World News Korner

The Republican's most aggressive attempt to suppress votes yet. And it looks like it will succeed.

Courtesy of Slate:

According to a six-month-long investigation conducted by Greg Palast for Al Jazeera, “voting officials in 27 states, almost all of them Republicans, have launched what is threatening to become a massive purge of black, Hispanic, and Asian-American voters. Already, tens of thousands have been removed from voter rolls in battleground states, and the numbers are set to climb.”

Specifically, officials have a master list of 6.9 million suspected “potential double voters.” And in Virginia, Georgia, and Washington the lists are “heavily over-weighted with names such as Jackson, Garcia, Patel, and Kim,” all common to Democratic-leaning minority groups.

The process for checking those names, a computer program called Crosscheck—touted by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a vocal supporter for voter identification—is incredibly inaccurate. “The actual lists,” notes Al Jazeera America, “show that not only are middle names mismatched, and suffix discrepancies ignored, even conflicting birthdates are disregarded. Moreover, Crosscheck deliberately ignores any Social Security mismatches, in the few instances when the numbers are even collected.”

Given the tight races in Georgia and other battleground states, even a small number of false positives could turn the tide of an election, giving a strong advantage to Republican candidates for statewide and congressional offices.

In Georgia they simply misplace voter registrations that they don't want to accept:

On Tuesday, Judge Christopher Brasher of the Fulton County Superior Court denied a petition from civil rights advocates to force Georgia’s Secretary of State to process an estimated 40,000 voter registrations that have gone missing from the public database.

All of that bullshit the conservatives have been throwing around about voter fraud, and the need for stricter restrictions at the polls, was all to lay the groundwork for crap like this.

You know there are a whole lot of reasons to vote for the Democrats in this next election. But perhaps one of the best is because they respect EVERY American's right to vote, and rather than attempt to suppress any group's ability to cast their ballot, they work overtime to make it easy for all of us.

I for one am beyond fed up with this underhanded shit.

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