The data is processed through a system called the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, which is being promoted by a powerful Republican operative, and its lists of potential duplicate voters are kept confidential. But Rolling Stone obtained a portion of the list and the names of 1 million targeted voters. According to our analysis, the Crosscheck list disproportionately threatens solid Democratic constituencies: young, black, Hispanic and Asian-American voters – with some of the biggest possible purges underway in Ohio and North Carolina, two crucial swing states with tight Senate races.
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The Virginia list was a revelation. In all, 342,556 names were listed as apparently registered to vote in both Virginia and another state as of January 2014. Thirteen percent of the people on the Crosscheck list, already flagged as inactive voters, were almost immediately removed, meaning a stunning 41,637 names were "canceled" from voter rolls, most of them just before Election Day.
We were able to obtain more lists – Georgia and Washington state, the total number of voters adding up to more than 1 million matches – and Crosscheck's results seemed at best deeply flawed. We found that one-fourth of the names on the list actually lacked a middle-name match. The system can also mistakenly identify fathers and sons as the same voter, ignoring designations of Jr. and Sr. A whole lot of people named "James Brown" are suspected of voting or registering twice, 357 of them in Georgia alone. But according to Crosscheck, James Willie Brown is supposed to be the same voter as James Arthur Brown. James Clifford Brown is allegedly the same voter as James Lynn Brown.
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Swedlund's statistical analysis found that African-American, Latino and Asian names predominate, a simple result of the Crosscheck matching process, which spews out little more than a bunch of common names. No surprise: The U.S. Census data shows that minorities are overrepresented in 85 of 100 of the most common last names. If your name is Washington, there's an 89 percent chance you're African-American. If your last name is Hernandez, there's a 94 percent chance you're Hispanic. If your name is Kim, there's a 95 percent chance you're Asian.
MUCH more:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/the-gops-stealth-war-against-voters-w435890The program was designed by a Republican to favor Republicans and to target Democrats. It is being blindly used by many Republican election officials who refuse to objectively examine the results they are handed. In addition, there is evidence that the purges performed have been closer to elections than allowed by federal law so that voters who are purged do not have sufficient time to get their voter registration restored.
The same as the RedMap strategy, Crosscheck is intended to reduce the strength of Democratic votes. If you are not familiar with RedMap:
This is how the GOP rigged Congress: The secret plan that handcuffed Obama’s presidency, but backfired in Donald Trump
GOP stole the House with old trick in a brilliant modern form. A new book by Salon's editor lays out every detail
Paul Rosenberg
Jun 13, 2016
The Republican Party is in crisis. It’s an ongoing story played out in multiple episodes a day in recent weeks, and it’s been a growing concern throughout this election cycle.
But the Democratic Party is profoundly broken as well—most notably in the Legislative branch, both in Congress and in state legislatures. After holding the House for four decades, Democrats lost control in the 1994 midterms, and have only held it for four years since then. The 2010 midterm was even more disastrous than 1994, but with an added twist—it was a census year, meaning that the winners that year could gerrymander themselves into power for a full 10 years. And, of course, that also meant a leg up on controlling the next decade of maps. The Republicans did exactly that in an electoral heist both brazen and dangerous–as a new book by Salon’s editor-in-chief David Daley explains.
The power to draw these maps rests largely with state legislatures, and the GOP’s margins there have not been seen since before the Great Depression. There’s a reason why–a plan called REDMAP, as Daley explains in “Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy,” published by W.W.Norton/Liveright this week. But as Daley writes, the Democrats aren’t just badly outnumbered, they are seemingly clueless about the basic nature of the battle they’re involved in, much less what to do about it. Unless that’s fixed—and fast—the Democrats will continue to be at least as broken as the Republicans, for as far as the eye can see.
What will it take for the Democrats to wake up? That’s impossible to say. But Daley lays out everything we need to know about what’s happened to steal our democracy—from the grand plan to the messy on-the-ground reality in districts across the country—as well as pointing to innovative ways of undoing the damage, not by mirroring GOP dirty tricks, but by making our democracy work better than it has in the past.
http://www.salon.com/2016/06/13/this_is_how_the_gop_rigged_congress_the_secret_plan_that_handcuffed_obamas_presidency_but_backfired_in_donald_trump/
Between the two Republican plans, Democrats have lost a significant percentage of our voting power. Rachel Maddow had a report some time back that indicated that each Democratic member of Congress had to get many more votes than the Republican members. Then to have hundreds of thousands of voters illegally removed from the voting rolls without a chance to be reinstated, reduces the number of Democratic voters even more.
The Democratic Party needs to fight BOTH of these things with everything we've got. But the DNC has done NOTHING since 2010 to fight the RedMap strategy and seldom fought against CrossCheck even though the purging of voters was illegal in many ways.
I have hope that the initiative that President Obama and Eric Holder are planning to lead will take these things on with good effect.
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