression, and this is just one of its many new implementations as heralded under this administration's plan. Can't beat them with Gerrymandering? Deregister people who will vote against you.
  - travmatt 9y ago
    If that fails the next step is to launch lawsuits against the voting rights act, and if even that fails then you claim fraud and refuse to recognize the validity of the election, as the Republican Party in Georgia did.
deveshkhanal 9y ago
Yay, more good news.
- deveshkhanal 9y ago
  [sarcasm]
alistproducer2 9y ago
Anyone with half a brain knows that these purges are designed to advantage a side not protect the system. I read an article the other day that stated that some America's voting system had essentially been compromised on many levels. It made me think about why so many of our polls have, in the last few years, been so off the mark. Now I'm beginning to think it's not because the polling models suddenly don't work. It is quite possibly something more nefarious than that.
- brian-armstrong 9y ago
  Yeah, I remember the outrage when the original Diebold hacking announcement was made in the Bush Jr era. The concerns in that were never addressed and doubtless things have simply since got worse. If Google, Facebook et al wanted to make amends for biasing the election, they could bring some of their engineering prowess to bear on defeating systematic voting machine fraud.
  - corey_moncure 9y ago
    What does the fact that they don't do so, tell you?
  - liquidise 9y ago
    > Google, Facebook et al wanted to make amends for biasing the election I'm still surprised by the anger for this. For the purposes of the viewer, Google and Facebook are effectively media companies. By that measure, all media companies bias elections heavily during election cycles. This is done both with content and well as paid advertising. But to "make amends" for something sounds as if their influence is either unprecedented or morally wrong. Perhaps the argument is that the bias from international influences was wrong. Something else entirely? I suppose i fail to see where the real complaint here is. What behavior or lapse triggered these accusations?
    - pnathan 9y ago
      > if their influence is either unprecedented It is. That's the entire point of the "filter bubble" argument that is coming up some 8-10 years old now.
jeffdavis 9y ago
The headline is wrong. A 99% false positive rate does not mean the software is 99% inaccurate. That's a statistical fallacy.
- kafkaesq 9y ago
  It's one "kind" of inaccurate, if you will. They're just trying to simplify. They also explain exactly what they mean in the caption under the title.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
MR4D 9y ago
I get the obvious point of the article; something is clearly fishy. However, let’s look at the numbers. According to https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/IN https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/IN , the population of Indiana is roughly 6.6 million. Roughly 85% are white ( so about 5.6 million people) and ~15% are non-white ( roughly 1 million people). Now, the article says “50 percent of U.S. racial minorities share the same last names, as opposed to 30 percent of white Americans”. So just using this as an issue, about 1.7 million whites and 0.5 million non-whites hit the first hurdle. Honestly, if they really are using this against minorities, then they sure suck at it. They’ve already got MORE THAN 3 TIMES as many white folks as non-whites thru the first hurdle towards un-registering them!! Serves them right if the article is anywhere close to being correct!

156 points by clumsysmurf 9y ago

mox1 9y ago

Too add a data point, here is a list of the 10 most common <FirstName, LastName> pairs in the United States. https://blogs.ancestry.com/cm/calling-james-smith-10-most-common-first-and-surname-combinations/ https://blogs.ancestry.com/cm/calling-james-smith-10-most-co... I hesitate to guess ethnicity based on names, but I see mostly Caucasian and Latin names (Smith is represented heavily).

alphabettsy 9y ago
Many immigrants and especially African-Americans that are decendants of slaves have/use anglo-ized names rather than traditional names associated with their ethnicity.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
thephyber 9y ago
I think the goal is less to target racial groups directly, but rather to target those who are less likely to have the desire, the knowledge, or the resources to rectify the issue. This tends to target the poorest Americans -- either those who can't afford to take time away from work to get the documents required to re-register or those who simply would give up after finding out they are not registered.
bcg1 9y ago
It is correct to hesitate to guess ethnicity based on names. Quite sure there are plenty of people of color named Smith and Johnson. Also, even if these were Caucasian names, the article states that the system disproportionately targets people of color; looking at the 10 most common combinations proves nothing one or another with respect to the assertion in the article.

kevin_thibedeau 9y ago

New York purged me back in 2010 and I was forced to vote provisional despite voting there consistently for many years. The fail extends all around.

wavefunction 9y ago
Happened to me in 2016. In Texas, provisional votes are 'reviewed' by an unelected group of inhabitants of the county, in this case a very conservative one. Guess what? They tossed my vote despite me never having any issues voting in Texas before in a liberal county just to the south, both counties comprising a significant part of Austin. I feel like folks who arbitrarily strip other citizens of their civil rights should be imprisoned for lengthy periods of incarceration.
fencepost 9y ago
And odds are high that your provisional ballot was simply tossed unless you contacted your county Board of Elections, probably with documentation to prove that you were allowed to vote and probably within just a few days after the election. What happens with provisional ballots is very highly variable, but quite frequently ends up with them simply being tossed.
- taserian 9y ago
  Are they tossed because of malicious intent, or because they can't change the outcome of the election? For example, if the outcome of the election has Candidate X ahead of Y by D votes (D = X - Y) and there are less than D provisional ballots to count, is there a reason to count them? (This being for a simple one-post election; if there are multiple posts where proportion of votes allows for a seat being won/lost by a party, the formula would have to be different.)
  - fencepost 9y ago
    > Are they tossed because of malicious intent, or because they can't change the outcome of the election? Highly variable, but I'm pretty sure it's a lot more to do with the laws of the states than with whether there are enough provisional votes to matter. In looking up some things for an earlier comment I saw one mention of persons casting a provisional ballot then having 3 days to bring proof of eligibility to the county Board of Elections and a separate mention (for another state) of the Board of Elections investigating provisional ballots and informing voters if their ballot was discarded instead. I'd be surprised if anyplace had a law of "you don't have to count them if there aren't enough to change the outcome," but I've been surprised before.

Bud 9y ago

This is a crime. The power to unregister voters must be forcibly taken away from states; especially red states, since they are the only ones abusing this power. It should require federal action, instead.

simonh 9y ago
Well that's a non-starter, I'm sure people are de-registered for perfectly legitimate reasons all the time. But yes clearly this is an egregious abuse of power. Here in the UK local councillors have been jailed and punitively fined for pursuing voter registration and de-registration policies that were politically motivated. It's considered a serious crime.
JumpCrisscross 9y ago
> It should require federal action Shooting from the hip is a good way to trash a democracy. What you're proposing would allow a single, centralized actor to purge voters from the rolls. De-centralised systems will always have longer, more-idiotic tails. That's the tradeoff for their robust central tendencies.
- pjc50 9y ago
  Most countries have centralised voter registration. Often tied to ID and other registration systems.
  - JumpCrisscross 9y ago
    > Most countries have centralised voter registration Most democracies haven't lasted more than a century. De-centralisation is an annoying but core feature of American democracy. It's wise to be conservative when discussing its dismissal, particularly in respect of something as fundamental as voting.
    - bjelkeman-again 9y ago
      New Zealand was one of the first countries to offer universal adult suffrage in 1893. Which is a decent definition of a modern democracy. Sweden, where I live, was a bit late and got it voted on in 1919 and the first election in 1921. So just under a century now.

pulisse 9y ago

De rigueur pointer to a discussion of the birthday paradox for those who don't understand why the combination of first name, last name, and birth date is an unavoidably flawed way of uniquely identifying individuals: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bring-science-home-probability-birthday-paradox/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bring-science-hom....

ThrustVectoring 9y ago
Personal anecdote: my parents used a pediatrician who identified minor patients by first + last + birth month. The office had to start using middle initial as well to disambiguate me from another patient.
- fencepost 9y ago
  Separate personal anecdote. My wife changed gynecologists after receiving a message on our answering machine with very sensitive and concerning medical data that was not for her. She hadn't even seen the doctor in question for more than 9 months, had never had any indication of the problems in question (but had had tests done that could have identified such) and was generally thoroughly freaked out by this. Turns out the practice had another patient with the same name and was just a little sloppy about which person got called.
mjevans 9y ago
Natural keys are no substitute for unique fully synthetic identifiers... Synthetic identifiers SHOULD identify zero or one entities (zero if the reference is not presently valid). Upon lookup, /verification/ should still occur at an operator level.

adamw2k 9y ago

Lawsuit was filed shortly after SB 442 was passed (which is what allowed the process to begin): http://www.naacp.org/latest/naacp-files-lawsuit-indiana-unlawful-voter-purges/ http://www.naacp.org/latest/naacp-files-lawsuit-indiana-unla... Sadly, it will have to work its way through the court while names continue to be purged.

rtkwe 9y ago
Doesn't have to, the NAACP applied for an injunction that would stop the purges while the case is making its way through the court. It's basically the first step any time a law or something like this is challenged in the court. Couldn't find any follow up articles from a (admittedly super cursory) search saying if it was granted though.

danblick 9y ago

In the US, there's a lot of concern about making it easy for voters to register and stay registered, because in the past officials used this to disenfranchise blacks in the south and minority groups. I think they are not paying enough attention to the risk of intentional voter fraud (by hostile outsiders) in the modern world. In the last election, Russian election manipulation became a big topic because they hacked e-mail servers and placed some fake news ads. Can you imagine what it would have done to the country if they had actually placed fraudulent votes in key districts? Would you have accepted Donald Trump as president if there had been serious questions about whether he'd been elected by fraudulent votes? This is not really that hard to imagine! The system today is pretty vulnerable to manipulation by outsiders, and the discussion about voter disenfranchisement is keeping us from fixing that...

ch4s3 9y ago
That's complete nonsense. The Supreme Court and several district courts have found states like North Carolina to be actively using purges and registration changes for the purpose of disenfranchising voters. Furthermore, if you want to protect the integrity of the vote, registration is the last logical place to start, as in person fraud is vanishingly rare. Only 2 people were charged with doing so in this past election, 2. If we want to secure the machines, that is a totally different scenario, and unrelated to purging voter rolls.
- wang_li 9y ago
  It doesn't get charged often because there are parties that fight tooth and nail to prevent the implementation of processes that would allow the detection of ineligible voters voting. It is shown in every election cycle that there are cases of voters voting who should not be because of their citizenship or felon status or voting in multiple districts. When you say that only 2 have been charged, why is that relevant? What number of people would be disenfranchised if the voting system required photo ID? And I mean people who literally cannot get a photo ID at all, not someone who has to pay $10 or who has to spend a few hours once every four to six years getting their ID renewed.

s73ver_ 9y ago

The inaccuracy is a feature, not a bug.

awalton 9y ago
Perhaps more specifically, it's its intended feature, not some goofy side-effect. The whole game here is voter suppression, and this is just one of its many new implementations as heralded under this administration's plan. Can't beat them with Gerrymandering? Deregister people who will vote against you.
- travmatt 9y ago
  If that fails the next step is to launch lawsuits against the voting rights act, and if even that fails then you claim fraud and refuse to recognize the validity of the election, as the Republican Party in Georgia did.

deveshkhanal 9y ago

Yay, more good news.

deveshkhanal 9y ago
[sarcasm]

alistproducer2 9y ago

Anyone with half a brain knows that these purges are designed to advantage a side not protect the system. I read an article the other day that stated that some America's voting system had essentially been compromised on many levels. It made me think about why so many of our polls have, in the last few years, been so off the mark. Now I'm beginning to think it's not because the polling models suddenly don't work. It is quite possibly something more nefarious than that.

brian-armstrong 9y ago
Yeah, I remember the outrage when the original Diebold hacking announcement was made in the Bush Jr era. The concerns in that were never addressed and doubtless things have simply since got worse. If Google, Facebook et al wanted to make amends for biasing the election, they could bring some of their engineering prowess to bear on defeating systematic voting machine fraud.
- corey_moncure 9y ago
  What does the fact that they don't do so, tell you?
- liquidise 9y ago
  > Google, Facebook et al wanted to make amends for biasing the election I'm still surprised by the anger for this. For the purposes of the viewer, Google and Facebook are effectively media companies. By that measure, all media companies bias elections heavily during election cycles. This is done both with content and well as paid advertising. But to "make amends" for something sounds as if their influence is either unprecedented or morally wrong. Perhaps the argument is that the bias from international influences was wrong. Something else entirely? I suppose i fail to see where the real complaint here is. What behavior or lapse triggered these accusations?
  - pnathan 9y ago
    > if their influence is either unprecedented It is. That's the entire point of the "filter bubble" argument that is coming up some 8-10 years old now.

jeffdavis 9y ago

The headline is wrong. A 99% false positive rate does not mean the software is 99% inaccurate. That's a statistical fallacy.

kafkaesq 9y ago
It's one "kind" of inaccurate, if you will. They're just trying to simplify. They also explain exactly what they mean in the caption under the title.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

MR4D 9y ago

I get the obvious point of the article; something is clearly fishy. However, let’s look at the numbers. According to https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/IN https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/IN , the population of Indiana is roughly 6.6 million. Roughly 85% are white ( so about 5.6 million people) and ~15% are non-white ( roughly 1 million people). Now, the article says “50 percent of U.S. racial minorities share the same last names, as opposed to 30 percent of white Americans”. So just using this as an issue, about 1.7 million whites and 0.5 million non-whites hit the first hurdle. Honestly, if they really are using this against minorities, then they sure suck at it. They’ve already got MORE THAN 3 TIMES as many white folks as non-whites thru the first hurdle towards un-registering them!! Serves them right if the article is anywhere close to being correct!