Republican Satanic Panic Voter Fraud Hunt Raises Its Ugly Head

Via Zandar Versus The Stupid, an article from Greg Palast at Al-Jazeera America about attempted mass disenfranchisement.

The Crosscheck list of suspected double voters has been compiled by matching names from roughly 110 million voter records from participating states. Interstate Crosscheck is the pet project of Kansas’ controversial Republican secretary of state, Kris Kobach, known for his crusade against voter fraud.

The three [Georgia, Virginia, and Washington] states’ lists are heavily weighted with names such as Jackson, Garcia, Patel and Kim — ones common among minorities, who vote overwhelmingly Democratic. Indeed, fully 1 in 7 African-Americans in those 27 states, plus the state of Washington (which enrolled in Crosscheck but has decided not to utilize the results), are listed as under suspicion of having voted twice. This also applies to 1 in 8 Asian-Americans and 1 in 8 Hispanic voters. White voters too — 1 in 11 — are at risk of having their names scrubbed from the voter rolls, though not as vulnerable as minorities.

If even a fraction of those names are blocked from voting or purged from voter rolls, it could alter the outcome of next week’s electoral battle for control of the U.S. Senate — and perhaps prove decisive in the 2016 presidential vote count.

A lot of people have the same first, last, and middle name.  In my ninth grade science class there were two Steven Goodmans (same spelling of Steven) who lived in the same (large) neighborhood.  They did not resemble each other, but the teachers had a bit of trouble distinguishing one from the other.  I met a third Steven Goodman in college.  He groaned in his sleep.  Presumably all three have different SSNs, but mistakes have been made when writing numbers.  And they all (at the time) lived in the same state.  110,000,000 voter records in 27 states?  Good luck.

Even 2,000,000 (that's two million; you wouldn't want to scan that data by hand) names are going to have duplicates and triplicates, not from fraud, but from the fact that people have names, not numbers.  And get named after their parents and may live with said parent, y'know, at the same address.  Or have common first names paired with common last names.  Not everyone names the baby after characters in movies and operas, and some people legally change what they're called.  And I seem to remember that an awful lot of people whose only crime, you should excuse the expression, was having the same names as convicted felons were stricken from voter rolls in Florida in 2012.

These are not people "concerned" about "voter fraud" (in fact, what minute fraud has been discovered seems to have been perpetrated by conservatives).  These are people trying to strip the franchise from non-conservatives.

VOTE this Tuesday.  Anyone telling you not to vote is trying to sell something, probably you.

(See my post from 2011 for back story.)