From Secretary of State candidate Debra Bowen's site:
Thousands of voters dumped off California's voting rolls
March 29th, 2006
I just learned of an alarming development in our fight for fair and transparent elections: The current Secretary of State, Bruce McPherson, launched a statewide voter registration database system last year that will disenfranchise tens of thousands of voters in California.
More than 14,000 new voter registration and re-registration applications just from Los Angeles County were recently invalidated under this new stringent set of regulations -- and other counties are seeing similar results.
This is a 43% rejection rate! In fact, virtually all of these applications would have been accepted before Secretary McPherson rolled out his new statewide voter registration database. Typically rejection rates are 1-2%. This is outrageous.
A little more at the link:
http://www.debrabowen.com/...
More on the flip:
And courtesy of Norm's diary from earlier today is the LA Times story:
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-rejected29mar29,1,2998644.story?coll=la-headlines-california?
From the LA Times article:
The new database system was installed to meet the requirements of the Help America Vote Act, the 2002 federal law designed to avoid the voting irregularities cited in the 2000 presidential race. Since the start of this year, voters in all states have been required to provide their driver's license number, other state-approved identification or the last four digits of their Social Security number when they register to vote or change their information.
Voter information is checked against records with the federal government and state motor vehicles department. Under an agreement negotiated by McPherson and the U.S. Justice Department, California is one of nine states that use the standard of an "exact match," in which the records must be the same to the letter, according to a national survey by the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit group in New York City. Thus, "Robert Smith" and "Rob Smith" would not be considered a match.
Ashley Snee Giovannettone, spokeswoman for McPherson, who oversees elections, said a sampling of statewide registrations found that 74% were immediately verified. She said state election law requires county officials to resolve the discrepancies for the others, which might mean fixing a typo or contacting the voter to obtain missing information.