Thousands Illegally Purged from Voter Rolls

Thanks to improper implementation of the Help America Vote Act of 2002, thousands of American citizens may have been disenfranchised in several states. Although the reports say the purge has not been directed at any particular party, it is damaging to democracy if a citizen is denied a ballot without legal justification (mental incompetence for example). With less than four weeks before polling day, the problem is unlikely to be corrected in time.

Election officials in the various states are supposed to use their own databases to verify a voter’s particulars. If they cannot do so, they are supposed to check it against the federal government’s Social Security database. The state lists are supposed to be more accurate, and use of the federal database is a last resort measure. Instead, some states have used the Social Security database first.

The New York Times reported that as a result of this backward approach, “In the year ending Sept. 30, election officials in Nevada, for example, used the Social Security database more than 740,000 times to check voter files or registration applications and found more than 715,000 nonmatches, federal records show. Election officials in Georgia ran more than 1.9 million checks on voter files or voter registration applications and found more than 260,000 nonmatches.” Social Security officials say those figures are ridiculously high.

In Nevada, there was genuine human error. County election officials entered the driver’s license numbers and Social Security numbers in the wrong field. That means that when the state got their results, it was a case of garbage in, garbage out. The state says it had no idea how many people were affected, but it claims to have fixed things in the last few weeks. That’s hard to believe – if one doesn’t know how many were affected, one doesn’t know how many situations need to be fixed.

Lawsuits have already sprung up. Voter rights groups are suing in Michigan and Florida saying officials were too aggressive in cleaning up their lists. In Georgia, the NYT claims, “the Justice Department is considering legal action against officials in Cobb and Cherokee Counties who sent letters to hundreds of voters stating that their voter registrations had been flagged and telling them they cannot vote until they clear up the discrepancy.”

And the Republican Party has filed suit in Ohio to get a list of names that have been flagged as questionable. The Democratic Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner, has refused thus far because she believes it the list will be used to challenge voters at the polls. Vote suppression is an old GOP practice, and with 290,000 non-matches in a state John Kerry lost by 118,457, the question is which citizen will not be allowed to cast a ballot?

© Copyright 2008 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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