CBS News Report on Voter Purging and Supression

Some voters 'purged' from voter rolls

By Abbie Boudreau and Scott Bronstein
CNN Special Investigations Unit

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. Watch some of the concerns of voting experts »

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 Justice.

"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. iReport.com: Are you voting early?

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," he 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."

Brennan Center Report on Voter Purges and Suppression

Introduction

Voter registration lists, also called voter rolls, are the gateway to voting. A citizen typically cannot cast a vote that will count unless her name appears on the voter registration rolls. Yet state and local officials regularly remove—or “purge”—citizens from voter rolls. In fact, thirty-nine states and the District of Columbia reported purging more than 13 million voters from registration rolls between 2004 and 2006. Purges, if done properly, are an important way to ensure that voter rolls are dependable, accurate, and up-to-date. Precise and carefully conducted purges can remove duplicate names, and people who have moved, died, or are otherwise ineligible.

Far too frequently, however, eligible, registered citizens show up to vote and discover their names have been removed from the voter lists. States maintain voter rolls in an inconsistent and unaccountable manner. Officials strike voters from the rolls through a process that is shrouded in secrecy, prone to error, and vulnerable to manipulation.

While the lack of transparency in purge practices precludes a precise figure of the number of those erroneously purged, we do know that purges have been conducted improperly before. In 2004, for example, Florida planned to remove 48,000 “suspected felons” from its voter rolls. Many of those identified were in fact eligible to vote. The flawed process generated a list of 22,000 African Americans to be purged, but only 61 voters with Hispanic surnames, notwithstanding Florida’s sizable Hispanic population. Under pressure from voting rights groups, Florida ordered officials to stop using the purge list. Although this purge was uncovered and mostly stopped before it was completed, other improper purges may go undetected and unremedied.

The secret and inconsistent manner in which purges are conducted make it difficult, if not impossible, to know exactly how many voters are stricken from voting lists erroneously. And when purges are made public, they often reveal serious problems. Here are a few examples from this year:

• In Mississippi earlier this year, a local election official discovered that another official had wrongly purged 10,000 voters from her home computer just a week before the presidential primary.
• In Muscogee, Georgia this year, a county official purged 700 people from the voter lists, supposedly because they were ineligible to vote due to criminal convictions. The list included people who had never even received a parking ticket.
• In Louisiana, including areas hit hard by hurricanes, officials purged approximately 21,000 voters, ostensibly for registering to vote in another state, without sufficient voter protections.

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Findings

This report provides one of the first systematic examinations of the chaotic and largely unseen world of voter purges. In a detailed study focusing on twelve states, we identified three problematic practices with voter purges across the country:

Purges rely on error-ridden lists. States regularly attempt to purge voter lists of ineligible voters or duplicate registration records, but the lists that states use as the basis for purging are often riddled with errors. For example, some states purge their voter lists based on the Social Security Administration’s Death Master File, a database that even the Social Security Administration admits includes people who are still alive. Even though Hilde Stafford, a Wappingers Falls, NY resident, was still alive and voted, the master death index lists her date of death as June 15, 1997. As another example, when a member of a household files a change of address for herself in the United States Postal Service’s National Change of Address database, it sometimes has the effect of changing the addresses of all members of that household. Voters who are eligible to vote are wrongly stricken from the rolls because of problems with underlying source lists.

Voters are purged secretly and without notice. None of the states investigated in this report statutorily require election officials to provide advance public notice of a systematic purge. Additionally, with the exception of registrants believed to have changed addresses, many states do not notify individual voters before purging them. In large part, states that do provide individualized notice do not provide such notice for all classes of purge candidates. For example, our research revealed that it is rare for states to provide notice when a registrant is believed to be deceased. Without proper notice to affected individuals, an erroneously purged voter will likely not be able to correct the error before Election Day. Without public notice of an impending purge, the public will not be able to detect improper purges or to hold their election officials accountable for more accurate voter list maintenance.

Bad “matching” criteria leaves voters vulnerable to manipulated purges. Many voter purges are conducted with problematic techniques that leave ample room for abuse and manipulation. State statutes rely on the discretion of election officials to identify registrants for removal. Far too often, election officials believe they have “matched” two voters, when they are actually looking at the records of two distinct individuals with similar identifying information. These cases of mistaken identity cause eligible voters to be wrongly removed from the rolls. The infamous Florida purge of 2000—conservative estimates place the number of wrongfully purged voters close to 12,000—was generated in part by bad matching criteria. Florida registrants were purged from the rolls if 80 percent of the letters of their last names were the same as those of persons with criminal convictions. Those wrongly purged included Reverend Willie D. Whiting Jr., who, under the match ing criteria, was considered the same person as Willie J. Whiting. Without specific guidelines for or limitations on the authority of election officials conducting purges, eligible voters are regularly made unnecessarily vulnerable.

Insufficient oversight leaves voters vulnerable to manipulated purges. Insufficient oversight permeates the purge process beyond just the issue of matching. For example, state statutes often rely on the discretion of election officials to identify registrants for removal and to initiate removal procedures. In Washington, the failure to deliver a number of delineated mailings, including precinct reassignment notices, ballot applications, and registration acknowledgment notices, triggers the mailing of address confirmation notices, which then sets in motion the process for removal on account of change of address. Two Washington counties and the Secretary of State, however, reported that address confirmation notices were sent when any mail was returned as undeliverable, not just those delineated in state statute. Since these statutes rarely tend to specify limitations on the authority of election officials to purge registrants, insufficient oversight leaves room for election officials to deviate from what the state law provides and may make voters vulnerable to poor, lax, or irresponsible decision-making.

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Policy Recommendations

No effective national standard governs voter purges; in fact, methods vary from state to state and even from county to county. A voter’s risk of being purged depends in part on where in the state he or she lives. The lack of consistent rules and procedures means that this risk is unpredictable and difficult to guard against. While some variation is inevitable, every American should benefit from basic protections against erroneous purges.

Based on our review of purge practices and statutes in a number of jurisdictions, we make the following policy recommendations to reduce the occurrence of erroneous purges and protect eligible voters from erroneous purges.

A. Transparency and Accountability for Purges

States should:

• Develop and publish uniform, non-discriminatory rules for purges.
• Provide public notice of an impending purge. Two weeks before any county-wide or state-wide purge, states should announce the purge and explain how it is to be conducted. Individual voters must be notified and given the opportunity to correct any errors or omissions, or demonstrate eligibility before they are stricken from the rolls.
• Develop and publish rules for an individual to prevent or remedy her erroneous inclusion in an impending purge. Eligible citizens should have a clear way to restore their names to voter rolls.
• Stop using failure to vote as a trigger for a purge. States should send address confirmation notices only when they believe a voter has moved.
• Develop directives and criteria with respect to the authority to purge voters. The removal of any record should require authorization by at least two officials.
• Preserve purged voter registration records.
• Make purge lists publicly available.

B. Strict Criteria for the Development of Purge Lists

States should:

• Ensure a high degree of certainty that names on a purge list belong there. Purge lists should be reviewed multiple times to ensure that only ineligible voters are included.
• Establish strict criteria for matching voter lists with other sources.
• Audit purge source lists. If purge lists are developed by matching names on the voter registration list to names from other sources like criminal conviction lists, the quality and accuracy of the information in these lists should be routinely “audited” or checked.
• Monitor duplicate removal procedures. States should implement uniform rules and procedures for eliminating duplicate registrations.

C. “Fail-Safe” Provisions to Protect Voters

States should ensure that:

• No voter is turned away from the polls because her name is not found on the voter rolls. Instead, would-be voters should be given provisional ballots, to which they are entitled under the law.
• Election workers are given clear instructions and adequate training as to HAVA’s provisional balloting requirements.

D. Universal Voter Registration

States should:

• Take the affirmative responsibility to build clean voter rolls consisting of all eligible citizens. Building on other government lists or using other innovative methods, states can make sure that all eligible citizens, and only eligible citizens, are on the voter rolls.
• Ensure that voters stay on the voter rolls when they move within the state.
• Provide a fail-safe mechanism of Election Day registration for those individuals who are missed or whose names are erroneously purged from the voter rolls.

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About the Author

Myrna Pérez is counsel for the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, focusing on a variety of voting rights and election administration issues including the Brennan Center’s efforts to restore the vote to people with felony convictions. Prior to joining the Center, Ms. Pérez was the Civil Rights Fellow at Relman & Dane, a civil rights law firm in Washington, D.C. A graduate of Columbia Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, Ms. Pérez clerked for the Honorable Anita B. Brody of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and for the Honorable Julio M. Fuentes of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

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About the Voting Rights & Elections Project

The Voting Rights and Elections Project works to expand the franchise, to ensure that every eligible American can vote, and to ensure that every vote cast is accurately recorded and counted. The Center's staff provides top-flight legal and policy assistance on a broad range of election administration issues, including voter registration systems, voting technology, voter identification, statewide voter registration list maintenance, and provisional ballots

Voting Machines in Six West Virginia Counties Report Vote Flipping on ES&S Machines

Also from Black Box Voting Forums:

SUMMARY: Jackson, Putnam, Berkeley, Ohio, Monongalia and Greenbrier, all using ES&S iVotronic voting machines, now have voters reporting that when they voted for one candididate the machine lit up a different one. (Don't be too quick to accept the calibration excuse. A Tennessee machine flipped voter choice to a candidate five lines down, ruling out calibration as the real reason.)

Voting machine complaints continue
Voters encouraged to review ballots before confirming

CHARLESTON, W.Va. - A few voters from different counties continue to experience problems with electronic machines during early voting.

Eleven early voters from three counties - Jackson, Putnam and Berkeley - previously reported having problems with voting machines to the Charleston Gazette. At least five more voters in three other counties - Ohio, Monongalia and Greenbrier - recently reported similar problems.

A Wheeling Intelligencer editorial noted, "A few people who have cast ballots last week at the Ohio County early voting station in the City-County Building have reported difficulties.

"When they tried to select specific candidates on the touch-screen machine, votes instead were reported for their choices' opponents."

The Ohio County newspaper's Wednesday editorial added, "Voting machines taken to every polling place in every county should be recalibrated after they are moved - then tested to ensure they are functioning properly."

The Morgantown Dominion Post reported Melissa Turner, an early voter in Morgantown, was trying to vote for Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee, when the machine switched her vote.

Monongalia County Clerk Carye L. Blaney told The Charleston Gazette, "I don't think it is serious. I don't think it is a problem with the machine.

"Everyone touches the machine differently. The machine, by design, is sensitive. If you touch it with a finger, you may put pressure above the line where the candidate is, or below.

"But the machines clearly show you who you voted for. It puts a large green check mark next to the candidate.

"Melissa Turner was trying to press the machine with her thumb. We have purchased a stylus-pointed device that has a narrow tip that you can use to make your selection.

"Some counties use the eraser end of a pencil. They are both narrow, easier to touch and easier for the screen [on voting machines] to identify," Blaney said on Thursday.

S.E. Dalton, an early voter in Greenbrier County, stated, "I too had my presidential vote changed from Obama to McCain when I cast my vote in Greenbrier County. As soon as it happened, I stated to the attendant, 'I didn't vote for him.' She handed me a pencil and instructed me to use the eraser to touch the screen as, 'It is very sensitive.'"

In an e-mail, Dalton wrote he uses a wide variety of computer technology and programs every day.

"I can tell you that in no way was the unauthorized vote change a result of user error," Dalton wrote. "Voters must use great caution when casting their votes if the election results are to truly reflect the decisions of the voters of West Virginia."

West Virginia's electronic voting machines are all made by Election Systems & Software, or ES&S, based in Omaha, Neb.

Wood County Clerk Jamie Six believes problems are caused when county officials do not calibrate and align voting machines properly.

Charleston Gazette - Oct. 27, 2008 By Paul J. Nyden

http://wvgazette.com/News/200810270020

Voting Irregularities: ES&S Machines in West Virginia Registering Obama Votes Incorrectly For Green Party Candidate

Vote Flipping From Obama to McKinney (Green Party Candidate)

Some voting irregularities being registered through Black Box Voting. Notably, so far the incorrect vote registrations appear to be depriving Obama of votes.

Black Box Voting Forums; Posted on Wednesday, October 22, 2008 - 7:28 pm:

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Summary: This was the ES&S iVotronic, same voting machine caught flipping votes in two West Virginia counties. Votes peeled off to the other major party candidate, or to any smaller party candidate have the same effect: Disenfranchisement for the voter and political disadvantage for the candidate the voter was trying to vote for. You can find all counties with iVotronics by skimming through the state sections at Black Box Voting. If you will vote on a DRE, bring a cell phone camera and start capturing the screen, discreetly, BEFORE you see any votes flip. Prove it, this is important.

Sent by e-mail to Black Box Voting, from David Earnhardt, producer of the film UNCOUNTED - Oct. 20 2008

Vote Flipping in Davidson County, Tennessee

" My wife, Patricia Earnhardt, had an early voting experience here in Nashville, Tennessee, where she saw her vote momentarily flip from Barack Obama to Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney. She voted on a ouch-screen paperless machine. Here is her story:

"A poll worker directed me to a touch screen voting machine & instructedme how t o use it. I touched "Obama" for president & nothing lit up. I
touched 2 or 3 more times & still nothing lit up. I called the poll worker back over to tell him I was having a problem. He said I just needed to touch it more lightly. I tried it 2 or 3 more times more lightly with the poll worker watching & still nothing lit up. The poll worker then touched it for me twice — nothing lit up. The third time he touched the Obama button, the Cynthia McKinney space lit up! The McKinney button was located five rows below the Obama button. The poll worker just kind of laughed and cancelled the vote. He hit the Obama button again & it finally lit up. I continued on to cast the rest of my votes. After completing the process & reviewing my votes, I went to the VOTE page, hit the VOTE button & nothing happened. Again after several tries, I called the poll worker over & he finally got the machine to register my votes. Hurray — I voted! — or did I? I left the polling place feeling uncertain." Patricia Earnhardt -
Friday, Oct. 17 - Howard School Building - Nashville, Tennessee

David Earnhardt: I also had similar problems with the machine I was voting on that same day, although no vote flipping. I would touch the screen numerous times before I could get my various candidate choices to light up. It was strange and very frustrating. When I finally got through my slate of candidate choices, I could not get the VOTE button to light up when I touched it. I finally called over a poll worker and he told me that I needed to touch lightly. I touched the VOTE button more lightly, but was only able to get it to work after several more failed attempts.

From Another Black Box Voting forum Poster: For anyone who must vote on a touch screen, bring a new pencil with an unused eraser to the polling place. Tap the screen with the eraser, not your finger. If you tap the screen with the head of the eraser, you will avoid many of the problems associated with touch screens. First, the eraser head is much smaller than your finger tip. A large (or, may I say "fat?) finger might inadertently touch the area assigned to more than one candidate. A close relative of mine has huge fingers. There is no way he would be able to touch a voting area smaller than his massive fingertip. Next, the eraser avoids the problems that may be caused by a long fingernail that could drag into the next candidate space. By lifting the pencil in a deliberate motion rather than dragging it, this problem is avoided altogether. Finally, moving the eraser straight down and back up away from the screen helps reduce the problem of parallax, where the voter doesn't realize the effect of looking at a screen from an angle.