How can we check election purges before the fact?

[robinlynne]

I just watched a documentary on PBS. It showed the election process in a smallish county in indiana during the 2004 election. from the point of view of the registrar, training the poll-workers, through election day. The biggest emergency of the day was late morning when they realized that the secretary of state had purged 4500 people as deceased who were alive and trying to vote. What I found really unbelievable was that the registrar, one person, got to decide how to proceed. She decided that those voters would have to show ids to vote. She did run it by a democrat and a republican, and the dem was arguing that many of his people took the bus and did not have driver's licenses, which is what she wanted. This list was only there or only noticed after the elections began and the voters were already facing difficulties voting. If, for example, 2000 of them did not have IDS, which voters were not required to bring; they would not be able to vote.
(We don't find out, in this documentary, what happened, but this particular registrar was being filmed. Ours will be in back rooms making decisions with no movie cameras, unfortunately.)
My question here for discussion is: How can we stop this from happening next week? Can we get lists of how many people actually died in our counties, and ask for the purge/deceased lists ahead of time to check the numbers to see if anything is out of whack? Who has the power to see the purge lists ahead of time?