9 ms·

Ohio Was Set to Purge 235,000 Voters. It Was Wrong About 20%

174 points by tysone 7y ago

empath75 7y ago
Anybody who thinks these schemes are about anything other than removing legitimate voters from the roles is deluding themselves.
- gatherhunterer 7y ago
  That much is clear. This is only a few months after SCOTUS found Ohio’s new election districts to be illegally gerrymandered.
- makomk 7y ago
  Not really. Remember that news story a few years ago about Trump's "voter fraud expert" being registered to vote in three states? These schemes were why he would not, in fact, have been able to vote in the two states he wasn't living in - his other two voter registrations had been suspended via purges like this one. I wouldn't be surprised if there were news headlines out there counting the registrations removed from him as votes suppressed by the Republicans too...
josefresco 7y ago
"And voting rights groups found an unexplained tranche — around 20,000 people — who had been marked to be purged because of inactivity in future election cycles, but were actually active voters in previous Ohio elections. These voters were in Franklin County, a Democratic stronghold in the state." Aaaand there it is.
- not_a_cop75 7y ago
  How hard is it really for a voter to reregister? You guys are making it sound like it they're taking away driver's licenses or something. All you have to do is hit the website. If you don't have internet access hit a library.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
    You don't find out you need to re-register until it's too late.
    - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
      Don't most places allow same day registration at the polls? Every state I've voted in does. Edit: ok, 2/5ths isn't most but it's still a lot. Chill with the down-votes, it was an honest question, not an attack on your ideology.
      - lalaithion 7y ago
        Only 17 states have same day registration. Ohio does not.
      - ceejayoz 7y ago
        Sorta. There are problems with that approach. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provisional_ballot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provisional_ballot > The rates of rejection vary widely across the states, with some states counting all or nearly all provisional ballots while others reject more than half. I would expect maliciously executed voter purges to be accompanied by malicious rules on provisional ballots.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - spamizbad 7y ago
        Only 21 states[1] offer same-day registration. It's far less common in the south and midwest regions of the US. [1] http://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/same-day-registration.aspx http://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/same-da...
      - bryanlarsen 7y ago
        Nope, deadline was a week ago yesterday. https://www.rockthevote.org/voting-information/election-dates-deadlines/ohio/ https://www.rockthevote.org/voting-information/election-date...
- microtherion 7y ago
  uNexPlAInEd
- jcims 7y ago
  Just a data point as I can’t read the article right now. Franklin County is the largest county in the state and represents 11% of the population.
  - dragontamer 7y ago
    A policy that harms city-voting more than rural will innately benefit Republicans.
    - jcims 7y ago
      Sure but the only two numbers I saw were 235k and 20k, indicating the set of users removed in Franklin county may have actually been underrepresented (<11%). However now that i can see the article the 20k is actually 50% of the set of 40k folks that shouldn't have been on the list, which of course is a different story.
- vkou 7y ago
  This is the real voter fraud. Purging eligible voters from the lists.
  - rtkwe 7y ago
    Electoral fraud, it's the common phrase and lets you easily distinguish between voters breaking the rules (exceedingly rare by all accounts) and state perpetrated disenfranchisement (happens all over; gerrymandering, poll closures, and mass purges to name a few).
etxm 7y ago
How does the purging actually work? Is there sole evil republican henchman with database access? Is there no oversight into what is actually purged? Trapped behind the paywall.
- deaps 7y ago
  >> Trapped behind the paywall. While the site it loading, just hit the escape key.
  - rymohr 7y ago
    Any tricks for mobile?
    - heavyset_go 7y ago
      Use Firefox mobile and install any of the paywall bypass plugins that work on the desktop version.
- sct202 7y ago
  I got the letters that my voter registration was going to be purged, but I left Ohio like 7 years ago at that point and hadn't voted since I left. I had actually looked into de-registering way back when but it required filling out a form and physically mailing it, so I didn't bother. Edit: Also I was slightly impressed that they found my current mailing address. I've moved like 6 times across several states, since I left Ohio.
- notfromhere 7y ago
  The Secretary of State is Republican, and surprise, the GOP pursues policies that restrict the ballot in a way that benefits them and disadvantages Democrats. Ohio is a state where the GOP holds 75% of federal House seats despite winning only 50% of the vote. Similar effect holds for the state legislative offices
  - tathougies 7y ago
    80% of 235,000 is 188,000. Your argument is that it is okay to keep 188,000 invalid voters on the books because otherwise the republicans might win? Don't you see how fraudulent or no-longer-active voter registrations may bring about questions of legitimacy? 188,000 is no small number of people. Trump won Ohio with a smaller margin.
SolaceQuantum 7y ago
I couldn't get past the paywall, but are there any independent watchdogs with real political sway about this, or do we need to rely on journalism and rights groups? The issue I have is that journalism could be intensely valid and yet also considered so politically biased that anyone on 'the other side' would dismiss legitimate corruption because of the source. And if a 'same side' media doesn't cover it, it could look like a complete fabrication because what someone understands to be legitimate news sources don't cover the corruption...
rdtsc 7y ago
> She went online and discovered that her name had also been flagged as an inactive voter. The state was in the process of removing her from its voter rolls. > “I voted three times last year,” said Ms. Miller. I am still baffled at the election system in this country. Every state does its own thing. One state uses paper, other uses some machines which can be easily hacked, some use both. Somehow voter ID is controversial, but India, with more people, poverty and issues seems to have managed it. Why can't they issue free IDs and track every voter in a database and call it a day? > The state of Ohio had released names of 235,000 voters it planned to purge from voter rolls in September [...] voting rights groups found an unexplained tranche — around 20,000 people But that means 200k some thousand should have been purged. If they died, and a death certificate was issued, doesn't some government database know about it and say, "yeah, person is dead purge their voter record". It's 2020 almost, we flew people to the moon, there is a Tesla roadster in Sun's orbit, self driving cars, but somehow managing a few hundred million voter records is an impossible task and I don't understand why.
- wongarsu 7y ago
  In Germany every person eligible to vote just gets a letter telling you the day of the vote and your voting station (and a list of stuff being voted on, local elections usually coincide with more important ones). At voting day (a Sunday) you go to your polling station with that letter and photo id and after five minutes you have cast your vote and are on your way. It's dead simple. But it hinges on the state having a database with every citizen's address. As I understand it such an idea would be very unpopular in the US.
  - scrooched_moose 7y ago
    I mean, that's largely what voter registration is - a database of every citizen's address. The problem comes in when those addresses change. There's no requirement to inform your old state you left, so millions of inactive voters are left in the database. Generally there's a requirement to register in the new state (drivers license) within 30 days which is often missed, or not required for temporary moves like college students. These purges do serve a legitimate purpose, but are often used as a political tool to alter turnouts.
biomcgary 7y ago
According to the article, moderate Republicans in Ohio insisted on transparency for purging voter rolls. They sent out the proposed list to various voter advocacy groups across the political spectrum, which reviewed the proposed changes and flagged mistakes. 80% were purged correctly. 20% were not. Rather than condemning Ohio, they should be praised for bringing transparency to the process (as long as the mistakes are corrected).
- pknopf 7y ago
  I still don't think it's a coincidence that the 20,000 were in a democratic strong-hold.
  - biomcgary 7y ago
    Possibly not, but if they were trying to be nefarious, they shot themselves in the foot with transparency. More likely to be a mistake OR the conspiracy of a single individual.
  - Spivak 7y ago
    It's not a coincidence but I don't think it's super malicious. it's not because it's a "democratic strong-hold" it's because Franklin county is Columbus, dense, and more populated than the surrounding areas.
- microtherion 7y ago
  They should be both praised for bringing more transparency, AND condemned for purging nearly 50k eligible voters.
  - biomcgary 7y ago
    Did they purge eligible voters? My reading of the article was that they proposed purging voters, but got input from advocacy groups first. Did I misread it?
    - microtherion 7y ago
oftenwrong 7y ago
There doesn't appear to be an explanation for the purges. I can understand the need to purge the voter lists of "dead" (literally or otherwise) entries, but surely it would be best if the state provided an explanation for each removal?
- creaghpatr 7y ago
  I think that's what happened here, which is how the 20% were found to be incorrectly marked.
  - oftenwrong 7y ago
    I'm not so sure: >And voting rights groups found an unexplained tranche — around 20,000 people — who had been marked to be purged because of inactivity in future election cycles, but were actually active voters in previous Ohio elections. and >The experience has left some voters like Jennifer Kulina-Lanese, a former veterinary professional, shaken. She got a call from the League of Women Voters shortly after it received the list, informing her that the county where she had voted just last year had started the process for her to be purged. >“I still don’t know why, and that’s what’s scary,” said Ms. Kulina-Lanese, who is 45. “The idea that Franklin County was starting a process to remove me was terrifying.”
- maskull 7y ago
  It would also be important to remove people that have registered to vote elsewhere.
mschuster91 7y ago
In Germany we do not have this problem (neither voter suppression nor voter fraud), for a multitude of reasons: 1) everyone has a government-provided ID document: a passport, for German nationals the ID card Personalausweis also works, and for EU nationals (who can vote in municipal and EU elections) their country's ID document 2) the legal requirement to register at the city/region office ("Meldebehörde") where you live, and you have to prove this with a copy of your rent contract or property deed 3) everyone getting a document ("Wahlschein") by mail a couple of weeks prior to election date. If you don't get one but should have gotten, you can contact the election authority to investigate, and if you lose/misplace it you can easily look up where your voting place is, go there and have them locate you on the voter roll. 4) if any piece of official mail goes returned by the post as "undeliverable", the Meldebehörde will investigate and de-register you (thus also removing you from the voter roll) The only real vote fraud in the last years was from a politician who had seasonal workers register at a company and apply for mail-voting, but that's it.
- thinkling 7y ago
  Yeah, from the European perspective the American situation is hard to understand. In the U.S., requiring everyone to register their address is going to be met with cries of Big Brother and small but vocal resistance. This is despite the fact that the vast majority of people have to declare an address to file their tax return and/or to have a driver's license. The other piece is that the constitution, written before direct elections were common, explicitly leaves the execution of elections to the states, which makes it hard for the federal government to set standards or require this kind of registration. And it's politically intractable to fix these silly things in the constitution.
  - crooked-v 7y ago
    It becomes much easier to understand when you realize that the modern Republican Party opposes centralized voter ID at the national level and supports stricter but wildly patchwork voting ID requirements at the local level for the same reason: it makes it harder for demographics they don't like to get acceptable IDs for voting. For example, in 2015, North Carolina's Republican state legislature literally looked up the forms of ID statistically most likely to be used by black people for voting ID in the state and banned those for use in voting, while leaving the forms of voting ID most used by white people as valid. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/07/29/the-smoking-gun-proving-north-carolina-republicans-tried-to-disenfranchise-black-voters/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/07/29/the-s...
webwielder2 7y ago
Conservatives in the US know that the only way they can hold onto power in our electoral system is to subvert that system (gerrymandering, voter intimidation/misdirection, erroneous purges) and they are not afraid to do so. And let's not forget the Supreme Court halting a vote recount in Florida in 2000 for literally no reason besides politics, leading directly to the Iraq catastrophe.
- will4274 7y ago
  I'd encourage you to read some of the scholarly material related to Bush v. Gore, particularly the distinctions between the first case and the second case as well as materials that cover the actions of the FL court specifically - it's a lot more complex and nuanced than you summarize here.
yalogin 7y ago
This is how republicans are in elections. I mean not all districts can be jerrymandered, so voter purge is a must.
- specialist 7y ago
  It's not just purging. Think of voting like a sales pipeline. Any friction whatsoever reduces the conversion rate. Every little extra bureaucratic step disenfranchises voters.
kregasaurusrex 7y ago
As a Franklin county resident, I see multiple groups of volunteers who have a big push around August-October to concentrate efforts around the the Ohio State campus and downtown areas to register voters. This includes groups affiliated with campus political organizations, the League of Women Voters, and groups who seek signatures to bring issues to a ballot vote. The extent to which the article describes purging 40,000 Franklin County voters is much more than what I'd expect than people being ineligible to vote for reasons like leaving student voters leaving the state/county (and not updatign their address), becoming deceased, or the recent case regarding the "use it or lose it" rule. In my opinion there should be a formal audit that includes other state data to correct the discrepancies in the spreadsheet of voters to be purged. Additionally, Ohio voter ID laws themselves can be regressive in harming poorer populations. Many don't have access to a nearby BMV bureau to get an ID, aren't aware of the registration deadline which has already passed, lack utility bills in their name, or can't get a stamp for an absentee vote to be mailed. For the the current and next ballot cycle it's important to allow citizens to voice their opinion at the box and to register with a party for primary votes as well.
Der_Einzige 7y ago
Lol all you have to do is vote by mail like all other sane States...
specialist 7y ago
TLDR: We need national, universal, automatic voter registration. #1 Our VRDBs only contain eligible voters. Ineligible voters are removed. This is very hard to verify, audit. The Correct Answer is to list everyone, with a flag for eligibility, with a separate audit log for changes. aka standard DBA best practices. #2 We already have virtually complete rosters of every person, living or dead, updated in near realtime. Commercial data brokers, facebook, law enforcement, national security. We should license or repurpose these readily available data sources for both voter database and the census. #3 States administer elections. Feds make the rules. Anyone who opposes nationwide standards should also oppose currency, weights & measures, intra-state trade, the entire American experiment, etc. FWIW, some states already share data, to better track people who move, students, overseas voters (registered at home), deaths, etc. I haven't been active for a while, so don't know how far along those efforts are. -- Now about this article. Purging (caging) is the weaponization of normal data quality efforts for partisan reasons. Option 1: Send verification mails to inactive (but still eligible) voters. Some sizable fraction won't be returned. USPS's UAA rate is %1, more for high density areas. Many people just don't response (eg looks like junk mail). Then aggressively, silently remove anyone who doesn't respond. Option 2: Any official communication sent by election admin which is returned (recall USPS UAA 1%) is used to purge. Option 3: Ignore or inject data quality problems. Match voter roll against other demographic databases, eg DMV. Purge any records for any error whatsoever. eg Mike vs Michael. Missing commas, hyphens. Whatever works. This is from memory, I'm sure there's other strategies used, but these are the big ones. Note that The Correct Answer above moots the entire problem. And would be both cheaper and nearly error free.
blockmarker 7y ago
America, the country where you can't stop massive voter fraud because every time it is tried, one of the two parties disallow legal voters from voting. America might be richer than Europe, but it seems to me to be much more dysfunctional.

174 points by tysone 7y ago

Anybody who thinks these schemes are about anything other than removing legitimate voters from the roles is deluding themselves.

gatherhunterer 7y ago
That much is clear. This is only a few months after SCOTUS found Ohio’s new election districts to be illegally gerrymandered.
makomk 7y ago
Not really. Remember that news story a few years ago about Trump's "voter fraud expert" being registered to vote in three states? These schemes were why he would not, in fact, have been able to vote in the two states he wasn't living in - his other two voter registrations had been suspended via purges like this one. I wouldn't be surprised if there were news headlines out there counting the registrations removed from him as votes suppressed by the Republicans too...

josefresco 7y ago

"And voting rights groups found an unexplained tranche — around 20,000 people — who had been marked to be purged because of inactivity in future election cycles, but were actually active voters in previous Ohio elections. These voters were in Franklin County, a Democratic stronghold in the state." Aaaand there it is.

not_a_cop75 7y ago
How hard is it really for a voter to reregister? You guys are making it sound like it they're taking away driver's licenses or something. All you have to do is hit the website. If you don't have internet access hit a library.
- TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
  You don't find out you need to re-register until it's too late.
  - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    Don't most places allow same day registration at the polls? Every state I've voted in does. Edit: ok, 2/5ths isn't most but it's still a lot. Chill with the down-votes, it was an honest question, not an attack on your ideology.
    - lalaithion 7y ago
      Only 17 states have same day registration. Ohio does not.
    - ceejayoz 7y ago
      Sorta. There are problems with that approach. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provisional_ballot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provisional_ballot > The rates of rejection vary widely across the states, with some states counting all or nearly all provisional ballots while others reject more than half. I would expect maliciously executed voter purges to be accompanied by malicious rules on provisional ballots.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - spamizbad 7y ago
      Only 21 states[1] offer same-day registration. It's far less common in the south and midwest regions of the US. [1] http://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/same-day-registration.aspx http://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/same-da...
    - bryanlarsen 7y ago
      Nope, deadline was a week ago yesterday. https://www.rockthevote.org/voting-information/election-dates-deadlines/ohio/ https://www.rockthevote.org/voting-information/election-date...
microtherion 7y ago
uNexPlAInEd
jcims 7y ago
Just a data point as I can’t read the article right now. Franklin County is the largest county in the state and represents 11% of the population.
- dragontamer 7y ago
  A policy that harms city-voting more than rural will innately benefit Republicans.
  - jcims 7y ago
    Sure but the only two numbers I saw were 235k and 20k, indicating the set of users removed in Franklin county may have actually been underrepresented (<11%). However now that i can see the article the 20k is actually 50% of the set of 40k folks that shouldn't have been on the list, which of course is a different story.
vkou 7y ago
This is the real voter fraud. Purging eligible voters from the lists.
- rtkwe 7y ago
  Electoral fraud, it's the common phrase and lets you easily distinguish between voters breaking the rules (exceedingly rare by all accounts) and state perpetrated disenfranchisement (happens all over; gerrymandering, poll closures, and mass purges to name a few).

etxm 7y ago

How does the purging actually work? Is there sole evil republican henchman with database access? Is there no oversight into what is actually purged? Trapped behind the paywall.

deaps 7y ago
>> Trapped behind the paywall. While the site it loading, just hit the escape key.
- rymohr 7y ago
  Any tricks for mobile?
  - heavyset_go 7y ago
    Use Firefox mobile and install any of the paywall bypass plugins that work on the desktop version.
sct202 7y ago
I got the letters that my voter registration was going to be purged, but I left Ohio like 7 years ago at that point and hadn't voted since I left. I had actually looked into de-registering way back when but it required filling out a form and physically mailing it, so I didn't bother. Edit: Also I was slightly impressed that they found my current mailing address. I've moved like 6 times across several states, since I left Ohio.
notfromhere 7y ago
The Secretary of State is Republican, and surprise, the GOP pursues policies that restrict the ballot in a way that benefits them and disadvantages Democrats. Ohio is a state where the GOP holds 75% of federal House seats despite winning only 50% of the vote. Similar effect holds for the state legislative offices
- tathougies 7y ago
  80% of 235,000 is 188,000. Your argument is that it is okay to keep 188,000 invalid voters on the books because otherwise the republicans might win? Don't you see how fraudulent or no-longer-active voter registrations may bring about questions of legitimacy? 188,000 is no small number of people. Trump won Ohio with a smaller margin.

SolaceQuantum 7y ago

I couldn't get past the paywall, but are there any independent watchdogs with real political sway about this, or do we need to rely on journalism and rights groups? The issue I have is that journalism could be intensely valid and yet also considered so politically biased that anyone on 'the other side' would dismiss legitimate corruption because of the source. And if a 'same side' media doesn't cover it, it could look like a complete fabrication because what someone understands to be legitimate news sources don't cover the corruption...

rdtsc 7y ago

> She went online and discovered that her name had also been flagged as an inactive voter. The state was in the process of removing her from its voter rolls. > “I voted three times last year,” said Ms. Miller. I am still baffled at the election system in this country. Every state does its own thing. One state uses paper, other uses some machines which can be easily hacked, some use both. Somehow voter ID is controversial, but India, with more people, poverty and issues seems to have managed it. Why can't they issue free IDs and track every voter in a database and call it a day? > The state of Ohio had released names of 235,000 voters it planned to purge from voter rolls in September [...] voting rights groups found an unexplained tranche — around 20,000 people But that means 200k some thousand should have been purged. If they died, and a death certificate was issued, doesn't some government database know about it and say, "yeah, person is dead purge their voter record". It's 2020 almost, we flew people to the moon, there is a Tesla roadster in Sun's orbit, self driving cars, but somehow managing a few hundred million voter records is an impossible task and I don't understand why.

wongarsu 7y ago
In Germany every person eligible to vote just gets a letter telling you the day of the vote and your voting station (and a list of stuff being voted on, local elections usually coincide with more important ones). At voting day (a Sunday) you go to your polling station with that letter and photo id and after five minutes you have cast your vote and are on your way. It's dead simple. But it hinges on the state having a database with every citizen's address. As I understand it such an idea would be very unpopular in the US.
- scrooched_moose 7y ago
  I mean, that's largely what voter registration is - a database of every citizen's address. The problem comes in when those addresses change. There's no requirement to inform your old state you left, so millions of inactive voters are left in the database. Generally there's a requirement to register in the new state (drivers license) within 30 days which is often missed, or not required for temporary moves like college students. These purges do serve a legitimate purpose, but are often used as a political tool to alter turnouts.

biomcgary 7y ago

According to the article, moderate Republicans in Ohio insisted on transparency for purging voter rolls. They sent out the proposed list to various voter advocacy groups across the political spectrum, which reviewed the proposed changes and flagged mistakes. 80% were purged correctly. 20% were not. Rather than condemning Ohio, they should be praised for bringing transparency to the process (as long as the mistakes are corrected).

pknopf 7y ago
I still don't think it's a coincidence that the 20,000 were in a democratic strong-hold.
- biomcgary 7y ago
  Possibly not, but if they were trying to be nefarious, they shot themselves in the foot with transparency. More likely to be a mistake OR the conspiracy of a single individual.
- Spivak 7y ago
  It's not a coincidence but I don't think it's super malicious. it's not because it's a "democratic strong-hold" it's because Franklin county is Columbus, dense, and more populated than the surrounding areas.
microtherion 7y ago
They should be both praised for bringing more transparency, AND condemned for purging nearly 50k eligible voters.
- biomcgary 7y ago
  Did they purge eligible voters? My reading of the article was that they proposed purging voters, but got input from advocacy groups first. Did I misread it?
  - microtherion 7y ago

oftenwrong 7y ago

There doesn't appear to be an explanation for the purges. I can understand the need to purge the voter lists of "dead" (literally or otherwise) entries, but surely it would be best if the state provided an explanation for each removal?

creaghpatr 7y ago
I think that's what happened here, which is how the 20% were found to be incorrectly marked.
- oftenwrong 7y ago
  I'm not so sure: >And voting rights groups found an unexplained tranche — around 20,000 people — who had been marked to be purged because of inactivity in future election cycles, but were actually active voters in previous Ohio elections. and >The experience has left some voters like Jennifer Kulina-Lanese, a former veterinary professional, shaken. She got a call from the League of Women Voters shortly after it received the list, informing her that the county where she had voted just last year had started the process for her to be purged. >“I still don’t know why, and that’s what’s scary,” said Ms. Kulina-Lanese, who is 45. “The idea that Franklin County was starting a process to remove me was terrifying.”
maskull 7y ago
It would also be important to remove people that have registered to vote elsewhere.

mschuster91 7y ago

In Germany we do not have this problem (neither voter suppression nor voter fraud), for a multitude of reasons: 1) everyone has a government-provided ID document: a passport, for German nationals the ID card Personalausweis also works, and for EU nationals (who can vote in municipal and EU elections) their country's ID document 2) the legal requirement to register at the city/region office ("Meldebehörde") where you live, and you have to prove this with a copy of your rent contract or property deed 3) everyone getting a document ("Wahlschein") by mail a couple of weeks prior to election date. If you don't get one but should have gotten, you can contact the election authority to investigate, and if you lose/misplace it you can easily look up where your voting place is, go there and have them locate you on the voter roll. 4) if any piece of official mail goes returned by the post as "undeliverable", the Meldebehörde will investigate and de-register you (thus also removing you from the voter roll) The only real vote fraud in the last years was from a politician who had seasonal workers register at a company and apply for mail-voting, but that's it.

thinkling 7y ago
Yeah, from the European perspective the American situation is hard to understand. In the U.S., requiring everyone to register their address is going to be met with cries of Big Brother and small but vocal resistance. This is despite the fact that the vast majority of people have to declare an address to file their tax return and/or to have a driver's license. The other piece is that the constitution, written before direct elections were common, explicitly leaves the execution of elections to the states, which makes it hard for the federal government to set standards or require this kind of registration. And it's politically intractable to fix these silly things in the constitution.
- crooked-v 7y ago
  It becomes much easier to understand when you realize that the modern Republican Party opposes centralized voter ID at the national level and supports stricter but wildly patchwork voting ID requirements at the local level for the same reason: it makes it harder for demographics they don't like to get acceptable IDs for voting. For example, in 2015, North Carolina's Republican state legislature literally looked up the forms of ID statistically most likely to be used by black people for voting ID in the state and banned those for use in voting, while leaving the forms of voting ID most used by white people as valid. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/07/29/the-smoking-gun-proving-north-carolina-republicans-tried-to-disenfranchise-black-voters/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/07/29/the-s...

webwielder2 7y ago

Conservatives in the US know that the only way they can hold onto power in our electoral system is to subvert that system (gerrymandering, voter intimidation/misdirection, erroneous purges) and they are not afraid to do so. And let's not forget the Supreme Court halting a vote recount in Florida in 2000 for literally no reason besides politics, leading directly to the Iraq catastrophe.

will4274 7y ago
I'd encourage you to read some of the scholarly material related to Bush v. Gore, particularly the distinctions between the first case and the second case as well as materials that cover the actions of the FL court specifically - it's a lot more complex and nuanced than you summarize here.

yalogin 7y ago

This is how republicans are in elections. I mean not all districts can be jerrymandered, so voter purge is a must.

specialist 7y ago
It's not just purging. Think of voting like a sales pipeline. Any friction whatsoever reduces the conversion rate. Every little extra bureaucratic step disenfranchises voters.

kregasaurusrex 7y ago

As a Franklin county resident, I see multiple groups of volunteers who have a big push around August-October to concentrate efforts around the the Ohio State campus and downtown areas to register voters. This includes groups affiliated with campus political organizations, the League of Women Voters, and groups who seek signatures to bring issues to a ballot vote. The extent to which the article describes purging 40,000 Franklin County voters is much more than what I'd expect than people being ineligible to vote for reasons like leaving student voters leaving the state/county (and not updatign their address), becoming deceased, or the recent case regarding the "use it or lose it" rule. In my opinion there should be a formal audit that includes other state data to correct the discrepancies in the spreadsheet of voters to be purged. Additionally, Ohio voter ID laws themselves can be regressive in harming poorer populations. Many don't have access to a nearby BMV bureau to get an ID, aren't aware of the registration deadline which has already passed, lack utility bills in their name, or can't get a stamp for an absentee vote to be mailed. For the the current and next ballot cycle it's important to allow citizens to voice their opinion at the box and to register with a party for primary votes as well.

Der_Einzige 7y ago

Lol all you have to do is vote by mail like all other sane States...

specialist 7y ago

TLDR: We need national, universal, automatic voter registration. #1 Our VRDBs only contain eligible voters. Ineligible voters are removed. This is very hard to verify, audit. The Correct Answer is to list everyone, with a flag for eligibility, with a separate audit log for changes. aka standard DBA best practices. #2 We already have virtually complete rosters of every person, living or dead, updated in near realtime. Commercial data brokers, facebook, law enforcement, national security. We should license or repurpose these readily available data sources for both voter database and the census. #3 States administer elections. Feds make the rules. Anyone who opposes nationwide standards should also oppose currency, weights & measures, intra-state trade, the entire American experiment, etc. FWIW, some states already share data, to better track people who move, students, overseas voters (registered at home), deaths, etc. I haven't been active for a while, so don't know how far along those efforts are. -- Now about this article. Purging (caging) is the weaponization of normal data quality efforts for partisan reasons. Option 1: Send verification mails to inactive (but still eligible) voters. Some sizable fraction won't be returned. USPS's UAA rate is %1, more for high density areas. Many people just don't response (eg looks like junk mail). Then aggressively, silently remove anyone who doesn't respond. Option 2: Any official communication sent by election admin which is returned (recall USPS UAA 1%) is used to purge. Option 3: Ignore or inject data quality problems. Match voter roll against other demographic databases, eg DMV. Purge any records for any error whatsoever. eg Mike vs Michael. Missing commas, hyphens. Whatever works. This is from memory, I'm sure there's other strategies used, but these are the big ones. Note that The Correct Answer above moots the entire problem. And would be both cheaper and nearly error free.

blockmarker 7y ago

America, the country where you can't stop massive voter fraud because every time it is tried, one of the two parties disallow legal voters from voting. America might be richer than Europe, but it seems to me to be much more dysfunctional.