Conservative Revolutionary American Party III: Republican Operatives Step Up Attempts to Purge Voters

Thursday, October 30, 2008

Republican Operatives Step Up Attempts to Purge Voters

by James Parks, Oct 27, 2008

Seems like every day, we hear about more efforts by Republican operatives to suppress the vote. Kyla Berry, a college senior in Georgia, received a letter three weeks ago telling her that she is not a U.S. citizen and is not eligible to vote.

That came as a surprise to Berry, who was born in Boston and has a U.S. passport and birth certificate to prove it. The letter, dated Oct. 2, gave her a week from the time it was dated to prove her citizenship. One big problem: The letter was postmarked Oct. 9.

Berry is one of more than 50,000 registered Georgia voters whose names have come up as a mismatch when checked against state computer records. At least 4,500 of those people are having their citizenship questioned, and the burden is on them to prove they are eligible to vote. Check out the video of CNN’s interview with Berry here.

An African American college student, Berry represents the kind of voter Republican operatives often have sought to purge from the rolls before elections. Millions of new voters—many of them from groups that usually vote for Democrats—have registered, making it likely that next week’s vote will smash all previous records.

Republicans across the country are pulling out all the stops to keep the new voters and Democratic voters at home on Election Day. One of their biggest tools is the computer matching system in which registered voters’ names are cross-checked with state and federal databases. The databases are notorious for errors and typos, which means legitimate voters could be “flagged” and possibly purged from the rolls for no good reason.

A report by the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law found that states are secretly purging roles with no supervision or national standards. As a result, efforts to clean up voter rolls are not as precise as they should be and eligible voters often are wrongly removed.

But that didn’t stop Colorado Secretary of State Michael Coffman, a Republican. The voter advocacy group, Advancement Project, has filed suit against Coffman challenging illegal purges and cancellation practices that have removed between 16,000 and 30,000 voters from Colorado’s rolls.

The suit alleges, among other things, that Coffman has removed tens of thousands of voters from the official voter rolls after Aug. 4, 2008, in violation of federal law, which bans systematic removal of voters from the rolls within 90 days of a federal election.

Here are other examples of Republican determination to purge legal voters from the rolls:

Even after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against them, Ohio Republicans still are trying to use computer mismatches to challenge voter registrations. At the request of House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), the White House asked the Department of Justice to look into whether 200,000 new Ohio voters must reconfirm their registration information before Nov. 4.
In Florida, election officials found that 75 percent of some 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. Also in Florida, according to Ari at Oxdown Gazette, some officials are planning to challenge the vote of anyone whose name is on a home foreclosure list—a move that has been successfully challenged in Michigan and Ohio.
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. Van Hollen’s lawsuit was dismissed late last week.
In Montana earlier this month, U.S. District Court Judge Donald Molloy issued a scathing ruling denouncing the state Republican Party’s effort to challenge the registration of 6,000 voters. “The timing of the challenges is so transparent it defies common sense to believe the purpose is anything but political chicanery,” Molloy said. The Montana Republican Party and its leaders, he wrote, “are abusing the process.”