Alarm over voter purges as 17m Americans removed from rolls in two years

We have a voting problem in America. Voting in our country has never been easy, but there’s a new challenge: Politicians are trying to stop Americans from voting because of who they are likely to vote for in an election.

Extreme voter suppression laws that disproportionately impact people based on their race or ethnicity, gender, age, or income have started popping up all over the country. If we don’t fight back, more and more Americans will become disenfranchised.

Voting rights are under attack nationwide as states pass voter suppression laws. These laws lead to significant burdens for eligible voters trying to exercise their most fundamental constitutional right. Since 2008, states across the country have passed measures to make it harder for Americans—particularly black people, the elderly, students, and people with disabilities—to exercise their fundamental right to cast a ballot. These measures include cuts to early voting, voter ID laws, and purges of voter rolls.

The ACLU is engaged in advocacy and litigation across the country to get rid of these harmful voter suppression measures once and for all.

Voting rights are under attack. In recent years, politicians in dozens of states have erected intentional barriers to our right to vote, including forcing discriminatory voter ID and proof-of-citizenship restrictions on eligible voters, reducing polling place hours in communities of color, cutting early voting opportunities and illegally purging voters from the rolls.

Like the poll taxes and literacy tests of the Jim Crow era, modern voter suppression efforts are relentless and effective.

Efforts to discourage and disenfranchise voters—in voter registration, ballot access, or counting of votes—have a catastrophic effect on our democracy and our communities. The facts and faces of voters from the 2018 election in Georgia convey the insidious design and pervasive impact of voter suppression.

Greg Palast exposed voter caging in Florida, and companies such as Crosscheck for their voter suppression tactics.

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During the election, then-SOS Kemp controlled Georgia’s entire voting system including every voting machine and tabulating computer. Kemp himself was running in a close race for governor, which he won.

The press has not described how easily any Georgia Secretary of State (or unknown colleagues) can rig the electronic machines without a trace. That danger is why Coalition for Good Governance is fighting for paper ballots for all Georgians. The Court determined that voting on the electronic machine system was unconstitutional, but that ordering a switch to paper ballots without more preparation time could also burden the right to vote.

Because of the disenfranchisement as described by Rachel Maddow and many Georgians, we are now asking the Court to require (1) electronic pollbook corrections and security now and (2) paper ballots for the December runoff and any other elections and the 2019 elections, while we await the 2019 hearing on the merits of the paper ballots case. SNIP

How the 2000 Election in Florida Led to a New Wave of Voter Disenfranchisement

https://www.thenation.com/article/how-the-2000-election-in-florida-led-to-a-new-wave-of-voter-disenfranchisement/

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No one could ever determine precisely how many voters who were incorrectly labeled felons were turned away from the polls. But the US Civil Rights Commission launched a major investigation into the 2000 election fiasco, and its acting general counsel, Edward Hailes, did the math the best that he could. If 12,000 voters were wrongly purged from the rolls, and 44 percent of them were African-American, and 90 percent of African-Americans voted for Gore, that meant 4,752 black Gore voters—almost nine times Bush’s margin of victory—could have been prevented from voting. It’s not a stretch to conclude that the purge cost Gore the election. “We did think it was outcome-determinative,” Hailes said.

The 2000 election in Florida forever changed American politics and kicked off a new wave of GOP-led voter disenfranchisement efforts. “Other people began to see that in very competitive elections, you could make a difference by keeping certain voters from participating,” Hailes said. Bush’s election empowered a new generation of voting-rights critics, who hyped the threat of voter fraud in order to restrict access to the ballot, and remade a Supreme Court that would eventually gut the centerpiece of the VRA.
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But blatant warning signs were ignored by Bush and the state well in advance of the election. On the orders of state officials, names were added to the purge list if there was only a 70 percent match between a name on the voter rolls and a name in the state’s felon database. This meant that voters could be tagged as felons even when middle initials, suffixes, nicknames, and even race and sex data didn’t match perfectly. Hence the confusion of Willie Steen with felon O’Steen.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Palast

SNIP After subsequently noticing a large proportion of African-American voters were claiming their names had disappeared from voter rolls in Florida in the 2000 election, Palast launched a full-scale investigation into voter fraud, the results of which were broadcast in the UK by the BBC on their Newsnight[6] show prior to the 2004 Election. Palast claimed to have obtained computer discs from Katherine Harris' office, which contained caging lists of "voters matched by race and tagged as felons."[5]SNIP