Texas Joins the Voter Purge Parade
Florida isn’t the only state engaging in massive purges of tens or hundreds of thousands of voters, many of them entirely eligible to vote. A staggering percentage of Texas voters may find their right to vote suspended based on a whole range of illegitimate excuses.
More than 300,000 valid voters were notified they could be removed from Texas rolls from November 2008 to November 2010 – often because they were mistaken for someone else or failed to receive or respond to generic form letters, according to Houston Chronicle interviews and analysis of voter registration data…
Statewide, more than 1.5 million voters could be on the path to cancellation if they fail to vote or to update their records for two consecutive federal elections: One out of every 10 Texas voters’ registration is currently suspended. Among voters under 30, the figure is about one in five…
State and federal laws require the nation’s voter rolls be regularly reviewed and cleaned to remove duplicates and eliminate voters who moved away or died. But across Texas, such “removals” rely on outdated computer programs, faulty procedures and voter responses to generic form letters, often resulting in the wrong people being sent cancellation notices, including new homeowners, college students, Texans who work abroad and folks with common names, a Chronicle review of cancellations shows.
The Secretary of State’s office says it automatically cancels voters only when there is a “strong match” between a new registration and an older existing voter – such as full name, Social Security number and/or date of birth.
However, each year thousands of voters receive requests to verify voter information or be cancelled because they share the same name as a voter who died, got convicted of a crime or claimed to be a non-citizen to avoid jury duty. Those voters receive form letters generated by workers in county election offices that “therefore may be more subject to error,” said Rich Parsons, a spokesman for the Secretary of State in emailed responses to the newspaper. Voters who fail to respond to form letters – or never receive them – get dropped.
Statewide, 21 percent of the people who received purge letters later proved they were valid voters, compared with 16 percent in Harris County, according to a Chronicle analysis of the latest U.S. Election Assistance Commission data. Other counties had higher percentages: 37 percent of voters who received removal letters in Galveston County were valid voters, 40 percent in Bexar County and 70 percent in Collin County.
This kind of thing goes on all over the place. Federal law requires each state to maintain a Qualified Voter File, a central list of all qualified voters. It also requires them to take steps to keep them as current as possible, which can obviously be very difficult — people die or move residences regularly, especially younger people like students. So they often rely on computer matching programs that search various databases to look for any discrepancies, which have a very high error rate. If a person’s entries in state or local databases conflict in any way — a missing middle initial, a slightly different address (like a missing or transposed apartment number), a single letter misplaced — they can be flagged and therefore purged from the voter rolls. And those differences don’t even have to be with their own entries in different databases; if their name is identical to someone else’s name, they could easily get flagged.
Michigan has a long history of doing this as well and our last secretary of state, Terri Lynn Land (now a member of the Republican National Committee) lost at least two court cases over such voter purges. Some of the registrations that are canceled or suspended are legitimate, of course, as the person has died or moved out of state and so forth. But it also results in thousands, sometimes tens or hundreds of thousands, of eligible voters being purged. And that is unacceptable.
psweet:
June 7th, 2012 at 11:41 am
70% error rate? The only place I know of where that’s acceptable is hitting in the major leagues!
baal:
June 7th, 2012 at 12:27 pm
Until and unless the leadership of the (R) party starts getting serious problems for the behaviour, they won’t stop. They need some ‘penalty enhancement’.
velociraptor:
June 7th, 2012 at 1:10 pm
I get viscerally angry when I hear of garbage of this nature. As I see it, one of the problems we have is that there are no consequences for the people that pull this kind of shit and fuck it up, in this case, purging an eligible voter from the rolls.
Here’s an idea: If someone is wrongly purged, the purger or members of the purging authority are stripped of their right to vote in perpetuity, and fined, say $10,000 per instance. Once they are bankrupt, their party is held accountable for the difference. Put people’s asses on the line and a whole lot of this shit will disappear.
It would work great for criminal cases too.
reedcartwright:
June 7th, 2012 at 1:15 pm
The high error rate is a good reason to have same-day voter registration.
Modusoperandi:
June 7th, 2012 at 1:23 pm
reedcartwright, they’re against that. Also, early voting, Sunday voting and voting by Democrats.
gvlgeologist:
June 7th, 2012 at 2:23 pm
The errors are not bugs, but features.
Are there really people who don’t think that this is deliberately targeted at people likely to vote Democratic?
Childermass:
June 7th, 2012 at 2:29 pm
The problem is not a purge per se, but intentionally engineering it to be more likely to purge those are likely not to vote the way you want. If any purge is to be done, it should be done at the same time and in the same way throughout the entire state — an not merely in highly Democratic or highly minority areas. And it should be reasonable. Someone registering elsewhere using the same SSN is reasonable. Missing middle initials and misspellings are not.
That a criminal has a similar name is not likewise someone registering elsewhere with a similar name: someone had my same first name, last name, and middle initial when I lived in Michigan. He lived just down the highway in a very rural area i.e. not that many people between us. The town the post office put on our addresses only had a few thousand people. People search engines tell me that he has also has lived not all that far from where I live in Oklahoma too.
A purge of someone who failed to vote in any election in the time it takes two federal election to happen is not unreasonable. Where I live they failed to vote a minimum of eight times and possibly a whole lot more. They missed a presidential election, a gubernatorial election, at least one election for federal senator, at least one primary, almost certainly a runoff, school board elections, etc. If someone fail to vote in that many elections and then fails to respond to a letter that states “Important: You might lose your registration to vote by not responding” then purge them. Again, this must be done in the same way from every area in the state and in the same way to every citizen. If it only done in counties that vote for the Democrats then it is a scam.
Meanwhile I might state the best way to protect one’s right to vote is very simple: Vote.
If you don’t fail to vote umpteen times in a row, the standard of going two federal election without ever voting rule won’t go into effect. Meanwhile you can vote against those who wish to prevent people from voting. If religious minorities (obviously includes most of us), blacks, naturalized immigrants, poor people, etc. got out and voted a greatly increased frequency then those schemes to prevent them from exercising their democratic rights would be greatly diminished. And elected people might actually have to listen.
d cwilson:
June 7th, 2012 at 2:41 pm
Also voting by people who work for the government or receive any tangible benefit from the government other than corporate/agricultural subsidies. Or anyone who isn’t a white male Christian property owner.
bluentx:
June 8th, 2012 at 12:30 am
Check your Texas voter registration at:
https://team1.sos.state.tx.us/voterws/viw/faces/SearchSelectionVoter.jsp
Just checked mine. Haven’t been purged yet–but there’s still time:)
davem:
June 8th, 2012 at 5:29 am
Why is this so difficult? Here in the UK, we get a form every year, listing adults in the household, asking us to confirm that the list is correct, or to correct it. Is this rocket science?
Vall:
June 8th, 2012 at 11:21 am
I just had a great idea for the Democrat leaders: propose a bill that makes voting mandatory. No registration needed. To avoid double voting, use biometric identifiers. Make sure the person proposing the bill owns a biometric company.