A recent controversy between the state of Texas and individual counties in the state has emerged over whether the state can force counties to purge voter registration rolls of the names of people who may be dead, or have moved out of the county.
Counties - especially large ones - are concerned that doing so this close to an election might result in legitimate voters being removed from the rolls - and open themselves up to whatever legal consequences follow. They prefer doing this after the election, but the state in insisting they go forward now.
Here are a few stories related to this. It a good potential future written assignment for GOVT 2306.
- NPR: Many Texans Bereaved Over "Dead" Voter Purge: In Houston, high school nurse Terry Collins got a letter informing
her that after 34 years of voting she was off the Harris County rolls.
Sorry. "Friday of last week, I got a letter
saying that my voting registration would be revoked because I'm
deceased, I'm dead. I was like, 'Oh, no I'm not!' " Collins says. In
order to stay on the rolls, the 52-year-old nurse had to call and
inform the registrar of her status among the living. She tried, but it
didn't go so well. "When I tried to call I
was on hold for an hour, never got anyone," she says. "I called three
days in a row and was on hold for an hour or more."
- HC: Harris County cancels 'dead' voter purge: Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector Don Sumners said Monday that he
would not purge from the voter roll before the November election any of
the 9,018 citizens who received letters from his office in recent days
notifying them that they may be dead and are at risk of having their
registrations canceled.
However, a spokesman for the Texas secretary of state, the office
that generated the statewide list of about 80,000 voters, said Sumners'
move contradicts legislative directives.
"Our office has federal and state requirements to maintain an
accurate and secure voter registration list. If any of those people are
deceased, the law requires that they be removed from the voter
registration list ," Rich Parsons said. "Mr. Sumners' decision would
prevent that."
- HC: Who's afraid of zombie voters?: Voter purges are a common event, but usually not this controversial.
The difference? In the search for ghost voters, Texas has replaced a
scalpel with a proton pack. Changes to the system have turned a
reasonable process into a broad swipe that risks kicking out proper
voters and undermining the legitimacy of our elections.
While the state previously used data from the Bureau of Vital Statistics, a bill passed last year now requires it to use data from the Social Security Administration.
This new list appears to be less accurate, perhaps explaining why
people who had been voting for years suddenly found notices of their own
ineligibility in their mailboxes.
And rather than taking the burden on itself to check whether the
information was accurate, the Texas Secretary of State's office mailed
out notices for both strong and weak matches, and burdened citizens with
sorting it out. Sending an unverified mass mailing that asks people to
confirm their own deaths seems an inefficient and risky way of
maintaining voter rolls, especially so close to a major election. And
given the problems with voter registration in Harris County over the
past few years, and the continuing debate over the discriminatory effect
of statewide voter ID laws, we would hope that Texas would be more
careful not to risk disenfranchising voters.
- Businessweek: Texas Court Halts Attempt to Purge Voters as Dead: Texas officials were temporarily
barred by a state judge from ordering county election officials
to purge presumably dead voters from registration rolls because
the initiative may violate the election code.
The ruling came in a lawsuit filed yesterday by four Texas
voters who were told they would be purged from voter-
registration lists as deceased. They asked state court Judge Tim
Sulak in Austin to stop the state from striking about 77,000
names from the rolls, arguing the plan violates the Texas
election code and the U.S. Voting Rights Act.
The secretary of state is “restrained from further
instructing the counties to remove any other names from the
voter rolls,” Sulak said in his order. “Plaintiffs are
entitled to temporary injunctive relief.”
Lawyers for the voters contended the state was required to
get pre-approval for rules changes under the federal Voting
Rights Act. The law mandates that Texas and other jurisdictions
subject to the act get pre-clearance from the U.S. Justice
Department or a special three-judge panel to alter electoral
procedures.
“There is no statutory authority for this purge,” civil
rights lawyer David Richards, who represents the plaintiffs,
said in a phone interview while waiting for the judge to rule.
Showing posts with label purging voters. Show all posts
Showing posts with label purging voters. Show all posts
Thursday, September 20, 2012
Monday, June 4, 2012
Vote Purging in Texas
From the Houston Chronicle, a warning on efforts underway to purge voter rolls - which has to be done from time to time, but can lead to legitimate voters being removed from the polls. Not that this is deliberate.
Monday, October 27, 2008
Armies of Lawyers
Slate tells us that they are set to descent across the country for both major parties to challenge ineligible voters -- if the are Republican -- and fight voter suppression -- if the are Democrat:
With an estimated 9 million new voters registered, lawyers on each side will be ghost-busting their election nightmare of choice: Democrats claim Republicans seek to suppress the vote—particularly student and minority votes—through polling-place intimidation, threatening robo calls, and illegal voter-roll purges. Republicans respond—indeed John McCain expressly announced at the final debate—that Democrats are "destroying the fabric of democracy" by signing up Mickey, Minnie, Donald, and Daisy, who will all then vote in coordinated efforts to steal the election.
...
Election litigation is a boom industry, even in a crumbling economy. Hasen recently published a study indicating that the number of lawsuits filed over elections rose from an average of 94 in the four years before the 2000 election to an average of 230 in the six years after. Paradoxically, the best way to inoculate America against the growing pandemic of "vote fraud" allegations from the political right, and the anxiety over widespread voter intimidation and suppression from the left, may be by throwing more lawyers at it. That's why the single most important role for the armies of attorneys working the 2008 election may ultimately just be to be there: to avert the biggest conflicts and bear witness to the small ones. Send in enough lawyers, and you may just ensure that a watched polling place never boils.
With an estimated 9 million new voters registered, lawyers on each side will be ghost-busting their election nightmare of choice: Democrats claim Republicans seek to suppress the vote—particularly student and minority votes—through polling-place intimidation, threatening robo calls, and illegal voter-roll purges. Republicans respond—indeed John McCain expressly announced at the final debate—that Democrats are "destroying the fabric of democracy" by signing up Mickey, Minnie, Donald, and Daisy, who will all then vote in coordinated efforts to steal the election.
...
Election litigation is a boom industry, even in a crumbling economy. Hasen recently published a study indicating that the number of lawsuits filed over elections rose from an average of 94 in the four years before the 2000 election to an average of 230 in the six years after. Paradoxically, the best way to inoculate America against the growing pandemic of "vote fraud" allegations from the political right, and the anxiety over widespread voter intimidation and suppression from the left, may be by throwing more lawyers at it. That's why the single most important role for the armies of attorneys working the 2008 election may ultimately just be to be there: to avert the biggest conflicts and bear witness to the small ones. Send in enough lawyers, and you may just ensure that a watched polling place never boils.
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Republicans Hate ACORN
Slate.com tries to understand why:
With voter registration coming to a close, the community-organizing group ACORN has become a major target of criticism by Republicans in recent weeks. On Thursday, Slate's John Dickerson reported that members of the crowd at a McCain rally in Wisconsin started shouting the organization's name as a rallying cry. When did a group more typically known for its minimum-wage and housing campaigns become such a controversial organization in national politics?
In the run-up to the 2004 election.
ACORN—that's the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now—was founded in 1970 and has long been known for its activism surrounding local issues in urban areas. The group earned its fair share of criticism from the right over the years—not least for its controversial tactics, which have included disrupting a speech by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich in 1995. In 2003, Manhattan Institute scholar Sol Stern described ACORN as promoting "a 1960s-bred agenda of anti-capitalism, central planning, victimology, and government handouts to the poor."
These days, Republicans are accusing ACORN of committing widespread voter-registration fraud. The group has been involved in registration efforts since its early days, but that aspect of its work did not earn much criticism until recent years. In 1993, Newsday reported that the New York State Senate had held hearings over the legality of ostensibly nonpartisan voter drives conducted by ACORN and sponsored by the state's Democratic Party. In 1999, about 400 voter-registration cards submitted by ACORN in Philadelphia were flagged for investigation after a judge stated that "a cursory look would have suggested that they were all in the same hand." Meanwhile, the earliest example of registration fraud documented on "Rotten ACORN," a critical Web site put together by the Employment Policies Institute, comes from 1998—but that's the only case cited from before 2003.
Some people just don't like it when poor people vote.
With voter registration coming to a close, the community-organizing group ACORN has become a major target of criticism by Republicans in recent weeks. On Thursday, Slate's John Dickerson reported that members of the crowd at a McCain rally in Wisconsin started shouting the organization's name as a rallying cry. When did a group more typically known for its minimum-wage and housing campaigns become such a controversial organization in national politics?
In the run-up to the 2004 election.
ACORN—that's the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now—was founded in 1970 and has long been known for its activism surrounding local issues in urban areas. The group earned its fair share of criticism from the right over the years—not least for its controversial tactics, which have included disrupting a speech by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich in 1995. In 2003, Manhattan Institute scholar Sol Stern described ACORN as promoting "a 1960s-bred agenda of anti-capitalism, central planning, victimology, and government handouts to the poor."
These days, Republicans are accusing ACORN of committing widespread voter-registration fraud. The group has been involved in registration efforts since its early days, but that aspect of its work did not earn much criticism until recent years. In 1993, Newsday reported that the New York State Senate had held hearings over the legality of ostensibly nonpartisan voter drives conducted by ACORN and sponsored by the state's Democratic Party. In 1999, about 400 voter-registration cards submitted by ACORN in Philadelphia were flagged for investigation after a judge stated that "a cursory look would have suggested that they were all in the same hand." Meanwhile, the earliest example of registration fraud documented on "Rotten ACORN," a critical Web site put together by the Employment Policies Institute, comes from 1998—but that's the only case cited from before 2003.
Some people just don't like it when poor people vote.
Thursday, October 9, 2008
Voters Purged in Swing States
From the NYT:
Tens of thousands of eligible voters in at least six swing states have been removed from the rolls or have been blocked from registering in ways that appear to violate federal law, according to a review of state records and Social Security data by The New York Times.
...
The screening or trimming of voter registration lists in the six states — Colorado, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Nevada and North Carolina — could also result in problems at the polls on Election Day: people who have been removed from the rolls are likely to show up only to be challenged by political party officials or election workers, resulting in confusion, long lines and heated tempers.
Some states allow such voters to cast provisional ballots. But they are often not counted because they require added verification.
...
States have been trying to follow the Help America Vote Act of 2002 and remove the names of voters who should no longer be listed; but for every voter added to the rolls in the past two months in some states, election officials have removed two, a review of the records shows.
The six swing states seem to be in violation of federal law in two ways. Michigan and Colorado are removing voters from the rolls within 90 days of a federal election, which is not allowed except when voters die, notify the authorities that they have moved out of state, or have been declared unfit to vote.
Tens of thousands of eligible voters in at least six swing states have been removed from the rolls or have been blocked from registering in ways that appear to violate federal law, according to a review of state records and Social Security data by The New York Times.
...
The screening or trimming of voter registration lists in the six states — Colorado, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Nevada and North Carolina — could also result in problems at the polls on Election Day: people who have been removed from the rolls are likely to show up only to be challenged by political party officials or election workers, resulting in confusion, long lines and heated tempers.
Some states allow such voters to cast provisional ballots. But they are often not counted because they require added verification.
...
States have been trying to follow the Help America Vote Act of 2002 and remove the names of voters who should no longer be listed; but for every voter added to the rolls in the past two months in some states, election officials have removed two, a review of the records shows.
The six swing states seem to be in violation of federal law in two ways. Michigan and Colorado are removing voters from the rolls within 90 days of a federal election, which is not allowed except when voters die, notify the authorities that they have moved out of state, or have been declared unfit to vote.
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