Reply #10: again, more work to do

[OnTheOtherHand]

Knowing how many registration forms Franklin County processed does not tell you how many people should be registered afterwards.

The purge of the Georges may actually have been legal, depending on whether they received notice. Regardless, the statistic offered in the story is that in Lucas County 405 people's provisional ballots were rejected because they had been purged in August. That is 0.2% of the presidential votes counted in Lucas County. Overall, about 2000 PBs were rejected as not registered, about 1% of the presidential votes counted. The overall impact of purges might be larger than that. It could be smaller -- there is no reason to assume that all these folks had registered in the first place (or that their registrations were properly processed -- if they weren't, that is a distinct problem).

The feminist.org pdf documents that overall, the change in Bush-county registrations from 2000 to 2004 was about the same as the change in Kerry-county registrations. I don't see how it documents discriminatory purges -- although I think discriminatory purges are perfectly plausible.

If we want to know how many people wanted to vote, should have been able to vote, and couldn't (and why not), we have to do work that hasn't been done yet.