Voter suppression tactics have historically been a mainstay of American politics. The Jim Crow laws imposed poll taxes and literacy tests depriving many African-Americans of the right to vote. Today, computer programs cleanse voting rolls of so-called “fraudulent” voters. Ultimately, they all serve to maintain the predominantly white status quo in many states. Perhaps most effective has been Project Crosscheck. Al Jazeera America recently revealed that 27 states – all but six of which are Republican – use a software called Crosscheck to purge the rolls of voters suspected of double voting. Crosscheck essentially targets people in different states with the same or similar names. Other identifying signatures such as social security or driver permit numbers get only cursory consideration. This year the software has “scrubbed” a master list of almost 7 million suspected fraudulent voters. In at least three states – Georgia being one of them – the list is heavily weighted towards minorities with names such as Garcia, Jackson (a common African American name) and Kim. Tens of thousands of voters – mostly minorities — have been removed from the rolls for allegedly double voting. Virginia, for example, removed 41,000 names. The responsibility falls on the accused voters to prove they did not commit fraud. Many don’t even realize they are no longer listed. At one Atlanta seniors home, Georgia’s secretary of state had delisted 10 African Americans. Al Jazeera interviewed many delisted voters and found they were in fact two different people. John Paul Williams of Alexandria was accused of voting once in Virginia and again in Georgia as John R. Williams of Atlanta. John Paul Williams told the network he had never lived in Georgia. Crosscheck is a project of Kansas’s Republican Secretary of State Kris Kobach. The New York Times recently described Kobach as a “lightning rod on restrictive voting” helping states write strict voter laws and leading a “national hunt for double registrations.”
Posted on: Sun, 02 Nov 2014 14:47:26 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015