[CitizensTruth] ARTICLE-Three States Accused of Illegally Purging Voter Lists

[Walterb306 at cs.com]

All,

Another violation by state officials that threatens voters' rights, raising 
yet more concerns about the 2008 elections.

Fortunately, some election watch groups, such as Fair Elections Legal 
Network, are challenging voter purging policies.    


Beverley 

http://www.alternet.org/democracy/92695/?page=entire


Three States Accused of Illegally Purging Voter Lists
By Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet
Posted on July 25, 2008, Printed on September 8, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/92695/

Election officials in a handful of states appear to be ignoring the federal 
law dictating the way registered voters may be purged from voter rolls, civil 
rights attorneys say.
National voting rights groups have contacted officials in Kansas, Michigan 
and Louisiana in recent weeks because those states appear to be purging 
registered voters after election officials found duplicate names and birthdays of 
people on their voter lists and in out-of-state databases, such as driver's 
license records.

The states are assuming that a more recent driver's license or voter 
registration in another state indicates that the voter has relocated, meaning the 
voter registration tied to their prior address is no longer valid. While purging 
voters who move, die or are imprisoned is a routine part of managing elections, 
the federal law governing purges -- the National Voter Registration Act -- 
lays out a multiyear process of trying to contact voters to confirm a change of 
address before deleting them from voter rolls.

The election attorneys say the NVRA process seeks to err on the side of 
protecting voting rights and cannot be circumvented by what appears to be a 
duplicate voter registration.
"The National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) limits the circumstances in which 
a state may cancel a voter's registration," the Fair Elections Legal Network, 
a Washington-based voting rights consortium, said in a June 24 letter to 
Kansas Secretary of State Ron Thornburgh. "The NVRA does not permit cancellation 
based on a match alone."

"We are looking at several statewide purge issues," said Bradley Heard, a 
senior attorney with Advancement Project, a voting rights law firm. He said that 
in Michigan, both data matching and mailings by local officials to verify a 
voter's registration information were of concern. "We are also looking at a 
state law that calls for purging a bunch of voter registration records that are 
otherwise eligible."

But state election officials in these three states disagree with the voting 
rights groups, offering different explanations that suggest existing state laws 
or election management practices pre-empt the NVRA.

"We follow the state law that was adopted by our state Legislature," said 
Jacques Berry, press secretary for Louisiana Secretary of State Jay Dardenne, a 
Republican. "It supersedes the NVRA."

"There is a section of the NVRA that they (the voting rights lawyers) 
interpret differently than we do," said Brad Bryant, Kansas deputy secretary of 
state. "It has been this way for 15 years."

Kelly Chesney, spokeswoman for Michigan Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land, 
did not reply to requests to comment.

Voting Rights Groups Target Purges 
Last week, Project Vote, which is working in two dozen states to register 
voters in 2008, sent a letter to Dardenne saying his state appeared to be 
ignoring sections of the NVRA that require that voters be notified by mail over two 
federal election cycles before being removed. Project Vote's attorney said 
Louisiana Commissioner of Elections Angie LaPlace was treating apparently 
duplicate database listings as "cases of suspected fraud or some other irregularity."

Last year, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund sued Louisiana over the purging of 
registrations of refugees from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Many people who 
applied for a driver's license in a neighboring state -- to quickly acquire an ID 
after losing their belongings in the storms -- also were registered to vote 
without their knowledge, NAACP attorneys said. Those new voter registrations 
resulted in 21,000 voters being removed from Louisiana voter rolls last August, 
the group said. While the NAACP suit was dismissed, Project Vote's recent 
letter suggests the state's voter list maintenance practices have not changed. 
Project Vote also wrote to the U.S. Department of Justice about the matter, as the 
agency oversees federal elections in most Southern states as a result of the 
Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Louisiana election officials disagreed with Project Vote's assessment, saying 
the state has its own voter purge process that "supersedes" the federal law. 
Berry, the secretary of state's spokesman, explained that Louisiana updates 
its voter roll annually with multiple mailings to voters so the lists are 
accurate in state elections -- not just federal contests. He said that process is 
more rigorous than that outlined in the federal NVRA, requiring, for instance, 
that voters reaffirm their Louisiana voter registrations in person after 
receiving a final state notice. Berry said the process was approved by the 
Department of Justice.

"What we find is in the vast majority of cases the voter has moved out of 
Louisiana and registered in another state, not realizing that they will not 
automatically cancel their voter registration," he said.

The issue of whether states are heeding the National Voter Registration Act 
reveals how the implementation of the nation's election laws often turns on a 
patchwork of local or state policies. In the absence of litigation, whether a 
state or election jurisdiction is following the NVRA often remains a question 
of local interpretation.

In Madison County, Mississippi, county supervisors this week rescinded a plan 
to send a mass mailing to voters, where returned postcards were to be used to 
purge voters over a two-year period. In this instance, Project Vote notified 
county officials that its timetable would violate the NVRA, and, according to 
local news reports, the county's supervisors decided to abandon the plan and 
instead prepare for a high-turnout election in the fall.
"The mildest things confuse people and can ultimately disenfranchise people 
during elections," Madison County Supervisor Karl Banks said in a Clarion 
Ledger report. "Here we are willing to disenfranchise people because they don't 
send a card back?"

In Kansas, Bryant, the deputy assistant secretary of state, said his state 
has an established practice of comparing its voter rolls with databases from 
neighboring states to identify people who have moved. He said Kansas has a 
"memorandum of understanding" with 11 states to share databases that can be used to 
clean up voter files. Those states are Missouri, Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota, 
South Dakota, Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona.

Bryant said statewide election data has improved in recent years, 
facilitating the job of updating voter rolls. The federal Help America Vote Act, passed 
in 2002 after Florida's presidential election debacle, required states to 
consolidate county or municipal voter rolls into statewide lists. Bryant said the 
new statewide lists have created "certain data elements" that can be compared 
with other states, such as driver's license data.
"All the comparisons do is create a list of possible matches in each state," 
Bryant said, adding that it is then up to each state to decide how it treats 
that information for purge purposes.

The attorneys for the voting rights groups agree to a point, saying vote list 
maintenance in itself is an important and necessary goal. However, the 
attorneys and states disagree about what should come after the matches are 
discovered -- whether to immediately purge voters or to follow the NVRA process of 
sending postcards to voters over two federal election cycles to verify their reside
nce and registration information.
Bryant said he did not know how many registered voters had been removed in 
2008 using his state's data-matching process.

Michigan's Secretive Approach
In Michigan, the issues are more complex. Advancement Project's Heard said 
there has been an overall lack of "transparency" regarding several aspects of 
the state's voter purge process. In 2006, he said, Michigan election officials 
did a statewide mailing to all voters that did not mention the mailing would be 
used to verify voter registration information. Still, Heard said the returned 
postcards were used to remove 230,000 registered voters from voter rolls 
within 90 days of that year's general election, which also violates the NVRA, he 
said.

Jan BenDor, statewide coordinator for the Michigan Election Defense Alliance, 
a local voting rights group, said state officials cited an April 2007 letter 
from the Department of Justice pressuring the state to do more to clean up its 
voter roll for the statewide mailing and August 2006 purge. Ten states 
received those letters, which critics said was a political move because the claims 
of sloppy voter rolls was based on outdated data, notably U.S. Census 
population estimates.

Since the 2006 purge, Michigan has used driver's license databases from other 
states to identify another 280,000 names as apparent duplicate voter 
registrations, Heard said. This month, staffers for Michigan Secretary of State Land, 
a Republican, canceled a meeting with Heard and Michigan activists to discuss 
purge issues.

"We have been trying to get a meeting with election officials to talk about 
the issues and get their explanation," Heard said. "It's hard to say what 
happened with the 280,000 supposed out-of-state movers, since we can't get the info 
from the state."

Land's spokeswoman, Chesney, did not respond to requests to comment. However, 
newspapers in Michigan have quoted Chesney as saying the meeting was canceled 
when an information session appeared to be a precursor to litigation. Heard 
said Advancement Project has not ruled out filing a lawsuit.

"We have to evaluate all of our options," he said. "We are hoping the 
secretary of state's staff will sit down and talk about it."

Purge Issues Not Going Away
The purge issue is only going to rise in profile in the coming weeks. Several 
voting rights groups are studying the process in a number of swing states and 
hope to issue reports later this summer. Among the issues being studied is 
the accuracy of the database matches used to purge voters. When California first 
implemented a data-matching program in 2006, some counties had error rates as 
high as 40 percent, meaning a registered voter who appeared to have moved 
would have been incorrectly purged without further efforts to confirm their 
residency and voter registration status. 

Steven Rosenfeld is a senior fellow at Alternet and co-author of What 
Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election, with 
Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman (The New Press, 2006). 
© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/92695/

   
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