Please Help us Counteract the Voter Registration Purging that Helped Make George W. Bush President

[Time for change]

As voter registration efforts continue across our country over the next few months, those who lead those efforts would do well to keep in mind the critical role of voter purging in our last two presidential elections.

No, I am not in the least discounting the need for aggressive voter registration efforts. Rather, I am suggesting that without efforts to counteract illegal voter purging, much of those efforts could go for naught – as they did in 2000 and 2004.

I am currently working with the Election Defense Alliance on a project to prevent a recurrence of the disastrous purges of 2000 and 2004, in 2008.

Evidence on how illegal purging of voters helped George Bush win the Presidential elections of 2000 and 2004 can be found at this post, which I just posted in General Discussion.

The investigations described in the above noted post were undertaken after the respective elections – when it was too late to do anything about correcting the illegal voter registration purges or the election results. Nor was the Bush administration Justice Department at all interested in investigating any of these issues. But what if these problems had been discovered prior to the elections?

What we would like to do is identify voter registration figures in selected counties throughout the United States, at various points in time following the 2006 elections. We are interested in identifying the number of registered voters in those counties between December 2006 and the present, and we also want to know how to follow those numbers from now until the 2008 election.

The goal is to be able to identify suspicious decreases in the number of registered voters, which could be indicative of illegal voter purging. Those situations would then be investigated further, in an attempt to ascertain the reasons for the suspicious decreases, and then take corrective action if possible.

The 15 states that appear to be of greatest interest are: Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Iowa, Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, Florida, Missouri, Virginia, New Hampshire, Indiana, Montana, and North Dakota. Targeted counties in those states would be perhaps the 3-5 largest counties in the state, or any other county that would appear to be especially susceptible to voter purging.

If you have any information or links that would help us obtain the data that we are looking for in any of the above noted counties and states, please let me know – either through this post or by pm.

I will also be cross-posting to the respective state forums and the Election Reform forum.

Thank you.

[dragonlady]

1. Voter purging would not be as serious here in Wisconsin

We have same-day registration, so if someone shows up at the polls and is not on the voter list, that can be fixed on the spot. It's not like in some states where registration closes before the election and you just can't vote if you aren't on the list. (Of course, there still could be some problem if registration lines are long and the voter is in a hurry, or doesn't have necessary information at hand.) But this project is an excellent idea for states without same-day registration, and thanks for undertaking it.

[Time for change]

2. Thank you, that's great to know

Actually, I hesitated on whether or not to call Wisconsin a swing state this year.

Obama has double digit leads in most of the polls I've seen. That's rather amazing considering how close the last two elections have been in Wisconsin.

[sybylla]

3. True - but there's still time to lose it

Kerry and Gore, IIRC, started out with double digit leads too and ended up barely winning the state. Hopefully, Obama will keep his head in the game.

[LiberalFighter]

5. It also appears that locations with populations less than 5,000 don't have to register to vote.

[dragonlady]

6. That was formerly the case

Now with the new statewide voter list, everyone has to register. From the Government Accountability Board's site:

In October 2002, the federal government passed the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA). This legislation created new election administration requirements for all states and called for an upgrade of voting systems. Specifically, HAVA calls for the creation of a single, uniform, official, centralized, interactive computerized statewide voter registration list defined, maintained, and administered at the state level that contains the name and registration information of every legally registered voter in the state.

[goofticket]

4. Become a Special Registration Deputy and sign em up again

The state offers classes to be certified as a Special Registration Deputy to register people to vote, anywhere in the state.

Sing up today and get busy in your Democratic neighborhoods....
http://elections.state.wi.us/section_detail.asp?linkcatid=2435&linkid=158&locid=47

Hurry classes fill up quick with Repugs, who then don't help voter registration except for GOp events....the evil SOBs!

Lots of other classes too...become a "Ward Boss" ..a Cheif Elections Inspector and challenge your local GOP voting site Bushie.

Let's take over the elections, and make sure everyone votes, is registered and the GOp chronies stop the party yaking at the polls.