From the Advancement Project and Project vote, a great release you may have missed on Voter Suppression in Maryland. That’s right! And what voters would that be, MINORITY VOTERS…because, at its root, election fraud is a RACE AND CLASS CRIME!!! http://www.advancementproject.org/ MARYLAND CONTINUES ITS VOTER SUPPRESSION EFFORTS
http://www.advancementproject.org/Contact: Sabrina Williams, Advancement Project 202/728-9557 or 305/904-3960
Michael Slater, Project Vote 617-282-3666(Washington DC, October 4, 2006)—Today, Advancement Project and Project Vote sent a letter to Linda Lamone, administrator of the Maryland State Board of Elections. The letter demanded the state discontinued its unlawful practice of refusing to process, and in some cases canceling, voter registration applications where the applicant’s personal identification number could not be verified through the Motor Vehicle Administration (MVA) or Social Security Administration (SSA) databases.
“It seems like Maryland is taking a page from Florida’s voter suppression playbook, which also attempted to use technology to match 2 different databases and ultimately disenfranchised thousands of voters in 2000 because the database wrongly identified them as a felon,” said Andrew Rivera, senior attorney, Advancement Project, a national civil rights organization. “Matching an applicant’s registration number with information in a database is an error prone and unreliable process.”
Voter protection groups have been monitoring Maryland’s voter registration processes, and have learned that election officials have:
* Refused to register voter registration applicants whose personal identification number could not be verified in the MVA or SSA databases and placed such applicants on a “pending” status, in violation of HAVA;
* Sent “pending” applicants a misleading letter stating that their identification number could not be verified, but did not indicate that they could in fact vote in the primary election as long as they produced identification;
* Removed “pending” applicants whose notice letter was returned as undeliverable from Maryland’s statewide voter registration database, which is in direct violation of the NVRA; and
* Required “pending” applicants, whose applications should have been processed, to vote by provisional ballot in violation of HAVA, NVRA and the VRA.
“Maryland has created needless and unlawful barriers to voter registration and voting in the state,” said Colin Pierce, Project Vote spokesperson. “These hurdles are unauthorized, unwise, unjust, and unnecessary, and they are contrary to federal law and the interests of the state in promoting fair elections. We urge the state to take immediate steps to remove these hurdles and protect the rights of eligible persons to participate in our democracy.”
Maryland’s matching requirements have been causing problems for thousands of eligible voters. For example, a citizen registering as “William” might not “match” if his driver’s license is issued under “Bill”; a woman’s married name might not match against an outdated database containing her maiden name. Moreover, common data entry errors cause matches to fail. According to court documents in a recent Washington case, one woman was barred from the rolls when her birthday was mistakenly entered into the system as “1976” instead of “1975”. A federal court in Washington State recently blocked enforcement of a Washington state statute that required the rejection of voter registration applications if the applicant’s ID number could not be verified.
Perhaps even more troubling, while Maryland’s matching procedures not only disenfranchise numerous eligible voters, they may disproportionately impact certain racial and ethnic groups. For example, it is common for individuals of Latino descent to use both maternal and paternal last names or to use one or the other inconsistently. If an individual uses a different version of her name on her application than is used in the database, she will not be registered to vote. In African-American communities, it is common to modify spellings of names traditionally spelled differently in other cultures. In fact, one recent study reported that Jazmine, Jasmin, and Jazmin are all common names in African-American communities. Any of these names could easily be misspelled by a data enterer as Jasmine.
“These sources of error will confront election officials with tens of thousands of bureaucracy-generated mistakes preventing eligible citizens from voting,” continued Pierce. “Even under the best case scenario, disenfranchisement will be widespread. The only question is how many voters will be denied.”
If Maryland does not discontinue its practice of placing applicants whose personal ID number cannot be verified on pending status rather than registering such applicants, it will lead to the inevitable and unlawful disenfranchisement of thousands of eligible voters throughout the state. Voter protection groups are not asking for the state to unilaterally reverse the operation of state regulations, unlawful as they are; rather, they are asking for the state to exercise discretion in implementing them as to minimize their unfair and regressive impact on voter registrants. At a minimum, groups recommend:
* That if a voter whose ID number has not been verified provides ID at the polls on Election Day, the voter should be permitted to vote by regular ballot; and
* The state should notify all applicants, well in advance of Election Day, whose applications are pending because of Maryland’s inability to verify their ID number of their right to present ID at the polls and prior to the canvassing of provisional ballots.
“Maryland is relying on computers to accurately identify eligible voters in a way that exceeds the limits of human error in entering data,” concluded Rivera. “A ‘no match, no vote’ rule will mistakenly reject too many registration applications, too close to the election. If Maryland continues down the current path of requiring an ID match as a precondition to registration, a close examination of the intersection between Maryland’s current approach and federal laws will be in order.”
Nation: Check out PROJECT VOTE – It’s a Great Resource and Organization
http://www.projectvote.org/