Blog
Voter Purges and Challenges
By Michael Waldman – 05/23/08
I just sat through a nail-biting, emotionally exhausting
two hour TV movie. The opening ten minutes were especially
nerve-wracking. The film begins with elderly Floridians squinting at
their butterfly ballots, then stabbing at the ballots, scary music playing,
over and over, voting by accident for Pat Buchanan. Think of the shower
scene in "Psycho" with your grandmother instead of Janet Leigh. Even more
exciting: would the panting, lurching advance man catch up with Al Gore before
he walked onstage to concede?
Maybe not everybody would find this as thrilling. But
Recount,which airs on HBO this Sunday, is one of the
better political movies I've ever seen. It "gets" the motives and methods
of political players better than anything in years. More relevant to the
work of the Brennan
Center, it brings to life
the ways our elections can go wrong, and the rickety and often corrupt
machinery by which we still cast and count votes.
(Full disclosure: I am an old colleague and friend of Ron
Klain, the protagonist; I see GOP lawyer Ben Ginsberg at the beach many summers;
and I go duck hunting with James Baker every year. Well, that part isn't
true. But like anyone involved in politics, back then I had a rooting interest
in the outcome of the recount.)
The narrative crackles and does a good job portraying the
legal machinations that led to the Supreme Court's 5–4 intervention to stop the
counting, thus making George W. Bush President. It's all here, from the
"Brooks Brothers riot" in which Republican congressional staffers shut down the
counting in Miami,
to the frenzied efforts to read and understand the Supreme Court opinion that
announced its reasoning only applied to this case. The acting is
terrific, and the dialogue is sharp and as profane as real life politics (and
HBO).
Read the rest of this story ...
Tags: Democracy, Voting After Criminal Conviction, Voting Rights & Elections, Allegations of Voter Fraud, Voter Lists and Databases, Voter Purges and Challenges, Voting Technology
By Myrna Pérez – 03/10/08
Things are looking pretty grim for Mississippi citizens who want to exercise
their right to vote. Recently, Mississippi
Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann advocated a plan that would have scrapped all
existing voter registrations and required everyone to reregister. Then came news that approximately 11,000
registered voters were illegally purged from the voting rolls just one week
before tomorrow's primary.
But, that's not all. Secretary
Hosemann is concerned that the Mississippi Constitution does not go far enough
in disenfranchising people with past criminal convictions. Currently, state law lists ten kinds of crimes that will result in
a person losing their voting rights. The
remedy he supports, House Bill 969, disenfranchises all persons convicted of
ANY felony until two years after the person fully completes all terms of the
sentence and satisfies other conditions.
It is estimated that right now, more than 146,000
Mississippians are disenfranchised - more than 92,000 of them are African
Americans. About 121,000 of those people
are not incarcerated and are living, working and paying taxes in their communities. During a time when the rest of the country is
excited about how many people are participating in our electoral process, the
chief elections officer of Mississippi
is supporting a proposal that will make even more people ineligible to vote.
Not only is this bad public policy, it is inconsistent with
the existing trend of expanding franchise opportunities for persons with
criminal convictions. Indeed, even in Kentucky - one of only two
states that permanently disenfranchises everyone with a felony conviction
unless the governor grants an individual clemency application - Governor Steve
Beshear announced that he is removing some barriers in the application process
to restore voting rights to convicted felons.
In just over ten years, sixteen states have reformed their policies to
bring more people with past felony convictions back into the democratic
process.
Secretary Hosemann explains his support for expanding the list of disenfranchising crimes with a statement that reveals how out of touch this kind of proposal is: "All of the nine states
fully covered by the 1965 Voting Rights Act disenfranchise felons or suspend
their right to vote upon conviction." To
be "fully covered" by the Voting Rights Act means that the state's voting
practices history is so discriminatory that the entire state is still required
by law to obtain permission from the Department of Justice or a court before
certain election changes are allowed to be made. Mississippi
is one of those covered states. With
that group being the benchmark, the progress we can expect out of Mississippi is not
encouraging.
Tags: Democracy, Voting After Criminal Conviction, Voting Rights & Elections, Voter Purges and Challenges, Voter Registration
By Myrna Pérez – 02/26/08
Hailing from Texas, I've seen my fellow southerners come up with some great ideas—like adding creamy gravy to chicken-fried steak, for instance. But now comes Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann with an election "reform" proposal that has me scratching my head. The Secretary of State's plan includes a lot of things, but the provision that should inspire bipartisan outrage is the section requiring all persons who registered prior October 1, 2008 to
reregister. The Secretary is concerned that the voter rolls are bloated and apparently thinks starting from scratch is the way to fix the problem. Talk about the medicine being worse than the disease.
We should strive for accurate rolls. On this, no one disagrees. When voter rolls are accurate, turn-out numbers are more precise, and election misconduct is easier to detect. Problems arise, however, when the quest for accurate rolls eclipses the voter's actual rights. When eligible voters are removed from the rolls, they're silenced unless they're able to correct the problem in time to qualify for the next election. Unfortunately, many voters will not know or understand they have to reregister before it is too late.
The irony is that there is no need for extreme proposals like Secretary Hosemann's. Federal law sets forth a common-sensical approach that strikes a balance between voters' rights and accurate voter rolls. Under the National Voter Registration Act, sometimes referred to as the "NVRA" or "Motor Voter Act," if it appears from information provided by the Postal Service that a registrant should no longer be on the rolls, the officials are supposed to send a forwardable notice asking for a confirmation of the registrant's address. If that registrant does not respond, the registrant remains on the rolls for two federal elections. If the registrant shows up to vote in the interim, she or he can update the necessary information. Only registrants who fail to respond to the address confirmation notice AND miss two federal elections can be removed from the voter rolls.
Under Hosemann's proposal, registrants who vote in any election conducted between November 3, 2008 and December 31, 2009 and meet certain other conditions will be deemed reregistered. Everyone else who registered prior to October 1, 2008 will have to reregister in order to be able to vote in any election after December 31, 2009. The Secretary's proposal will disenfranchise too many voters in the name of minimizing registration roll bloat. The NVRA method is simple and inexpensive. Secretary Hosemann should be ensuring compliance with the NVRA, not putting forth a new proposal that, by design, jeopardizes the voting rights of Mississippians.
Upate, 2/27
Thanks to an amendment offered by Senator David Blount, D-Jackson, the Mississippi Senate passed a revised version of the bill which did not include the provisions requiring all voters to reregister!
Tags: Democracy, Voting Rights & Elections, Election Day Issues, Voter Lists and Databases, Voter Purges and Challenges, Voter Registration
By Wendy R. Weiser – 02/04/08
You can't make this stuff up.
This weekend, the Indianapolis
Star reported
that the state of Indiana-which is currently defending its law denying the vote
to people without government-issued photo IDs before
the U.S. Supreme Court-is poised to revoke the IDs of up to 90,000 people. This ID purge is scheduled to happen later
this month, right in the middle of the primary season in an important
presidential election year, and only weeks before a special
congressional election.
This means that, in addition to the 13% of registered
voters in Indiana who don't have current state-issued photo IDs, up to
90,000 more could be blocked from voting because of Indiana's misguided voter
ID law, the most restrictive such law in the country. (Caveat:
the state is not physically collecting the cancelled IDs, and so it is
not clear what will happen when their holders show up to vote.)
And it's even worse than it sounds. The reason Indiana is planning to revoke these IDs is
because the state's Bureau of Motor Vehicles ran a computer check and was
unable to "match" the bearers' information against records kept by the Social
Security Administration. This kind of computer
matching is a singularly misguided and unreliable way to identify invalid ID
records. Typos, clerical errors, and
other irrelevant discrepancies in BMV and Social Security databases typically
cause a huge number of match failures between perfectly valid government records. A person listed as "Bill" on his driver's
license but "William" on his Social Security card will fail to match; so will a
woman whose driver's license is in her married name but whose Social Security
records are in her maiden name.
When other jurisdictions have tried record
matching in the voting context, there were match failures for up to 20-30%
of would-be voters. When they tried to
match records against the Social Security database, as Indiana has done here, the match failures
have risen to 46.2%. Erroneous match
failures are typically more common for people of color, as the Brennan Center
recently found when it analyzed Florida's
match files in connection with an ongoing lawsuit. Again, these match failures are not
indicative of any problems with the voters.
After initial efforts to investigate these mismatches in Indiana, a BMV
spokesperson admitted
that "[t]he great majority of mismatches that occurred were what we would call
innocent or inadvertent kinds of things."
The bottom line here is that Indiana has just made it doubly difficult
for its citizens to vote. Not only do they
have to go through the expense and effort to get government-issued photo IDs in
order to vote, but those who already have ID now need to navigate a bureaucratic
obstacle course to make sure that their IDs haven't been bumped. The ID purge may also circumvent the voter protections
Congress put in place in the Motor Voter law to protect against inaccurate
purges of the voter rolls.
It's almost as though officials in Indiana are trying to keep their citizens-or at least some of their
citizens-from being able to vote.
Let's hope that Indiana
rescinds its plans to cancel these IDs before its too late. But more importantly, this incident provides
yet another reason why it doesn't make sense to tie voting rights to
state-issued IDs, and yet another demonstration of the huge number of people
that could be unfairly barred from voting because of Indiana's voter ID law. Let's hope that the Supreme Court is watching
this current mess when it decides the constitutionality of Indiana's voter ID law.
Tags: Democracy, Voting Rights & Elections, Voter ID, Voter Lists and Databases, Voter Purges and Challenges
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