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Ohio Was Set to Purge 235,000 Voters. It Was Wrong About 20%

nytimes.com

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Re: Ohio Was Set to Purge 235,000 Voters. It Was Wrong About 20%

#111

Post by _fq4v »

notfromhere wrote: post #39
coryodaniel wrote: post #4

How does the purging actually work? Is there sole evil republican henchman with database access? Is there no oversight into what is actually purged? Trapped behind the paywall.

The Secretary of State is Republican, and surprise, the GOP pursues policies that restrict the ballot in a way that benefits them and disadvantages Democrats. Ohio is a state where the GOP holds 75% of federal House seats despite winning only 50% of the vote. Similar effect holds for the state legislative offices

80% of 235,000 is 188,000. Your argument is that it is okay to keep 188,000 invalid voters on the books because otherwise the republicans might win? Don't you see how fraudulent or no-longer-active voter registrations may bring about questions of legitimacy? 188,000 is no small number of people. Trump won Ohio with a smaller margin.

Re: Ohio Was Set to Purge 235,000 Voters. It Was Wrong About 20%

#112

Post by lefstathiou »

mschuster91 wrote: post #51

In Germany we do not have this problem (neither voter suppression nor voter fraud), for a multitude of reasons: 1) everyone has a government-provided ID document: a passport, for German nationals the ID card Personalausweis also works, and for EU nationals (who can vote in municipal and EU elections) their country's ID document 2) the legal requirement to register at the city/region office ("Meldebehörde") where you…

All of this makes perfect sense which is why we don’t do it. For the same reasons one party favors aggressive purging in urban areas, another party is hostile toward implementing voter ID requirements in those same districts.

Re: Ohio Was Set to Purge 235,000 Voters. It Was Wrong About 20%

#113

Post by tathougies »

will4274 wrote: post #108
coryodaniel wrote: post #4

How does the purging actually work? Is there sole evil republican henchman with database access? Is there no oversight into what is actually purged? Trapped behind the paywall.

Purging is a legal requirement in all 50 states. Dead voters, those who've moved, and those who are ineligible (felons) must be removed. Red states like Ohio are criminally over-zealous and remove poor people. Blue states like Michigan are criminally under-zealous and have more voters on the rolls than people living in the state.

I don't understand how this has turned into a political issue. Everyone should want expired, duplicate, or downright fraudulent voter registrations removed, while keeping those who are eligible on the books. What a sad state of affairs we are in.

Re: Ohio Was Set to Purge 235,000 Voters. It Was Wrong About 20%

#114

Post by gregmac »

spamizbad wrote: post #20
not_a_cop75 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How hard is it really for a voter to reregister? You guys are making it sound like it they're taking away driver's licenses or something. All you have to do is hit the website. If you don't have internet access hit a library.

Because this is HN and you're probably young-ish: When you're older and you've set down roots the last time you updated your voter registration was probably a few decades ago. Chances are your polling place hasn't likely changed either. So you know when elections come, you go to your usual polling place, give your name, get your ballet and "pull the lever" so to speak. You're not thinking "Oh I better double-check my…

In Canada, we get mailed a Voter Information Card [1] a month or two before the election. This basically just has your name and your polling and advanced polling location(s). It of course goes to your registered address.

If you don't get this card, you know you're not registered (or are registered with the wrong address) and can fix that. You can even register at (what should be) your polling location on election day.

This isn't a hard problem to solve.

[1] https://www.elections.ca/content2.aspx?section=vote&dir=vic&...

Re: Ohio Was Set to Purge 235,000 Voters. It Was Wrong About 20%

#115

Post by weberc2 »

zucker42 wrote: post #90
not_a_cop75 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I update my voter registration sometimes twice a year to match the party I most like at the time, It's always been online - easy peasy. I expect to get downvoted to hell but I also don't get why showing an ID to vote is such a big deal. After all, I have to look up the numbers in my drivers license to vote. Also, how is it hard to vote? Absentee ballots are totally easy to get. If I was blind, I might have to plan ah…

10% of households don't have a computer and 15% of adults don't have a driver's license. Maybe your experiences don't generalize to the rest of the population. Also, many states require you register to far ahead of time and will arbitrarily purge you from the voting roles . So I guess my point is this is more of issue than you're making it seem.

> 10% of households don't have a computer

Does this include smart phones? Seems like percent of people with Internet access would be more relevant. I would think public libraries would also provide a lot of coverage here.

> 15% of adults don't have a driver's license

What's the statistic for adults with any kind of government issued identification? Surely that's more relevant for this debate than the driver's license statistic?

Re: Ohio Was Set to Purge 235,000 Voters. It Was Wrong About 20%

#116

Post by tathougies »

maxerickson wrote: post #19
not_a_cop75 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How hard is it really for a voter to reregister? You guys are making it sound like it they're taking away driver's licenses or something. All you have to do is hit the website. If you don't have internet access hit a library.

Why do people have to register to vote at all? The state has a sort of pretty solid idea of where they live...

Because if you own ten houses in ten states, you only get to vote in one state, despite potentially being in residence in nine other states at various points of time. There are various criteria by which you qualify as being a citizen of exactly one state.

Re: Ohio Was Set to Purge 235,000 Voters. It Was Wrong About 20%

#117

Post by slg »

andrewla wrote: post #82
kasey_junk wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not a technical problem it’s a political one (or really it’s a whole host of historical and current political problems). One of 2 major parties in the US has made making it hard for people to vote a central strategy. This has happened in the past as well.

I think you're replying to a different point than the GP was making -- the "major party" you are (I assume) referencing is also the party that backs Voter ID laws, which the GP was explicitly pointing out as a solution to the problem.

It is fundamentally the same point since that party doesn't want to make it easy and free to get a voter ID. If you have to take a day off work to go to the DMV or need to pay some fee to get your ID, then requiring ID is in practice making it harder to vote. If you want to require a voter ID, it is the duty of the government to assure that everyone citizen who wants one has one.

Re: Ohio Was Set to Purge 235,000 Voters. It Was Wrong About 20%

#118

Post by specialist »

TLDR: We need national, universal, automatic voter registration.

#1 Our VRDBs only contain eligible voters. Ineligible voters are removed. This is very hard to verify, audit.

The Correct Answer is to list everyone, with a flag for eligibility, with a separate audit log for changes. aka standard DBA best practices.

#2 We already have virtually complete rosters of every person, living or dead, updated in near realtime. Commercial data brokers, facebook, law enforcement, national security. We should license or repurpose these readily available data sources for both voter database and the census.

#3 States administer elections. Feds make the rules. Anyone who opposes nationwide standards should also oppose currency, weights & measures, intra-state trade, the entire American experiment, etc.

FWIW, some states already share data, to better track people who move, students, overseas voters (registered at home), deaths, etc. I haven't been active for a while, so don't know how far along those efforts are.

--

Now about this article. Purging (caging) is the weaponization of normal data quality efforts for partisan reasons.

Option 1: Send verification mails to inactive (but still eligible) voters. Some sizable fraction won't be returned. USPS's UAA rate is %1, more for high density areas. Many people just don't response (eg looks like junk mail). Then aggressively, silently remove anyone who doesn't respond.

Option 2: Any official communication sent by election admin which is returned (recall USPS UAA 1%) is used to purge.

Option 3: Ignore or inject data quality problems. Match voter roll against other demographic databases, eg DMV. Purge any records for any error whatsoever. eg Mike vs Michael. Missing commas, hyphens. Whatever works.

This is from memory, I'm sure there's other strategies used, but these are the big ones.

Note that The Correct Answer above moots the entire problem. And would be both cheaper and nearly error free.

Re: Ohio Was Set to Purge 235,000 Voters. It Was Wrong About 20%

#119

Post by tathougies »

swsieber wrote: post #80
scrooched_moose wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. You can easily move without informing the new state. Millions of college students do it every year. The last move I made was in September so I hadn't changed licenses or filed income taxes yet, so they had no awareness of me yet. Luckily I'm in a fairly permissive state and was able to register with a couple utility bills without any hassle. Some sort of voter registration is a necessity when you can move…

You can still do it automatically for a majority of voters though. Having to register should be the exception, not the norm.

Sure, it's done automatically when you apply for a driver's license or change your registration, by the Motor Voter Act. Registering to vote is incredibly easy if you keep your state documents up-to-date. We just moved states. When we got our driver's license, we checked a box to change our voting record. We received in the next week a letter from our old county asking us if we did indeed move and if we should be removed from their voter roll, as well as a letter from our new county informing us we will be voting there from now on.

But... driver's licenses or state IDs aren't the end all be all. If I keep real property in another state, I could potentially qualify for a license or state ID there as well, but that state would not be my main residence and I could not be a citizen of that state unless I actually intended to move there permanently. If I lived a more transient life, I would be able to freely choose which state I wanted to be a citizen of. Like if I spend 73 days exactly in each of five states and received mail there, then I would be able to choose which state to register in. There's no way for states to know or to control my movement without imposing arbitrary and illegal restrictions.

Re: Ohio Was Set to Purge 235,000 Voters. It Was Wrong About 20%

#120

Post by andrewla »

crispyambulance wrote: post #81
biomcgary wrote: post #35

According to the article, moderate Republicans in Ohio insisted on transparency for purging voter rolls. They sent out the proposed list to various voter advocacy groups across the political spectrum, which reviewed the proposed changes and flagged mistakes. 80% were purged correctly. 20% were not. Rather than condemning Ohio, they should be praised for bringing transparency to the process (as long as the mistakes ar…

No one should be praised other than the people who discovered "the mistakes". The tactic here is voter disenfranchisement. It's a tried and true tool of the Republicans and has been around since forever. The thing is inactive voters are just that, inactive . There is very small risk that some of their names might get used for voter fraud. But every time this is researched, only a handful of incidents are discovered a…

> The thing is inactive voters are just that, inactive. There is very small risk that some of their names might get used for voter fraud. But every time this is researched, only a handful of incidents are discovered and it takes thousands to swing an election.

You claim the risk is small, but I'm not aware of anything that actually supports this assessment. This form of manipulation is nearly impossible to detect in a meaningful way. All the studies I'm aware of [1] have used prosecutions for voter fraud as a measure of the extent of fraud, but that is obviously contingent on the fraud being discovered.

I'm part of an apparently nonexistent group of people who both believe in Voter ID laws and believe very strongly in maximizing potential voter turnout. People have ID -- opponents of voter ID have deliberately exaggerated the number of people without ids [2].

[1] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/debu... has a good set of articles attempting to debunk the notion that various types of voter fraud occur. They all rely on "credible allegations"

[2] https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legacy/d/d... -- just look at the first footnote and the description of the methodology, and if you buy their results then you're a sucker.

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