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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%

#131

Post by wongarsu »

scrooched_moose wrote: post #75
wongarsu wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Germany every person eligible to vote just gets a letter telling you the day of the vote and your voting station (and a list of stuff being voted on, local elections usually coincide with more important ones). At voting day (a Sunday) you go to your polling station with that letter and photo id and after five minutes you have cast your vote and are on your way. It's dead simple. But it hinges on the state having a…

I mean, that's largely what voter registration is - a database of every citizen's address. The problem comes in when those addresses change. There's no requirement to inform your old state you left, so millions of inactive voters are left in the database. Generally there's a requirement to register in the new state (drivers license) within 30 days which is often missed, or not required for temporary moves like colleg…

> 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 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).

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

#132

Post by briffle »

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…

In the state of WI when they first implemented Voter ID, there were some entire counties where there was a single DMV location, that was only open for a few hours a week. (of course, during normal business hours). This makes it incredibly difficult for people that are poor, or young, and obviously have no drivers license to then take off work, and get themselves to the town across the count between 11am and 2pm on a Thursday.

If you add in some of the requirements for getting a valid State ID, it can be even harder for people to get. (Many poor people don't have ready copies of their birth certificate, marriage license to show the change in name, etc)

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

#133

Post by ilikehurdles »

sigzero wrote: post #130
ilikehurdles wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Voter ID doesn't solve the problem of outdated/invalid voter rolls at all. I can have an ID from a state I no longer live in for many years after I move out of that state. I can also have an expired ID for the state I currently live in. If I don't regularly buy alcohol or drive, I probably won't feel hard-pressed to spend a day renewing my ID.

And neither of those IDs would allow you to vote if it was implemented.

Thank you for reinforcing my point. That's a great example of how I would get disenfranchised despite being a resident of the district I'm voting in, while the IDs themselves would have no effect on whether a voter is wrongfully purged from the voter rolls.

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

#134

Post by omnimus »

zanny wrote: post #95
wongarsu wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Germany every person eligible to vote just gets a letter telling you the day of the vote and your voting station (and a list of stuff being voted on, local elections usually coincide with more important ones). At voting day (a Sunday) you go to your polling station with that letter and photo id and after five minutes you have cast your vote and are on your way. It's dead simple. But it hinges on the state having a…

Meanwhile the NSA records and analyzes every communication (that they can see, at least) you make over the Internet, and has probably megabytes worth of per-person profile information on a large chunk of the world population.

Of course the state knows they just can't admit they know. Besides that you are alive and your adress they probably also know if you are going to vote and who.

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

#135

Post by slg »

andrewla wrote: post #121
slg wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Everybody has an ID. Find a study that shows differently (for example [1]) and you'll be able to see how obviously synthetic it is. I have no doubt that the people who are opposing Voter ID have no nefarious motive, but there's a lot of confirmation bias at work that creates a false narrative that getting a photo ID is "difficult" and that people without photo IDs are common and disproportionately minorities. [1] htt…

Did you legitimately just link to a study disproving your point as if that is evidence that supposedly proves your point?

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

#136

Post by dragontamer »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #24
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't find out you need to re-register until it's too late.

And perhaps that is the real problem rather than the deregistration. Here in Canada you can register at the polling station on the day of the election.

The real problem is that one of our parties in the USA is passing laws to lower voter turnout.

The precise rules of voting don't really matter: as long as the anti-vote group gets what they want, they'll suppress the vote and strengthen themselves politically.

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

#137

Post by crispyambulance »

andrewla wrote: post #120
crispyambulance wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> [Voter fraud] is nearly impossible to detect in a meaningful way.

If the "victims" of voter fraud truly cared enough, they could audit the voter records for any election. Unless I am wrong, there exists a record of whether or not each person on the rolls actually voted. The intersection of the people who voted with those that are deemed truly inactive would be the extend of the voter fraud (at best).

No one seems to do that kind of study, however, because it's a lot of work and it's more "fun" to just blow thousands of people (mostly democrats) off the rolls.

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

#138

Post by slg »

neonIcon wrote: post #129
slg wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To do a laundry list[1] of other things that I would consider less important than voting requires an ID, which in turn requires you to go to the dreaded DMV. Is it the duty of the government to provide the ID for these people? Nope. [1]] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/24-things-that-require-a-... Almost every single one of which is either illegal, or very difficult to do without an ID.

None of these things listed are constitutional rights like voting and most of the things listed are more difficult but not impossible without ID.

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

#139

Post by oftenwrong »

creaghpatr wrote: post #62
oftenwrong wrote: post #36

There doesn't appear to be an explanation for the purges. I can understand the need to purge the voter lists of "dead" (literally or otherwise) entries, but surely it would be best if the state provided an explanation for each removal?

I think that's what happened here, which is how the 20% were found to be incorrectly marked.

I'm not so sure:

>And voting rights groups found an unexplained tranche — around 20,000 people — who had been marked to be purged because of inactivity in future election cycles, but were actually active voters in previous Ohio elections.

and

>The experience has left some voters like Jennifer Kulina-Lanese, a former veterinary professional, shaken. She got a call from the League of Women Voters shortly after it received the list, informing her that the county where she had voted just last year had started the process for her to be purged.

>“I still don’t know why, and that’s what’s scary,” said Ms. Kulina-Lanese, who is 45. “The idea that Franklin County was starting a process to remove me was terrifying.”

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

#140

Post by neuronexmachina »

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…

For reasons I don't entirely understand, there's a pretty huge bipartisan opposition in the US to distributing national ID cards.
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