Kris Kobach is the nation's number one hater of people of color, young people, Democrats in general. From authoring Arizona's notorious "papers please" anti-immigration law to coming up with the idea that Mexico will pay for Donald Trump's wall, Kobach has been a scourge on democracy, one that Kansas was unfortunately stupid enough to put into an office where he could do serious damage. As secretary of state, that's exactly what he's doing, and it's not confined just to Kansas. At Rolling Stone, Greg Palast has an alarming exposé describing a multi-state effort to deny millions the franchise this election.
It's called the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, a system "being promoted by a powerful Republican operative" (that's Kobach) that purports to analyze voter registrations and find duplicates in other states, to determine if people are voting illegally in more than one state.
But Rolling Stone obtained a portion of the list and the names of 1 million targeted voters. According to our analysis, the Crosscheck list disproportionately threatens solid Democratic constituencies: young, black, Hispanic and Asian-American voters—with some of the biggest possible purges underway in Ohio and North Carolina, two crucial swing states with tight Senate races. […]
On its surface, Crosscheck seems quite reasonable. Twenty-eight participating states share their voter lists and, in the name of dispassionate, race-blind Big Data, seek to ensure the rolls are up to date. To make sure the system finds suspect voters, Crosscheck supposedly matches first, middle and last name, plus birth date, and provides the last four digits of a Social Security number for additional verification.
In reality, however, there have been signs that the program doesn't operate as advertised. Some states have dropped out of Crosscheck, citing problems with its methodology, as Oregon's secretary of state recently explained: "We left [Crosscheck] because the data we received was unreliable."
The lists are kept close, but Palast was able to get them from Virginia, Georgia and Washington. "In all, 342,556 names were listed as apparently registered to vote in both Virginia and another state as of January 2014. Thirteen percent of the people on the Crosscheck list, already flagged as inactive voters, were almost immediately removed, meaning a stunning 41,637 names were “canceled” from voter rolls, most of them just before Election Day." Here's the problem with those lists, though: one-fourth of the names of purged voters didn't have a middle-name match; father and son relationships are ignored, as Jr. and Sr. designations aren't included; birthdates and Social Security numbers were not included at all. The matches were purely made up. In Georgia, according to Crosscheck, "James Willie Brown is supposed to be the same voter as James Arthur Brown. James Clifford Brown is allegedly the same voter as James Lynn Brown."
They had Mark Swedlund, a database expert whose clients include eBay and American Express, analyze the lists from Georgia and Virginia and "he was shocked by Crosscheck's 'childish methodology,'" saying "God forbid your name is Garcia, of which there are 858,000 in the U.S., and your first name is Joseph or Jose. You're probably suspected of voting in 27 states." According to his statistical analysis, African American, Latino and Asian are dominant on the list. Surprise! What that means: "an astonishing one in six Hispanics, one in seven Asian-Americans and one in nine African-Americans in Crosscheck states landing on the list."
Kobach shopped his list to the National Association of State Election Directors in 2013, telling them that his system had flagged 697,537 "potential duplicate voters" in 15 states. He also told the election directors that Kansas—cash-strapped, economically failing Kansas—would be willing to pick up the tab for compiling a national list if other states wanted to join in. Thirteen—almost all Republican-led—signed up. In North Carolina, Board of Elections chief Kim Strach testified to the legislature that 35,750 voters were identified as having voted in two states in 2012, though a state investigation has so far resulted in exactly zero people being charged with election fraud. In Ohio, "close to half a million voters" have been flagged by Republican Secretary of State John Husted with Crosscheck. Rolling Stone went looking for some of them:
Hot spots of "potential duplicate" voters, we couldn't help but notice, were in neighborhoods where the streets are pocked with rundown houses and boarded storefronts. On Otterbein Avenue, I met Donald Webster, who, like most in his neighborhood, is African-American.
Crosscheck lists him registered in Ohio as Donald Alexander Webster Jr., while registered a second time as Donald Eugene Webster (no "Jr.") in Charlottesville, Virginia. Webster says he's never been a "Eugene" and has never been to Charlottesville. I explained that both he and his Virginia doppelgänger were subject to losing their ability to vote.
"How low can they go?" he asked. "I mean, how can they do that?"
Legally, they can't. But it's going to take lawsuits across multiple states to put an end to it. Now that the cat's out of the bag, maybe that will happen. But not in time for the 41,000 in Virginia who've been purged, or the half million in Ohio Husted is busy dropping from the roles. Trump is absolutely right: this election is being rigged. But for his side.