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. But before I get to my request I will review some of the highlights of this sad story.
Florida 2000The sordid story of how George W. Bush and his helpers stole the 2000 Presidential election in Florida is too long and complicated to describe here. I partially described it in two
previous posts.
But without a doubt, most of the stolen votes were the result of an electronic voter purge of legal voters who were mostly African-Americans. Greg Palast thoroughly describes that story in his book, “
The Best Democracy Money Can Buy”. The first chapter of that book is titled “
Jim Crow in Cyberspace: The Unreported Story of How they Fixed the Vote in Florida” (See pages 6-44).
It’s a long story, but the bottom line details are this: In the run-up to the 2000 election, George W. Bush’s brother Jeb, the Governor of Florida, hired a database company known as ChoicePoint, with the purported purpose of scrubbing the Florida voter roles of ex-felons who were not legally allowed to vote in Florida. ChoicePoint eventually purged the Florida voter roles of 97,500 voters under their contract with Florida, prior to the 2000 Presidential election. A highly disproportionate number of those voters were African-American (54%), and an even higher disproportionate number of them (90%) were Democrats.
The only problem was that, as Palast showed, only about 5,500 of those voters were legally ineligible to vote according to Florida law. About 40,000 were ex-felons who had the right to vote under Florida law, and about 52,000 were merely close computer matches of ex-felons. This was no accident. ChoicePoint had informed the Governor’s office that under the existing computer program they were asked to run, many close computer matches would be disenfranchised as well as actual felons. They were told to go ahead with it anyhow.
In other words, approximately 92,000 voters were illegally and purposely disenfranchised under this system, and the vast majority of those were Democrats. In an election that was decided by 537 votes…. well, figure it out. And as we all know, George W. Bush was awarded Florida’s 25 electoral votes when the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the stopping of the Florida recount, which gave Bush a 5 point electoral vote victory.
Ohio 2004A great deal of evidence indicates that the main reason George Bush won Ohio, and therefore the general election in 2004, was illegal voter purging. Here is some of that evidence.
Discrepancies between NY Times reports and official voter registration figuresI initially suspected that there was something very wrong with voter registration in Ohio, and especially in Cleveland, when I discovered a HUGE discrepancy between reports by the
New York Times of massive new voter registration in Democratic areas of Ohio (ten times that of Republican areas) and official voter registration figures. While the
Times reporters identified 230,000 new voters registered in heavily Democratic Cuyahoga County in 2004, official Secretary of State figures indicated only 119,000 newly registered voters in Cuyahoga County. What could explain such a huge discrepancy?
Confirmation by Greater Cleveland Voter Registration CoalitionHaving failed to get the
NY Times or its reporters to respond to my enquiries, I managed to get a large degree of confirmation from Norman Robbins, leader of the Greater Cleveland Voter Registration Coalition. According to his figures, as communicated to me by e-mail, there were 160,894 new voter registrations received by the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections in 2004 (compared to 31,903 new voter registrations in 2000). This was about 42,000 more registered voters than the 119 thousand increase in registered voters between March and November of 2004 indicated by the official figures (though Normans’ number of newly registered voters in Cuyahoga County is somewhat less than that identified by the New York Times.) The discrepancy between Robbins’ figures and the official figures could be due to purging of newly registered voters, or failure to process the new voter registrations, which Robbins describes in his
report.
Illegal purging of registered votersConfirmation of the probable reason for the above noted discrepancies came from research by Victoria Lovegren, who posted a report at
Ohio Vigilance which indicates the purging, apparently illegal, of 165,224 voters from Cuyahoga County alone, for no other rationale than that they hadn't voted recently. Dr. Lovegren notes in her report that this practice violates the National Voting Rights Act. We don't know precisely when these purges occurred, though it was some time between the 2002 and 2004 November elections. Perhaps the most troublesome aspect of these reports is that the purging appears to have been done discriminately, that is, with no specific criteria for who would be purged.
Dr. Lovegren's report also notes numerous other issues of serious concern, including the following:
Registration applications being rejected for trivial reasons.
Insufficient staff to deal with all the applications for voter registration.
Requests for absentee ballots not responded to.
Hundreds of long time voters missing from the voter roles
Jammed phone lines on Election Day, so that voter inquiries couldn’t be answered
The public was not allowed to watch the provisional ballot verification process.
Numerous voters did not receive provisional ballots as required by law.
Numerous dirty tricks aimed at disenfranchising Democratic voters.
Oh, and one more thing about that: Diebold was responsible for electronic management of the voter roles in Cuyahoga County and several other Ohio counties in 2004.
What effect did this have on the ground? – Evidence from Mark Crispin Miller’s BookA question that is often asked of me when I talk about voter registration fraud in Ohio is what effect the purging of Democratic voters would be likely to have on the election results. There are two lines of doubt that have been expressed to me on this question. One is the question of whether newly registered voters would be as likely to vote as would long time voters. This question is answered in the Democratic National Committee (DNC) report on the 2004 Ohio election. According to
Section VI, Figure 12 of that report, new voter registration was correlated with high voter turnout, meaning that in general, newly registered voters were more likely to vote in the Ohio 2004 election than were previously registered voters.
The other line of doubt is the question of whether people who are purged actually are prevented from voting. I am asked, “Couldn’t these people re-register after they found out that they were purged? I would answer this question by saying that maybe they could have re-registered if they knew they were purged – but an unknown number of these voters didn’t know until Election Day. But I didn’t have much of a sense of how frequently the purging would actually prevent voters from voting until I read Mark Crispin Miller’s book, “
Fooled Again – How the Right Stole the 2004 Election and Why They’ll Steal the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them)”.
In that book, Miller recounts his conversations with Denise Shull, a poll checker in Summit County. During the course of her work on Election Day, Shull noted that approximately 10% to 20% of registered Democratic voters on
her list were not on the official list of registered voters. Furthermore – and this is very important – these voters were described as ardent Democrats, as long time voters in the area, AND most of them were not voting. A possible reason for their not voting is suggested by an encounter that Shull had with one of these voters as the voter (or more precisely,
non-voter) was leaving the polls. This voter was simply told that she couldn’t vote and was given a phone number to call. And even more disturbing, Shull noted three of her fellow Democratic volunteers who described to her very much the same phenomenon occurring at the polling places where
they worked that day.
What Shull describes not only provides on-the-ground confirmation that legally registered voters were purged from the voter rolls prior to the 2004 election, but indicates that most of these voters ended up not voting. What effect would this have had on the net vote count?
I calculated that with some modest targeting of Democratic voters, the purging of voters in Cleveland alone would have resulted in a net loss to Kerry of about 46 thousand votes. Targeting of Democratic voters in Cleveland could have been done relatively easily, since Cleveland is heavily Democratic (voted 83% for Kerry, 16% for Bush in 2004), and many precincts in Cleveland voted more than 90% for Kerry. In order to target Democratic voters in Cleveland, one would merely have had to pick out those precincts with a history of voting 90% or more for Gore in the 2000 election.
But what about Summit County, the county where Denise Shull and other Democratic volunteers described on-the-ground evidence of voter registration purging, and where only 57% of voters voted for Kerry. Voter purging in Summit County would have been much less efficient than voter purging in Cuyahoga County, because any voter purging that occurred would have included a large proportion of Republicans as well as Democrats. Unless ….
How could voter purging be made more efficient in counties with large percentages of Republican voters?Miller’s book also describes a break-in at Democratic Party headquarters in Akron, Summit County, in the summer of 2004. The only thing stolen was two computers with Democratic campaign-related information on them. A similar break-in occurred three months later in Lucas County, and was described by the
Toledo Blade. One can guess that with voter information obtained from these computers, the targeting of Democratic voters in these two counties could have been made a lot more efficient than it could have been without that information.
Elsewhere 2004The above descriptions focus on Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004 because those are the states that made the difference in George Bush’s electoral victories in those two years. However, as demonstrated in Miller’s book, voter disenfranchisement was not by any means limited to Ohio in 2004. From “Fooled Again”:
The boldest effort to suppress the national Democratic vote involved the services of Nathan Sproul… whose company,
Sproul & Associates, was active in the swing states and elsewhere from September through Election Day, ostensibly to register new voters. That furtive enterprise – involving…. The systematic disenfranchisement of untold thousands of Democrats and Independents… played a far larger role in Bush’s victory than anyone has thus far understood.
Miller then goes on to relate the details of the ballot shredding operations, etc. that Sproul conducted.
My requestAll of the above noted investigations 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, 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.
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