CBS News Report on Voter Purging and Supression

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 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.

Sorry, I Can’t Find Your Name - the Republican Party's Attempt at Voter Purges

I'm posting this before the editorial... a line FROM the editorial. If you find your name has been wrongfully purged from the voter rolls on election day, or that someone is trying to keep you from voting, call 1-866-OUR-VOTE. Do not let anyone steal your vote or this election. These sorts of practices are NOT America. America is a country where all are encouraged to vote, and where your vote is sacred. It is third world countries, dictatorships, communist dictatorships, and other such places that deny their citizens the right to vote. I hope the Republican Party understands this and the future backlash these purges will incur... backlashes that may be more than they can control in the future.

Compete honorably, and win or lose like a champion. But do not change the rights this country was founded on.

NY TIMES EDITORIAL

Before Mississippi’s March presidential primary, one county election official improperly removed more than 8,000 voters from the eligible-voter rolls, including a Republican Congressional candidate. Fortunately, the secretary of state’s office learned of the purge in time and restored the voters.

It’s disturbing that a single official (who acted after mailings to voters were returned) could come so close to disenfranchising thousands of voters. But voting rolls, which are maintained by local election officials, are one of the weakest links in American democracy and problems are growing.

Some of these problems are no doubt the result of honest mistakes, but in far too many cases they appear to be driven by partisanship. While there are almost no examples in recent memory of serious fraud at the polls, Republicans have been pressing for sweeping voter purges in many states. They have also fought to make it harder to enroll new voters. Voting experts say there could be serious problems at the polls on Nov. 4.

When voters die or move to a new address, or when duplicate registrations are found, a purge is necessary to uphold the integrity of the rolls. New registrations must also be properly screened so only eligible voters get added. The trouble is that these tasks generally occur in secret, with no chance for voters or their advocates to observe or protest when mistakes are made.

A number of states — including the battleground state of Florida — have adopted no match, no vote rules. Voters can be removed from the rolls if their names do not match a second list, such as a Social Security or driver’s license database. But (like the U.S. mail) lists of this kind are notoriously mistake-filled, and one typo can cause a no match. In Ohio, Republicans recently sued the secretary of state, demanding that she provide local officials with a dubious match list. As many as 200,000 new voters could have been blocked from casting ballots. The Supreme Court rejected the suit, but Republicans are still looking for ways to use the list on Election Day.

Congress and the states need to develop clear and accurate rules for purges and new-voter verification that ensure that eligible voters remain on the rolls — and make it much harder for partisans to game the system. These rules should be public, and voters who are disqualified should be notified and given ample time before Election Day to reverse the decision.

For this election, voters need to be prepared to fight for their right to cast a ballot. They should try to confirm before Nov. 4 that they are on the rolls — something that in many states can be done on a secretary of state or board of elections Web site. If their state permits it, they should vote early. Any voter who finds that their name has disappeared from the rolls will then have time to challenge mistakes.

If voters find on Election Day that their names are not on the rolls, they should contact a voters’ rights group like Election Protection, at 1-866-OUR-VOTE, or a political campaign, which can advocate for them. They should not, except as a last resort, cast a provisional ballot, since it is less likely to be counted.

There is a desperate need for reform of the way voting rolls are kept. Until then, election officials, voting rights advocates and voters must do everything they can to ensure that all eligible voters are allowed to vote.

The Real Scandal

by Bob Herbert, NY Times

It never ends. The Republican Party never gets tired of spraying its poison across the American political landscape.

So there was a Republican congresswoman from Minnesota, Michele Bachmann, telling Chris Matthews on MSNBC that the press should start investigating members of the House and Senate to determine which ones are “pro-America or anti-America.”

Can a rancid Congressional committee be far behind? Leave it to a right-wing Republican to long for those sunny, bygone days of political witch-hunting.

Ms. Bachmann’s demented desire (“I would love to see an exposé like that”) is of a piece with the G.O.P.’s unrelenting effort to demonize its opponents, to characterize them as beyond the pale, different from ordinary patriotic Americans — and not just different, but dangerous, and even evil.

But the party is not content to stop there. Even better than demonizing opponents is the more powerful and direct act of taking the vote away from their opponents’ supporters. The Republican Party has made strenuous efforts in recent years to prevent Democrats from voting, and to prevent their votes from being properly counted once they’ve been cast.

Which brings me to the phony Acorn scandal.

John McCain, who placed his principles in a blind trust once the presidential race heated up, warned the country during the presidential debate last week that Acorn, which has been registering people to vote by the hundreds of thousands, was “on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history.”

It turns out that a tiny percentage of these new registrations are bogus, with some of them carrying ludicrous names like Mickey Mouse. Republicans have tried to turn this into a mighty oak of a scandal, with Mr. McCain thundering at the debate that it “may be destroying the fabric of democracy.”

Please. The Times put the matter in perspective when it said in an editorial that Acorn needs to be more careful with some aspects of its voter-registration process. It needs to do a better job selecting canvassers, among other things.

“But,” the editorial added, “for all of the McCain campaign’s manufactured fury about vote theft (and similar claims from the Republican Party over the years) there is virtually no evidence — anywhere in the country, going back many elections — of people showing up at the polls and voting when they are not entitled to.”

Two important points need to be made here. First, the reckless attempt by Senator McCain, Sarah Palin and others to fan this into a major scandal has made Acorn the target of vandals and a wave of hate calls and e-mail. Acorn staff members have been threatened and sickening, murderous comments have been made about supporters of Barack Obama. (Senator Obama had nothing to do with Acorn’s voter-registration drives.)

Second, when it comes to voting, the real threat to democracy is the nonstop campaign by the G.O.P. and its supporters to disenfranchise American citizens who have every right to cast a ballot. We saw this in 2000. We saw it in 2004. And we’re seeing it again now.

In Montana, the Republican Party challenged the registrations of thousands of legitimate voters based on change-of-address information available from the Post Office. These specious challenges were made — surprise, surprise — in Democratic districts. Answering the challenges would have been a wholly unnecessary hardship for the voters, many of whom were students or members of the armed forces.

In the face of widespread public criticism (even the Republican lieutenant governor weighed in), the party backed off.

That sort of thing is widespread. In one politically crucial state after another — in Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, you name it — the G.O.P. has unleashed foot soldiers whose insidious mission is to make the voting process as difficult as possible — or, better yet, impossible — for citizens who are believed to favor Democrats.

For Senator McCain to flip reality on its head and point to an overwhelmingly legitimate voter-registration effort as a “threat to the fabric of democracy” is a breathtaking exercise in absurdity.

Miles Rapoport, a former Connecticut secretary of state who is now president of Demos, a public policy group, remarked on the irony of elected Republican officials deliberately attempting to thwart voting. Some years ago, he said, he “and all the other secretaries of state” would bemoan the lack of interest in voting, especially among the young and the poor.

Now, he said, with the explosion of voter registration and the heightened interest in the presidential campaign, you’d think officials “would welcome that, and encourage it, and even celebrate it.” Instead, he said, in so many cases, G.O.P. officials are “trying to pare down the lists.”

Are Black Voters Being Disenfranchised in Today's Indiana Primary? From Black Box Voting

I received this startling news from Blackboxvoting.org, yet I have seen nothing in the press on it, even though it would seem to HEAVILY affect today's Indiana primary. It also seems it would leave open the Indiana results to a legal challenge on disenfranchising black voters, if this story is true. It SHOULD be followed up in the press, I would think. With this story out there on election day in Indiana, I wonder why it hasn't appeared. CNN's lead is John McCain's take on Obama's "elitist" take on judges. That is not a story, but a report on what John McCain is saying in a political statement. Who will cover this MAJOR Indiana voting story? Posted on Tuesday, May 6, 2008 - 6:22 am:
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Posted on Tuesday, May 6, 2008 - 6:22 am:

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Yesterday, we reported that according to Indiana's own figures, 1.1 million voter registrations had been cancelled, one-quarter of a million of those in just two counties. Another researcher, Steve Rosenfeld, began tracking back through data from the Election Assistance Commission, finding that the cancellation quantities didn't jive with the numbers you'd expect. According to Rosenfeld, after talking with the office of the Indiana Secretary of State the explanation is that "cancelled" does not mean "cancelled registrations" it means "changes" to registrations.

IF TRUE, THIS RAISES ANOTHER CONCERN

Because Indiana is implementing an ID requirement, and this will require that voters name and address match when the voter registration database is compared with their ID, an unscrupulous data entry person would no longer need to PURGE registrations in order to knock people off the voting rolls. All that's required is CHANGING the registration slightly, to introduce typos.

Many locations are now enamored of using "electronic pollbooks" instead of the paper printouts. We all know what happens when you enter a name with a typo: The computer says "can't find".

Try it. Use any computer program you have, and enter your name with a typo. Then do a search for your name. If I typo "Ben Harris" and search for "Bev Harris" I won't find it. Now, with the paper pollbooks, a pollworker might see that it's a typo, if my address is the same. Whether they accept that Bev Harris is Ben Harris is open to how flexible they feel at the moment.

With electronic pollbooks, they may not find the typo-name at all. And if an unscrupulous political hack enters "changes" or "updates" that introduce a typo into the address, or name and address, it may be impossible to find you at all. Example: I alter "Bev Harris" to make it read "Ben Harris" and then change "973 SW 43rd St" to "793 SW 43rd". Gone. Poof.

Some say the problems with the Florida 2000 election have now been codified into federal law nationwide. In terms of the now-mandatory statewide voter lists, that's true. These centralized records allow changes to be introduced from either your county or the state, and a single person can cook the list.

When you add voter ID into the mix, it allows very subtle attacks that will produce mismatches. Mark my words, the new watchword for 2008 will be "human error." Add "human error" to the term "computer glitch" for meaningless and unacceptable terms that introduce voter disenfranchisment without accountability.

SECOND CLASS BALLOTS

If your name is not found on the voter rolls, you are entitled to vote on a provisional ballot. However: The networks will call the race, engaging in their traditional journalistic malpractice of saying who "won" when they mean who they "project WILL win". NO PROVISIONAL BALLOTS ARE CONSIDERED AT ALL when the networks "call the race." They are taking their projections from called and faxed-in reports of the voting machine results tapes -- and no provisional ballots are in those results.

Provisional ballots are also "second class" ballots because:
- They are not counted until many days later
- Some of the rules applied to which ballots count or don't count actually disenfranchise voters based on pollworker errors. For example, in Volusia County Florida, citizen extraordinaire Susan Pynchon fought to get a whole set of provisional ballots counted that they were about to deny, based on the reason that "the poll worker didn't write the REASON it was a provisional ballot" on each one.

CANCELLED DOESN'T MEAN CANCELLED

The word "cancelled" is the one chosen by the Indiana election officials and their computers. They say it doesn't mean "cancelled." Here is a picture of Porter County from their report. Cancelled means cancelled, or cancelled means changed, but something happened in Porter County and there is no explanation as to what:




Here is a link to the original Indiana document containing voter registration information:
http://www.in.gov/sos/elections/pdfs/Statewide_Voter_Count_by_County5.1.08.pdf

According to this document, here is a map with the percentage of voter registrations cancelled or changed, along with the quantities.



If you try to vote and they can't find you on the list, please report it to us for data collection and public records actions.

DISCUSS AND EVALUATE AS VOTER REPORTS AND RESULTS ROLL IN

You can post and discuss the Indiana and North Carolina 2008 primary elections here.

Here is a compendium of links that you may find helpful when tracking incoming results. Some of them are live already, others will go live as results come in:

http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/73/73764.html

--Fear, by Harry Truman "When even one American - who has done nothing wrong -- is forced by fear to shut his mind and close his mouth, then all of Americans are in peril."