[Rhodes22-list] Political: Voter Suppression

[Ben Cittadino]

This is a disturbing report. For all the "voter fraud" charges on the one
hand, there seem to be "voter suppression" charges on the other. 

ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- College senior Kyla Berry was looking forward to
voting in her first presidential election, even carrying her voter
registration card in her wallet.


"Vote suppression is real. It does sometimes happen," said Daniel P. Tokaji,
a law professor at Ohio State University.

 But about two weeks ago, Berry got disturbing news from local election
officials.

"This office has received notification from the state of Georgia indicating
that you are not a citizen of the United States and therefore, not eligible
to vote," a letter from the Fulton County Department of Registration and
Elections said.

But Berry is a U.S. citizen, born in Boston, Massachusetts. She has a
passport and a birth certificate to prove it.  

The letter, which was dated October 2, gave her a week from the time it was
dated to prove her citizenship. There was a problem, though -- the letter
was postmarked October 9.

"It was the most bizarre thing. I immediately called my mother and asked her
to send me my birth certificate, and then I was like, 'It's too late,
apparently,' " Berry said.

Berry is one of more than 50,000 registered Georgia voters who have been
"flagged" because of a computer mismatch in their personal identification
information. At least 4,500 of those people are having their citizenship
questioned and the burden is on them to prove eligibility to vote.

Experts say lists of people with mismatches are often systematically cut, or
"purged," from voter rolls.

It's a scenario that's being repeated all across the country, with cases
like Berry's raising fears of potential vote suppression in crucial swing
states.

"What most people don't know is that every year, elections officials strike
millions of names from the voter rolls using processes that are secret,
prone to error and vulnerable to manipulation," said Wendy Weiser, an
elections expert with New York University's Brennan Center for Justi 

"That means that lots and lots of eligible voters could get knocked off the
voter rolls without any notice and, in many cases, without any opportunity
to correct it before Election Day."

Weiser acknowledged that "purging done well and with proper accountability"
is necessary to remove people who have died or moved out of state.

"But the problem is it's not necessary to do inaccurate purges that catch up
thousands of eligible voters without any notice or any opportunity to fix it
before Election Day and really without any public scrutiny at all," she
said.

Such allegations have flared up across the United States during this
election cycle, most notably in Ohio, where a recent lawsuit has already
gone to the U.S. Supreme Court.

There, the state Republican Party sued Ohio's Democratic secretary of state
in an effort to make her generate a list of people who had mismatched
information. But Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner said generating such a
list would create numerous problems too close to the election and possibly
disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters.

The Supreme Court last week ruled against the GOP on appeal of a lower court
order directing Brunner to prepare the list.

In Florida, election officials found that 75 percent of about 20,000 voter
registration applications from a three-week period in September were
mismatched due to typographical and administrative errors. Florida's
Republican secretary of state ordered the computer match system implemented
in early September.

In Wisconsin, Republican Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen sued the state's
election board after it voted against a proposal to implement a "no-match"
policy. The board conducted an audit of its voter rolls and found a 22
percent match failure rate -- including for four of the six members of the
board.

The Brennan Center has also documented cases across the country of possible
illegal purging, impediments to college student voting and difficulties
accessing voter registration.

A lawsuit has been filed over Georgia's mismatch system, and the state is
also under fire for requesting Social Security records for verification
checks on about 2 million voters -- more requests than any other state.

One of the lawyers involved in the lawsuit says Georgia is violating a
federal law that prohibits widespread voter purges within 90 days of the
election, arguing that the letters were sent out too close to the election
date.

"They are systematically using these lists and matching them and using those
matches to send these letters out to voters," said McDonald, director of the
ACLU Voting Rights Project in Georgia. 

"It's not, you know, an individualized notion of people maybe not being
citizens or not being residents. They're using a systematic purging
procedure that's expressly prohibited by federal laws."

Asked if he believed that eligible voters were purged in Georgia, McDonald
said, "If people who are properly eligible, are getting improperly
challenged and purged, the answer would be 'Yes,' " he said.

Elise Shore, regional counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and
Educational Fund, said letters like those sent to Berry appear to violate
two federal laws against voter purging within 90 days of the election.

"People are being targeted, and people are being told they are non-citizens,
including both naturalized citizens and U.S.-born citizens," said Shore,
another plaintiff in the Georgia lawsuit. "They're being told they're not
eligible to vote, based on information in a database that hasn't been
checked and approved by the Department of Justice, and that we know has
flaws in it."

Georgia's Secretary of State Karen Handel, a Republican who began working on
purging voter rolls since she was elected in 2006, said that won't happen.
If there are errors, she said, there is still plenty of time to resolve the
problems.

Handel says she is not worried the verification process will prevent
eligible voters from casting a ballot.

"In this state and all states, there's a process to ensure that a voter who
comes in -- even if there's a question about their status -- that they will
vote either provisional or challenge ballot, which is a paper ballot," she
said.

"So then the voter has ample opportunity to clarify any issues or address
them," Handel added. "And I think that's a really important process."

Handel denied the efforts to verify the vote are suppression.

"This is about ensuring the integrity of our elections," she said. "It is
imperative to have checks and balances on the front end, during the
processes and on the back end. That's what the verification process is
about."

So someone like Kyla Berry will be allowed to cast a provisional ballot when
she votes, but it's up to county election officials whether those ballots
would actually count.


Berry says she will try to vote, but she's not confident it will count.

"I know this happens, but I cannot believe it's happening to me," she said.
"If I weren't allowed to vote, I would just feel like that would be ... like
the worst thing ever -- a travesty." 
 
Ben C.

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