And in a related headline: Social Security Offices Plan Shutdown that
could significantly impede registration of first-time voters as well as the re-registration of eligible citizens.
Back to the title story. . .Voter rolls maintained by each state far too often are held in charge by
[o]fficials [who] strike voters from the rolls through a process that is shrouded in secrecy, prone to error, and vulnerable to manipulation.
In Mississippi, election officials struck 10,000 voters from the rolls just prior to primary elections in the state. Examples abound, this year and historically, of voters' rights abuses. Particularly in the South.
Before reading further, please confirm your voting status NOW.
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.
In Louisiana, including areas hit hard by hurricanes, officials purged approximately 21,000 voters, ostensibly for registering to vote in another state. The purge did not follow existing legal protections that require officials to notify affected voters and give them the opportunity to contest or correct the records.
While the purging of voting rolls is a wise and healthy practice, designed -- when carried out openly and legally -- to maintain dependable, accurate, and up-to-date records so that elections can be accurate and credible. there are three dangerous practices connected with purges.
A. Lists from which Voters Names are Purged are Unreliable. There is no argument that ineligible voters' names and duplicate names have no business of registration rolls. But because of sources of information that would seem reliable on the face, abuses occur when too much reliance is placed on the accuracy of those sources.
[S]ome states purge their voter lists based on the Social Security Administration’s Death Master File, a database that even the Social Security Administration admits includes people who are still alive.
Another example of a source that can produce a cataclysmic error is
the United States Postal Service’s National Change of Address database, [which] sometimes has the effect of changing the addresses of all members of that household.
B. Voters Purged Secretly and without Notice. None of the 16 states investigated for voter purge abuses by the Brennan Center for Justice
require election officials to provide public notice of a systematic purge or even individual notice to those voters whose names are removed from the rolls as part of the purge.
That is only in 16 states. What about the remaining 34? To compound the problem, many states do not notify individual voters before purging them, effectively keeping the citizen in the dark and eliminating any chance he or she may have to rectify the state's error. In addition, no notification of intended purging by the state prevents citizen oversight: 1) destroying transparency in the process; 2) rendering government in the sunshine impossible; 3) removing voters' ability to hold elected officials accountable.
C. Bad Matching Criteria Leaves Voters Vulnerable to Manipulated Purges. The entire process and procedures governing the removal of voters from rolls is problematical because, in part, it relies on the discretion of election officials to identify registrants for removal. Simple mistaken identity can result in massive errors. It is difficult to determine if people who share the same name and similar identifying data are one or two individuals.
The infamous Florida purge of 2000 — conservative estimates place the number of wrongfully purged voters close to 12,000 — was generated in part by bad matching criteria. Florida registrants were purged from the rolls if 80 percent of the letters of their last names were the same as those of persons with criminal convictions.
Running through every aspect of voter roll abuse is a common factor: insufficient oversight. Not only do states rely on the discretion of officials to identify registrants for removal, they also give them free rein to initiate removal procedures. Resulting sins of omission and sins of commission can purge thousands.
In Washington, the failure to deliver a number of delineated mailings, including precinct reassignment notices, ballot applications, and registration acknowledgment notices, triggers the mailing of address confirmation notices, which then sets in motion the process for removal on account of change of address. Two Washington counties and the Secretary of State, however, reported that address confirmation notices were sent when any mail was returned as undeliverable, not just those delineated in state statute.
In a far too easy to understand example, election officials can inadvertently disenfranchise thousands of voters with a single keystroke because all states maintain their voter registration records on computer.
Getting back to the first sentence in this diary, it's not just the states that contribute to the problem. The Social Security Administration announces that the agency plans to shut down its databases for maintenance from October 11 through October 13 three weeks before the November 4 election.
. . .a time when election officials in every state will be scampering to try to process the millions of new voter registrations they receive.
Such a hiatus of access
could significantly impede registration of first-time voters as well as the re-registration of eligible citizens.
This could spell disaster.
State officials are already stretched and strained due to the overwhelming numbers of additional new registrants -- no small bulk of which are probably due to plenty of Kossacks' efforts. Still, these numbers may be nothing compared to what will happen only days before election day. Consider one of the most important swing states on the verge of delivering the election to Senator Obama.
Florida, for example, typically receives between 13 and 20% of its new voter registrations in the week before the deadline.
If the shutdown goes as planned, it will seriously impair the ability of states to process new voter registrations before the November 4 election. And these voters are mostly older, African-American, and low-income folks.
Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA) has written the Social Security Administration seeking delay of shutdown. Read it here [.pdf].
Further, the Brennan Center for Justice offers a number of recommendations to correct the shortcomings in the purge methodology.