Voting-rights groups challenge electoral purges
Interested to see any follow up on this:
http://projects.aljazeera.com/2014/double-voters/challenging-crosscheck.html
Nov.4, 2014
GREENSBORO, N.C. — As control of the U.S. Senate hangs in the balance, voting-rights activists are preparing for a fight over the removal of suspected fraudulent voters and nowhere more so than the Southern battleground states of Georgia and North Carolina.
They are responding to a six-month investigation published last week by Al Jazeera America, which revealed that millions of voters are at risk of being removed from the rolls in 27 states participating in the Interstate Crosscheck program, a voter-fraud detection system. Using open-records requests, Al Jazeera America obtained the previously confidential Crosscheck lists of 2.1 million voters potentially accused of casting ballots in two different states in the same election, a crime punishable by 2 to 10 years in prison. The lists reveal that the supposed double voters were matched simply on first and last name, and middle initials, suffixes and Social
Security numbers were ignored. Due to its shoddy methodology, the list captured far more black, Hispanic and Asian-American voters than their white counterparts, in large part because of the commonality of minority surnames.
Helen Ho, executive director for the legal advocacy group Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta, says, the investigation was a “bombshell.” While Ho’s immediate concern is protecting her community’s voters in today’s tight Senate contest between Democrat Michelle Nunn and Republican David Perdue in Georgia, she is leading national groups to take action against the misuse of the Crosscheck lists. She worries that Asian-Americans, many of whom share just a few common surnames — such as Chung, Lee, Patel and Kim — are particularly vulnerable to Crosscheck’s system of using little more than first and last name to identify potential double voters. “No one knew what was going on,” says Ho of Georgia’s participation in Crosscheck.
AAAJA issued a statement urging voters experiencing difficulty casting their ballot today to call their multilingual hotline for help.
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The North Carolina chapter of the NAACP, of which Barber is president, has warned the state government about Crosscheck-style electoral purges. “We’ve just sent a serious legal letter to the State Board of Elections calling this into question,” he says. “Because whether it’s driving [while] black or attempting to profile voters by black or by brown, it is wrong in America and we cannot tolerate it.”
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