{"id":55940,"date":"2018-09-06T07:28:06","date_gmt":"2018-09-06T14:28:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/siliconeer.com\/current\/?p=55940"},"modified":"2018-09-06T08:16:39","modified_gmt":"2018-09-06T15:16:39","slug":"are-you-still-on-the-rolls-check-with-voter-registrar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/siliconeer.com\/current\/are-you-still-on-the-rolls-check-with-voter-registrar\/","title":{"rendered":"Are You Still on the Rolls? Check with Voter Registrar"},"content":{"rendered":"

U.S. citizens across the country soon will vote on all 435 seats in the House of Representatives, for 35 U.S. senators and three dozen governorships. The House of Representatives and possibly the Senate are up for grabs, writes Mark Hedin.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

Given the high stakes, voters would do well to check at least a month ahead of time with their local board of elections to see if they\u2019re still registered to vote. This is especially true for people of color.<\/p>\n

The reason is that millions could find their right to vote challenged or taken away under suspicion that they\u2019re trying to vote more than once, largely due to 26 states using the Interstate Voter Crosscheck system, which compares lists of voters in different states and challenges the registration of those whose names come up more than once.<\/p>\n

For the 1,166,000 people in the country who share the surname Garcia, this could be a problem. Likewise, for the Rodriguezes (1,094,924), Jacksons (708,099), Washingtons (177,386), Kims (262,352), Patels (229,973), Lees (693,023) and Parks (106,696).<\/p>\n

Crosscheck, developed in 2005 by Kansas Secretary of State Ron Thornburgh as a free service for participating states, promised to detect voter fraud by comparing people\u2019s names, social security numbers and birthdates. Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa and Missouri first implemented it in 2006.<\/p>\n

During his tenure as Kansas\u2019 secretary of state, current GOP gubernatorial candidate Kris Kobach expanded Crosscheck to 15 states by 2012 and 29 by 2014 and in 2017 was appointed to a leading role in the White House\u2019s short-lived Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.<\/p>\n

In 2017, of 98 million voting records Crosscheck analyzed, it deemed 7.2 million potential duplicates, although Crosscheck has yet to produce its first voter fraud conviction. Eight states that originally signed on have since dropped out, citing unreliable data. Nonetheless, it\u2019s still in use in dozens more. Eight of those state have Senate seats up for a vote this year in contests that are expected to be close: Arizona, Nevada, Indiana, Missouri, West Virginia, Tennessee, Ohio and Michigan. And 19 Crosscheck-using states are voting on their governor for the next four years.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In a 2015 report named \u201cThe Health of State Democracies<\/a>,\u201d the Center for American Progress, a nonprofit funded in part by the Gates Foundation, Wal-Mart, Ford Foundation and many others, concluded that the voters Crosscheck tagged for review are disproportionately non-white.<\/p>\n

\u201cStates participating in the Interstate Crosscheck system risk purging legally registered voters \ua7f7 with a significant oversampling from communities of color,\u201d it said, citing the work of journalist Greg Palast, who\u2019s been studying the U.S. voting system since 2000, for the BBC, Al-Jazeera America, Rolling Stone magazine and others and produced a film about it, \u201cThe Best Democracy Money Can Buy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Working with data analyst Mark Swedlund, Palast found that among states using Crosscheck, one in six Hispanics, one in seven Asian Americans and one in nine African Americans landed on its list of suspect voters.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe outcome is discriminatory against minorities,\u201d Swedlund says.<\/p>\n

The chief explanation for the racial inequity is that ethnic communities are more likely to share a surname, such as Washington, Lee, Patel or Kim, Palast told Ethnic Media Services.<\/p>\n

Swedlund and Palast found that the Crosscheck system seems satisfied that if two people share a common first and last name, they\u2019re suspect. Differences in their birthdate, middle initial, Social Security numbers or suffixes such as \u201cJr.\u201d and \u201cSr.\u201d don\u2019t keep registered voters off Crosscheck\u2019s lists.<\/p>\n

Not all 7 million people whose names appear on Crosscheck\u2019s lists will be denied a vote, though. For one thing, only 36.4% of the people who were registered to vote even showed up at the polls in 2014. In one survey of elections between 1960 and 1995,\u00a0the United States\u00a0ranks dead last<\/a>\u00a0in the democracies of the world, with an average\u00a0turnout\u00a0of 48%.<\/p>\n

Would-be voters whose names are missing from the lists of registered voters will be given what\u2019s called a \u201cprovisional ballot,\u201d to be tallied if the voter is ultimately found to have been wrongly left off the lists. Palast, however, skeptical that many provisional ballots are ever counted, refers to them as \u201cplacebo ballots.\u201d<\/p>\n

Voters eager to cast genuine ballots, then, might want to call their local board of elections well in advance of Nov. 6 to be sure that they\u2019ll be allowed to vote.<\/p>\n

In 2018\u2019s highly charged political environment, individual votes may count more than ever. Take, for example, the recent special election for the vacant seat representing Ohio\u2019s 12th<\/sup>\u00a0congressional district.<\/p>\n

In that still undecided Aug. 7 race, 1,200 votes separate Republican Troy Balderson and Democrat Danny O\u2019Connor at press time.<\/p>\n

Ohio has removed almost 200,000 voters from the rolls because\u00a0they appeared on the Crosscheck lists.<\/p>\n

The margin of victory in the state\u2019s 12th<\/sup>\u00a0District race may ultimately be found among the 5,048 absentee ballots not yet tallied and the still uncounted 3,435 provisional ballots.<\/p>\n

No matter which of the candidates is awarded Ohio\u2019s vacant 12th<\/sup>\u00a0District Congressional seat based on the August election, voters will get another chance to decide between Balderson and O\u2019Connor in November.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why voters who want to have their voices heard Nov. 6, in Ohio and elsewhere, should call local officials\u00a0ahead of time\u00a0to see if any problems have come up with their registration.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

U.S. citizens across the country soon will vote on all 435 seats in the House of Representatives, for 35 U.S. senators and three dozen governorships. The House of Representatives and possibly the Senate are up for grabs, writes Mark Hedin. Given the high stakes, voters would do well to check at least a month ahead…<\/p>\n

Read More<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":55864,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[275,5,11,72,1848,19,20],"tags":[4884,5209,5210,8672,7853,8670,7486,147,4046,8671],"class_list":["post-55940","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-community","category-current-affairs","category-lifestyle","category-politics-current-affairs","category-society","category-topics","category-youth","tag-democrats","tag-ems","tag-ethnic-media-services","tag-interstate-voter-crosscheck","tag-mark-hedin","tag-november-6","tag-republicans","tag-siliconeer","tag-us-elections","tag-voter-registration"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/siliconeer.com\/current\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55940","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/siliconeer.com\/current\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/siliconeer.com\/current\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/siliconeer.com\/current\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/siliconeer.com\/current\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55940"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/siliconeer.com\/current\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55940\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/siliconeer.com\/current\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/55864"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/siliconeer.com\/current\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55940"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/siliconeer.com\/current\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55940"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/siliconeer.com\/current\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55940"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}