Welcome to the latest edition in our war on voting series. This is a joint project of Meteor Blades and Joan McCarter.
This week's War on Voting news was dominated by Greg Palast's Rolling Stone article detailing the latest Republican effort to keep people of color out of the polls come November. Of course, Kansas's Secretary of State and contender for most horrible person of the decade Kris Kobach is behind it. It's called the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, and with it a number of states—mostly Republican—are "matching" voters' names to "prove" they are committing voter fraud by being registered to vote in more than one state.
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.
But Palast's investigation of lists from Virginia, Georgia, and Washington reveal that the program is not matching all those things, often just first and last names—leaving out those key identifiers of birth dates and Social Security numbers, not to mention middle names. And, not surprisingly at all, "statistical analysis found that African-American, Latino and Asian names predominate, a simple result of the Crosscheck matching process, which spews out little more than a bunch of common names."
No surprise: The U.S. Census data shows that minorities are overrepresented in 85 of 100 of the most common last names. If your name is Washington, there's an 89 percent chance you're African-American. If your last name is Hernandez, there's a 94 percent chance you're Hispanic. If your name is Kim, there's a 95 percent chance you're Asian.
This inherent bias results in an astonishing one in six Hispanics, one in seven Asian-Americans and one in nine African-Americans in Crosscheck states landing on the list.
That would be the list of "fraudulent" voters. There are a few states where the system is being aggressively used—Ohio, North Carolina which have critical Senate elections this cycle, and Virginia, an important swing state. Now, voter registration purges aren't new, and in fact are part of states' responsibility to keep elections running smoothly. But this is registration purging on steroids, and has nothing to do with efficiency.
Somehow, I don't think Trump is going to have a problem with this kind of election rigging.
Below, you'll find some briefs what else has happened this week in the war on voting.