Please Help us Counteract the Voter Registration Purging that Helped Make George W. Bush President

[Time for change]

As voter registration efforts continue across our country over the next few months, those who lead those efforts would do well to keep in mind the critical role of voter purging in our last two presidential elections.

No, I am not in the least discounting the need for aggressive voter registration efforts. Rather, I am suggesting that without efforts to counteract illegal voter purging, much of those efforts could go for naught – as they did in 2000 and 2004.

I am currently working with the Election Defense Alliance on a project to prevent a recurrence of the disastrous purges of 2000 and 2004, in 2008.

Evidence on how illegal purging of voters helped George Bush win the Presidential elections of 2000 and 2004 can be found at this post, which I just posted in General Discussion.

The investigations described in the above noted post were undertaken after the respective elections – when it was too late to do anything about correcting the illegal voter registration purges or the election results. Nor was the Bush administration Justice Department at all interested in investigating any of these issues. But what if these problems had been discovered prior to the elections?

What we would like to do is identify voter registration figures in selected counties throughout the United States, at various points in time following the 2006 elections. We are interested in identifying the number of registered voters in those counties between December 2006 and the present, and we also want to know how to follow those numbers from now until the 2008 election.

The goal is to be able to identify suspicious decreases in the number of registered voters, which could be indicative of illegal voter purging. Those situations would then be investigated further, in an attempt to ascertain the reasons for the suspicious decreases, and then take corrective action if possible.

The 15 states that appear to be of greatest interest are: Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Iowa, Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, Florida, Missouri, Virginia, New Hampshire, Indiana, Montana, and North Dakota. Targeted counties in those states would be perhaps the 3-5 largest counties in the state, or any other county that would appear to be especially susceptible to voter purging.

If you have any information or links that would help us obtain the data that we are looking for in any of the above noted counties and states, please let me know – either through this post or by pm.

I will also be cross-posting to the respective state forums and the Election Reform forum.

Thank you.

[JPZenger]

1. PA. doesn't purge voter rolls, does it?

My understanding is that PA. no longer purges its voter rolls. In fact, the voter rolls in PA are filled with people who have died or moved out of state.

PA. used to delete voters from the rolls if they didn't vote within about 3 years. That caused problems with people who only showed up during Presidential elections. However, I don't think that is done anymore.

We also have the benefit of a Dem. Secretary of State, appointed by Rendell.

Meanwhile, the GOP Sec. of State who screwed up the Ohio voting in 2004, Ken Blackwell, was the main surrogate for McCain on NPR when they discussed McCain's appeal to African Americans. With friends like that ....

[Time for change]

2. Thank you

Do you happen to know if they don't purge the voter rolls because it's against the law, or is it just current policy? I ask because if it's not against the law then it could change at any time, it would seem.

[demodonkey]

3. Yes PA does purge inactive voters, all states do.

If no inactive voters were ever purged, we'd have people on there from 75 years ago.

PA's purging process for inactive voters is one of the most forgiving in the country. It takes as many as 10 years before you are finally dropped.