GOP-led Purge Threat to 3.5 Million Voters
Election officials in 27 states, most of them Republicans, have launched a program that threatens a massive purge of voter rolls, especially targeting minority voters.
Al Jazeera America has obtained 2.1 million names from the target lists, kept confidential until now. Experts reviewing the lists conclude it is suspiciously over-weighted with Black, Hispanic and Asian-American voters.
The targeted voters have been tagged as “potential duplicate voters,” suspected of voting twice in the same election, in two different states, a felony crime punishable by 2-10 years in prison. Until now, state officials conducting the purge have refused to turn over their lists on grounds that these voters are all subjects of a criminal investigation.
Read the full exposé
Watch the 2-part TV report on Al Jazeera America,
tonight & Thursday night at 9pm ET – on America Tonight
The match lists of suspected double voters, called Interstate Crosscheck, has been compiled for each state by Kansas’ controversial Republican Secretary of State, Kris Kobach.
The lists are rife with literally millions of obvious mis-matches:
- Al Jazeera found that nearly a fourth (23% ) of the accused voters lack matching middle names. For example, Kevin Thomas Hayes of Durham, North Carolina, is allegedly the same man who voted in Alexandria, Virginia, as Kevin Antonio Hayes.
- “Jr.” and “Sr.” are regularly mismatched, potentially disenfranchising two generations in the same family.
- While Kobach, in his public description of Crosscheck, claims that double voters are matched by Social Security number, in fact, internal documents admit that “Social Security numbers might or might not match.”
So far, no case has been made against a single one of the accused double-voters on the lists, though tens of thousands have already lost their right to vote based on inclusion in the lists.
>North Carolina has hired a full-time former FBI agent to arrest double voters. However, because the match list of 190,000 suspects in that state is so recklessly compiled, the Board of Elections has admitted to Al Jazeera that not one voter has been charged with the crime of voting twice. Nevertheless, the Republican-controlled Board of Elections has begun the process of removing the registration of voters on the lists.
The lists are heavily over-weighted with names such as Jackson, Garcia, Patel and Kim, common to minorities who vote overwhelmingly Democratic. Indeed, one in seven African-Americans in those 27 states are listed as suspected of the crime of voting twice, one in eight Asian-Americans, and one in eight Hispanic voters. White voters too, one in eleven, are at risk, though not as vulnerable as minorities.
Phi Beta Iota: The USA is a now moving beyond a two-party tyranny that is legal toward a two-party criminal conspiracy that is ripe for a violent revolution. There is one non-violent option — a nation-wide general strike demanding Electoral Reform in time for 2016. In the ideal every sitting member of the Senate and House should be turned out and their competitors elected solely and exlusively to flush Congress as its exists today down the toilet of history. Over the winter Occupy should converge with the labor unions, the Catholic Church, and the small parties (Constitution, Green, Libertarian, Natural Law, Reform, and Socialist) as well as the Independents, to discuss, define, and then demand the Electoral Reform Act of 2015. Absent such a cleansing initiative, we anticipate a violent broad coming together of veterans, unemployed college graduates, unemployed older white and blue collar workers, and soccer moms for whom Valium is no longer enough as they watch their suburban “dreams” deepen into psychotic nightmares.
See Especially:
Electoral Reform @ We the People Reform Coalition
See Also:
Electoral Reform @ Phi Beta Iota
