2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumCrosscheck
Why is there not more discussion and outrage about Crosscheck being used to purge voters form the voter rolls? How can anybody point fingers at how we lost if this is not the top of the discussion?
HassleCat
(6,409 posts)It's what they do with the information.
lou ky dem
(72 posts)We hearing more about how they used this against us in the election?
msongs
(70,123 posts)triron
(22,240 posts)supported by Repukes who had support of Russian hackers in the effort
removed votes for HRC on a vast scale. No recount would ever show it since they weren't
counted in the first place. This is consistent with and borne out by the skewing of the exit polls.
meow2u3
(24,916 posts)and give them some of their own medicine. We should really give them a real surprise!
csziggy
(34,189 posts)<SNIP>
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.
<SNIP>
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-w435890
The 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:
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. Its an ongoing story played out in multiple episodes a day in recent weeks, and its been a growing concern throughout this election cycle.
But the Democratic Party is profoundly broken as wellmost 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 twistit 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 dangerousas a new book by Salons editor-in-chief David Daley explains.
The power to draw these maps rests largely with state legislatures, and the GOPs margins there have not been seen since before the Great Depression. Theres a reason whya plan called REDMAP, as Daley explains in Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal Americas Democracy, published by W.W.Norton/Liveright this week. But as Daley writes, the Democrats arent just badly outnumbered, they are seemingly clueless about the basic nature of the battle theyre involved in, much less what to do about it. Unless thats fixedand fastthe 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? Thats impossible to say. But Daley lays out everything we need to know about whats happened to steal our democracyfrom the grand plan to the messy on-the-ground reality in districts across the countryas 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.
Amaryllis
(9,799 posts)that include all kinds of voter suppression, machine and tabulation tampering, etc. Pennsylvania still has 100% paperless, unverifiable voting machines.
Many of us were working on the election fraud issue after they stole the 2004 election and found then, and it is still the case, that it is extremely difficult to get Dems to pay any attention to it, in spite of the fact that Greg Palast, THom Hartmann, Brad Friedman of Bradblog, Verified Voting, and many others have been screaming about it for years. Thom Hartmann was talking about electronic tampering in the 2000 election and how we seriously need to do soemthing about voting machine issues.
Many tried, but you just can't get Michael Moore to go there - someone who could really make a difference in bringing this to the forefront, but he will only talk about campaign strategy, getting out the vote, messaging, etc - and same with most other Dems, no matter how much documented info you provide. THey would rather analyze endlessly how the Dems need to change their message, what they did wrong in the campaign, etc. etc.
The members of the Congressional Black Caucus pay more attention to voter suppression than anyone else but still dont seem to get the electronic tampering piece.
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/38767-the-republican-sabotage-of-the-vote-recounts-in-michigan-and-wisconsin
http://www.alternet.org/new-video-watch-wisconsin-election-officials-reject-hand-counts-after-electronic-scanners-make-big
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/voting-rights-activists-pursue-federal-lawsuit-wisc-after-discovering-way-hack-ballot
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/37486-the-shocking-truth-about-election-rigging-in-america
https://www.thenation.com/article/the-gops-attack-on-voting-rights-was-the-most-under-covered-story-of-2016/
csziggy
(34,189 posts)The problem machines have been designed to NOT provide the records needed to prove their totals are not correct. Or if the proof might exist, Republicans have passed laws to prevent them being examined - such as the machines in Detroit whose totals did not match the number of voters who cast votes.
I think we'd be better off pushing for fully verifiable voting in the future - paper ballots can be counted quickly with optical scanners and the ballots are there to count by hand if that is needed. A few electronic machines make voting easier for people with physical difficulties so we might have to accept some of those - but they should provide paper receipts and be as secure as ATMs or gambling machines.
I doubt that we can convince enough Americans about the hazards of electronic voting machines - but to push for them to be as secure as other electronic devices would be easier.
We need to work on all three parts - more secure voting machines, stop illegal and irrational purges, and stop partisan gerrymandering. Any one will be an unphill battle. All three at once will be the fight of our lives.
HassleCat
(6,409 posts)All it does is flag potential discrepencies. The registration and election officials decide what to do about it. They could do the same thing without Crosscheck. In fact, they pulled similar shenanigans before we even had computers. Crosscheck makes it easier and faster, so they can disenfranchise more voters, but they are doing what they have always done.
Justice
(7,198 posts)lou ky dem
(72 posts)You will see a couple of familiar names from congress. For one is Hon. Keith Ellison, US Congressman .
http://thebestdemocracymoneycanbuy.com/petition/
Gothmog
(154,120 posts)I have been volunteering on voter protection efforts for a long time. It is not that easy to fight these efforts but I can assure that Democrats were fighting and achieved some successes. Harris County elected a Democrat as District Attorney for the first time in 36 years. There was still a great deal of voter suppression existing but I can assure you that it is being fought where it can be.
If a plaintiff could have been identified, the cross check program would have been challenged more directly. As is, Marc Elias got a similar program in Ohio enjoined with stricken voters allowed to vote. http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/federal-court-rules-ohios-voter-purge-unconstitutional/story?id=42343068
Ohio, a battleground state in the presidential race, removed the names of tens of thousands of registered voters under what it calls its supplemental process."
Under this controversial method, voters were taken off the registration rolls after six years of not voting, regardless of whether they remained eligible to vote.
As ABC News reported in June, many of those removed were from low-income neighborhoods or neighborhoods that tended to vote Democrat.
Fighting voter suppression is hard but can be fun. I help get a trump supporter arrested for trying to vote twice.
I can assure that if Marc Elias and the DOJ could have found proper plaintiffs there would have been a lawsuit on cross check.
lou ky dem
(72 posts)They were not actually removed from the rolls they were flagged to be given provisional ballots. So when they showed up to vote they thought they had voted not knowing must provisional ballots are not counted.
Gothmog
(154,120 posts)If someone was struck and their provisional ballot is not counted, then a lawsuit can be filed. I understand that one of the litigators in the Texas voter id case is looking for these types of cases
SickOfTheOnePct
(7,297 posts)if the voter was struck from the rolls, only if they are found to be registered.
Gothmog
(154,120 posts)As set forth above, the provisional ballots for struck voters in Ohio were automatically counted due to the Clinton campaign lawsuit. Marc Elias is a great election law lawyer
SickOfTheOnePct
(7,297 posts)There should have been no provisional ballots required, since the state was ordered to reinstate the registrations of the purged voters.
The lawsuit in question was filed before the election, not after. There may well be a case out there where an unregistered voter sued after the election to have their provisional ballot counted and won, but I've not heard of it.