The Dirty Details of Voter Purges

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Secretive, error-riddled methods for cleaning up the voter rolls and how the Help America Vote Act isn't helping.

Thousands of Americans will likely show up to the polls on Nov. 4 to find they are no longer registered to vote. That's an estimate based on past elections and the findings of two leading research groups that found state-sanctioned voter purges are widely inaccurate.

Both the Brennan Center for Justice and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group have independently called into question the methods states use to clean up their voter rolls and the integrity of the information those purges are based on. Roughly 13 million names were purged from the rolls in 2005 and 2006, and while most of the removals were legitimate, that still leaves thousands likely disenfranchised, they say.

Washington state, which canceled the second-highest percentage of voters, beefed up its voter-roll-cleanup efforts after a 2004 governor's race that determined 1,800 votes were cast by felons or on behalf of deceased people, said Washington Secretary of State spokesman David Ammons.

"It really radicalized us for cleaning up the rolls," Ammons said.

Sometimes, though, the purges get too radical. The Brennan Center report, "http://www.brennancenter.org/content/resource/voter_purges">Voter Purges," shows that flawed purge lists threaten election integrity some eight years after the infamous felon purge lists used by Florida in 2000 wrongfully dropped at least 12,000 voters from the rolls.

The lists used to delete voters are "riddled with inaccuracies," according to the report. The bottom line, writes Myrna Perez, the report's author: "States maintain voter rolls in an inconsistent and unaccountable manner. Officials strike voters from the rolls through a process that is shrouded in secrecy, prone to error, and vulnerable to manipulation."

In Mississippi before the March 2008 primary, a county election official — from her home computer — http://www.wlbt.com/Global/story.asp?S=7973229&nav=1L7t4viX">secretly deleted 10,000 voters from the rolls.

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1. Site to check your registration - make sure you're not purged:

http://www.votersunite.org/info/RegInfo.asp