[Rhodes22-list] Political: Voter Suppression

[Brad Haslett]

Rob,

Oh for gawds sake, put down the crack pipe and be realistic for a
minute.  I'll agree with you, Democrats are rarely accused of vote
suppression, on the contrary, they are famous for allowing people to
vote as many times as they can. It's one thing to be a partisan but
keep your wits man!

Brad

On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 9:56 AM, Lowe, Rob <rlowe at vt.edu> wrote:
> Ben,
> There were similar reports during last presidential election cycle.  As
> elections are overseen by local election officials, there is a great
> opportunity for abuse.  Interesting, you rarely hear of Democratic
> election officials being accused of voter suppression tactics.  There
> needs to be a systematic method for purging voters from voter lists.  -
> rob
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: rhodes22-list-bounces at rhodes22.org
> [mailto:rhodes22-list-bounces at rhodes22.org] On Behalf Of Ben Cittadino
> Sent: Monday, October 27, 2008 10:38 AM
> To: rhodes22-list at rhodes22.org
> Subject: [Rhodes22-list] Political: Voter Suppression
>
>
> 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.
>
> --
> View this message in context:
> http://www.nabble.com/Political%3A-Voter-Suppression-tp20188986p20188986
> .html
> Sent from the Rhodes 22 mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>
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