New Study Details Massive Voter Roll Purges Underway in At Least 19 States

Posted by Brad Friedman, Brad Blog at 2:41 AM on October 1, 2008.

Tonight's CBS Evening News finally covered what may well be the November Surprise that we've been trying to warn about for months here at The BRAD BLOG: Massive voter roll purges being done in secret, with little or no oversight, and often under federal Justice Department cover, in states and counties around the country.



And the Democrats, who likely have the most to lose via such secret purges, are doing little or nothing about it.


The CBS story, posted below (appx 2 mins) starts with an elderly New Jersey voter who was suddenly removed from the voting rolls after thirty years, for apparently no reason whatsoever, before launching into findings from a new non-partisan Brennan Center for Justice study on "Voter Purges".


We've yet to read this Brennan report, but the brief coverage from tonight's Evening News notes 10,000 voters purged in Mississippi, 21,000 in Louisiana and "to top it off, another new study discovered 19 states are ignoring federal law (the National Voter Registration Act), banning systematic purges within 90 days of a federal election."


Among those 19, are a number of battleground states. The report lists: Alabama, Colorado, Connecticut, Delware, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Masachusetts, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Texas and Washington, as places where massive purges have recently taken place.

CBS ends by noting that their New Jersey voter has now been restored to the rolls, but they warn, "come Election Day, don't count on thousands of others being as fortunate"...

CBS' coverage doesn't even note that many states have now contracted the same private companies who did such a crappy job on their voting machines (companies like Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia) to manage, with the same lack of oversight, entire newly computerized state voting rolls. Names will be dropping from rolls this year by error or by evil...





This likely November Surprise may be just one of many. There is so much front-end voter suppression going on, at this point, it has all but obscured the massive problems that will occur with voting machines around the country when they break down, denying voters the ability to even cast a vote, much less have it counted accurately or verifiably. In Pennsylvania, for example, where almost the entire state votes on unverifiable touch-screen voting machines, the Democrats in charge of the state have recently declared that paper ballots needn't be given to voters until all voting machines in a particular precinct break down. Why isn't Obama and the DNC raising holy hell about that?



So CBS News has noticed. Where the hell are the Democrats, and why aren't they raising holy hell about all of this stuff everywhere. Instead, all we get when we inquire is the same old John Kerry/DNC line, "We'll have thousands of lawyers on call on Election Day, should anything go wrong, blah, blah, blah."


In the meantime, the Republicans are out with phony "reports" and lawsuits damned near every day --- and not just on Fox "News" --- declaring "evidence" of completely non-existant "voter fraud" by "Democrats". Yet, in the meantime, the Dems continue to bring a knife to a gunfight, and, as we've noted many times of late (most recently here and here) seem to have no clue that they are in a War on Democracy being waged by their GOP opponenents.



Once again we urge you --- even if you've voted in a recent primary election --- to check to make sure you are still registered! Here is a very handy link to do exactly that!


(Hat-tip Alan Breslauer for the quick video capture.)

Tagged as: republicans, disenfranchisement, vote suppression

Brad Friedman writes the BradBlog.