The precincts I worked in Columbus, Ohio for America Coming Together were comprised almost entirely of black folks. In three days of pre-election canvassing, I heard one person say he was going to vote for George Bush. People were completely lit to be able to show their repulsion with the Bush policies they had endured. The one precinct had six voting machines for the primary election and only two for the general with over three times the voters wishing to vote in the general. My coworkers and I were still giving out oranges to people standing in line at 9:30 at night. In one precinct, I was not allowed to give out an orange to a brittle diabetic who was going into diabetic shock because, "It might affect the election."
AND hundreds of people stood in those lines only to be told that they'd been purged from the voting rolls or to have their right to vote challenged by some faux-blonde Texas Christian lady who'd spent the last five days making threatening calls to blacks telling them that they could be arrested if they showed up to vote or that they'd switched the election for Democrats to November 3 from November 2. The County Elections Supervisor who gerrymnandered the electronic voting machines was a former head of the Franklin County (Columbus) Republican Party.
Here's your bottom line. According to Bob Fitrakis the letter regarding address changes did go out. He has had it read to him. However, it went out county by county and some counties, particularly Republican ones, may either be no purge counties or may not be purging on this basis. However, it is strongly possible, based on previous similar actions, including the exact same kind of purge conducted on 28,000 voters in Toledo in August of 2004, that in many Democratic counties with Republican election officials (Cuyahoga and Franklin come to mind immediately) that the registars may well be purging based on this letter.
However, the bottom line is that Democratic voter purges have happened regularly and massively in Ohio in the past few years and is likely to be happening again this year. Check out this story by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman.
Did 308,000 Cancelled Ohio Voter Registrations Put Bush Back In the White House?
http://www.commondreams.org/...
Oh, and the "reason" that the DNC isn't yelling about the purges, according to several sources, is that they don't want their voters getting discouraged and not showing up at the polls. Well, what good does it do if they show up at the polls and they've been purged? Maybe the DNC or Rainbow Push should get some of their voters to go out and demonstrate how upset they are that this is happening. Where is today's Martin Luther King when we need him?