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.

[LiberalFighter]

1. The best way to prevent illegal purging would be to have access to those voter files

and make comparisons with before and after files. It's real easy for those that have the right tool and understanding of voter registration.

One of the things that could be initiated would be to determine the voters that were purged and have each county check those within their county. They wouldn't have to check them all. A 10% check should be able to spot any irregularities.

In Indiana what happens in the 3 largest counties shouldn't be a problem. The problem would be the Secretary of State's Todd Rokita handling of the file. If they have the state wide file operating correctly there should be no need for the state to be messing with the file. IMO The 3 or 4 largest counties in Indiana have members of both parties as deputies and other workers in the voter registration and election board offices.

Wisconsin appears to have a problem with their voter registration set up. Not so much the same day registration but the fact that voter registration of any type is not required in any community under 5,000 and their is a separate voter registration office in each community 5,000 or over. There should be only one main office in each county and voter registration records should be required for everyone that votes in each county.

[Time for change]

2. Yes, I agree with that approach

The big question is how to get access to those files. In some cases they appear to be readily available. In many other cases getting access to them appears to be problematic.

[LiberalFighter]

3. Need to work with the state or county party to obtain the files

The party does take all state voter files and clean them up and add other data to it. I don't know if they check to see if voters are purged that shouldn't be or not.

I can identify possible duplicate registrations. And if I have before and after file can pull out the purged. But it would be better if the state or county provided a file of those purged and the reason for purging.

[Bill Bored]

4. Better Cross Post cause this forum just ain't what it used to be. nt