A Christian Liberal is NOT an oxymoron.

Posted by XT on October 27th, 2008 in Campaign News

CNN tells us about “voter mismatch”:

Berry is one of more than 50,000 registered Georgia voters who have been “flagged” because of a computer mismatch in their personal identification information. At least 4,500 of those people are having their citizenship questioned and the burden is on them to prove eligibility to vote.

Experts say lists of people with mismatches are often systematically cut, or “purged,” from voter rolls.

It’s a scenario that’s being repeated all across the country, with cases like Berry’s raising fears of potential vote suppression in crucial swing states.

So is it targeted voter supression or simple stupidity and incompetence?

In Florida, election officials found that 75 percent of about 20,000 voter registration applications from a three-week period in September were mismatched due to typographical and administrative errors. Florida’s Republican secretary of state ordered the computer match system implemented in early September.

In Wisconsin, Republican Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen sued the state’s election board after it voted against a proposal to implement a “no-match” policy. The board conducted an audit of its voter rolls and found a 22 percent match failure rate — including for four of the six members of the board.

Consider this:

Georgia’s Secretary of State Karen Handel, a Republican who began working on purging voter rolls since she was elected in 2006, said that won’t happen. If there are errors, she said, there is still plenty of time to resolve the problems.

Handel says she is not worried the verification process will prevent eligible voters from casting a ballot.

“In this state and all states, there’s a process to ensure that a voter who comes in — even if there’s a question about their status — that they will vote either provisional or challenge ballot, which is a paper ballot,” she said.

“So then the voter has ample opportunity to clarify any issues or address them,” Handel added. “And I think that’s a really important process.”

Part of what makes people suspicious is that, too often, it looks like Republicans are on the side of purging. And they seem to all be reading from the same playbook which says that cutting people out that don’t match means the election is fairer. Democrats, meanwhile, seem to be saying that letting the voter rolls remain the same is fairer. So which is which?

I don’t think there is a single answer to that. As Karen Handel notes, everyone who is bounced from the rolls can still cast a provisional ballet. But provisional ballets are not automatically counted – the voter has to show that they are eligible to cast that vote. That means they have to travel down to a courthouse and take “proof” with them. It’s a simple process, but one that presumes guilt – you are presumed not to be eligible until you prove otherwise.

I’d like for people to only be able to cast one vote, and for everyone who is eligible and who wants to gets to vote. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like there is a system in place to guarantee that happens. Or as CBS News points out:

In Ohio, Colorado and Florida political squabbles have sparked questions over the eligibility of hundreds of thousands of voters. Yet officials there could only point to a handful of people who were denied the right to vote or have committed voter fraud.

“It’s hard to put an actual number on voter fraud and say it’s ‘this big’ or ‘that big,’” says Brian Jones, an advisor to the McCain campaign on voter issues. “I think to just discount voting irregularities and say, ‘Well, it’s just a small number,’ is a very slippery slope.”

Sphere: Related Content