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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%

#191

Post by crooked-v »

jimmywanger wrote: post #188
crooked-v wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your linked source is talking about an entirely different issue. It's a court ruling that shut down North Carolina voter ID and early voting laws, in part because the defense of those laws included that that literal quote about it making harder for black people to vote. > All we know is that some Republicans are biased, just as all people have biases. When 'some' is enough to control a state legislature, and simila…

> When 'some' is enough to control a state legislature, and similar things happen across the country ( https://www.npr.org/2018/10/23/659784277/republican-voter-su... ), it's a logical conclusion. I don't see how it follows that a state legislature's cupidity directly translates to a national party's intentions. That's a bridge too far. If there's a smoking gun, such as a leaked internal memo, I would agree totally.…

> If there's a smoking gun, such as a leaked internal memo, I would agree totally.

What about a variety of direct quotes from the heads of different state Republican parties? https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/17/us/some-republicans-ackno...

>Yes, for closing the polls early, not for voter id laws.

The judgment is on a law that affects both.

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

#192

Post by ebiester »

CompanionCuuube wrote: post #145
wongarsu wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's no requirement to inform your old state you left, so millions of inactive voters are left in the database In Germany when you arrive somewhere we know that you are coming from somewhere. So when you register at your new address that usually involves your new city hall informing your old one that you moved. I guess that doesn't really work if registration isn't universal (in Germany we track you place of res…

> (in Germany we track you place of residence basically from birth, it's used not just for voting but also for determining where your taxes go, for government communication, to make sure nobody skips out on bills by moving, etc). If we tried to institute that kind of system, the political party which currently is all against voter id would be up in arms too.

So long as it isn't used to disenfranchise people from a single vote, there's no problem. Now, things get complicated and we would have to do work to get it right in that we have inconsistent rules on residency in terms of students and temporary housing, and we have a significant number of people who don't want to see a national registry of citizens (see issues with using SSN as a national ID) but there's nothing specifically that Democrats would object to philosophically.

The problem comes when we start trying to purge the rolls and there are false positives. The bigger problem is when those false positives are disproportionately citizens of color. Similarly, voter ID cards are not problems philosophically as much as these ID laws disproportionately affecting poor people and people of color.

If you want an ID law, you make IDs free, you account for many of the edge cases like elderly people who don't have birth certificates yet are clearly citizens, and you bend over backwards to make sure everyone who can vote gets one regardless of it costing a little more.

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

#193

Post by microtherion »

biomcgary wrote: post #78
microtherion wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should be both praised for bringing more transparency, AND condemned for purging nearly 50k eligible voters.

Did they purge eligible voters? My reading of the article was that they proposed purging voters, but got input from advocacy groups first. Did I misread it?

They did get input, but it's not clear to what extent that input was respected in the purges: https://radio.wosu.org/post/ohio-voter-purge-will-remove-tho...

Besides, if those checks showed that a large number of people were included in the purge for demonstrably wrong reasons, it would be prudent to assume that a lot of additional purges would also be suspect.

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

#194

Post by jandrese »

weberc2 wrote: post #176
jandrese wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The latter is where Voter ID laws tend to bite. They make it difficult for certain communities to obtain an ID via a variety of underhanded tricks. What you typically see is a Voter ID go into effect, and then whoops, the state budget is too tight this year so we're closing down a whole bunch of DMV locations and restricting hours on the rest.

So require ID-issuing authorities to keep certain hours. This is a trivial problem; I don't understand the compulsion to paint this as a dichotomy--there's lots of middleground between Evil Racist voter ID requirements and no voter ID requirements at all; it's not even a slippery slope.

This wouldn't solve the problem of too many inner city residents voting and messing up your legislative majority.

In-person fraudulent voting is one of those problems that basically doesn't exist. People have looked for cases of it happening and have come up empty handed. Attempting to solve that problem is a waste of time. The only point of these laws is to suppress voting blocks.

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

#195

Post by tathougies »

maxerickson wrote: post #151
tathougies wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right, but there's literally no good reason this has to be an a priori process anymore. We could easily have a system where you get to vote once in one place where you are eligible without having any preregistration.

Sure. Try getting 50 sovereign states to agree and get back to me. Its not like the federal government has any authority to decide how the states run an election

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

#196

Post by will4274 »

crooked-v wrote: post #169
tathougies wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's a political issue because one party uses it as an excuse to remove active voters of the other party, and the other party rightfully objects to this.

That's a pretty bad take.

The other half the story is that the Dems object to every cleanup and always claim the Republicans are trying to suppress votes, but never have any suggestions on how to do it better, only "don't do it now" or "do it after the next election" in perpetuity. That's how blue states like Michigan end up with court orders requiring them to do cleanups (court orders which Michigan is violating).

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

#197

Post by davvolun »

rdtsc wrote: post #33

> She went online and discovered that her name had also been flagged as an inactive voter. The state was in the process of removing her from its voter rolls. > “I voted three times last year,” said Ms. Miller. I am still baffled at the election system in this country. Every state does its own thing. One state uses paper, other uses some machines which can be easily hacked, some use both. Somehow voter ID is controver…

Republicans say Democrats just want to get all the poor people/illegals registered to up their vote, Democrats say Republicans want to suppress votes to keep control.

I think most Americans have a problem with the government keeping lists about them. How that makes sense in the modern age of driver's licenses, SSNs, and the Patriot Act, I'm not sure, but as long as people here are so against the idea, it's kind of dead-in-the-water.

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

#198

Post by jorblumesea »

biomcgary wrote: post #103
jorblumesea wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? So, you're willing to engage in unethical activity, with a modicum of lip service to transparency? The entire idea of purging voters rolls is antithetical to voting freedoms and transparency.

It is grossly unethical to purge valid voters in secret, but how is limiting voter rolls to those with a legal right to vote unethical? Should people be allowed to vote and have a say in the government of places they don't live? The reductio ad absurdum of this is allowing the whole world to vote for your local school board. Transparency and community engagement (through advocacy groups) helps ensure that valid voter…

When people talking about voting rolls, it's really just a dog whistle for suppressing the votes of minority and underprivileged groups. The debate about "legal right to vote" and all of those arguments are mostly smoke screens for disenfranchisement.

While it's true that we should have voting roles and ensure only people who are in the state should vote etc, that's absolutely not what people are doing or talking about when implementing voting systems. When the Republican party talks about these ideas, the end goal is skewing the voter turnout in their favor.

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

#199

Post by crooked-v »

will4274 wrote: post #196
crooked-v wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a political issue because one party uses it as an excuse to remove active voters of the other party, and the other party rightfully objects to this.

That's a pretty bad take. The other half the story is that the Dems object to every cleanup and always claim the Republicans are trying to suppress votes, but never have any suggestions on how to do it better, only "don't do it now" or "do it after the next election" in perpetuity. That's how blue states like Michigan end up with court orders requiring them to do cleanups (court orders which Michigan is violating).

> blue states like Michigan

Both houses of Michigan's state legislature have been Republican-controlled since 2011. Not much of an example of the Dems controlling voter rolls at the state level there.

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

#200

Post by [deleted] »

CompanionCuuube wrote: post #145
wongarsu wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's no requirement to inform your old state you left, so millions of inactive voters are left in the database In Germany when you arrive somewhere we know that you are coming from somewhere. So when you register at your new address that usually involves your new city hall informing your old one that you moved. I guess that doesn't really work if registration isn't universal (in Germany we track you place of res…

> (in Germany we track you place of residence basically from birth, it's used not just for voting but also for determining where your taxes go, for government communication, to make sure nobody skips out on bills by moving, etc). If we tried to institute that kind of system, the political party which currently is all against voter id would be up in arms too.

[deleted]
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