Alienated voters « Thread Started on Oct 30, 2007, 4:03am »

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Alienated voters « Thread Started on Oct 30, 2007, 4:03am » --------------------------------------------------------------------------------By: James Sample Oct 29, 2007 05:55 PM EST read at source> http://www.politico.com/news/stories/10 ... htmlBranch Rickey, the legendary baseball executive who signed Jackie Robinson, said luck is the residue of design. When it comes to managing voter registration, bad luck — in the form of a fundamental right arbitrarily denied — is the residue of misperceived risk, poor design and even worse execution. Misperceived risk: voter fraud Americans are quite familiar with imperfect election administration. Human errors by election officials, technological glitches, voter intimidation and missing ballot boxes occur somewhere, in some election, approximately as often as it rains. Proponents of laws that do not address these irregularities but that do result in substantial disenfranchisement of legitimate voters, market a misnomer and conflate the above problems with “voter fraud.” But voter fraud they are not. Voter fraud, to the extent it exists at all, involves real people casting ballots despite knowing that they are ineligible to vote. As a practical matter, voter fraud involves extraordinary criminal risk, including prison and fines, for almost zero personal gain. Unsurprisingly, exacting scrutiny of the 2004 election in Ohio revealed a possible voter fraud rate of 0.00004 percent. Americans are more likely to be struck by lightning. Granted, lightning does strike, but we’re not yet ready to pass legislation requiring a dome for the planet. When the 2004 Washington gubernatorial election was decided by a mere 129 votes out of almost 3 million, the voter fraud marketing machine shifted into high gear. Yet after close examination, a federal court found no evidence of fraud or misconduct. Similarly, John McKay, then the U.S. attorney for western Washington, probed the allegations but found nothing worth prosecuting. As has been well-documented, his refusal to jump to conclusions may well have cost him his job. Poor design: managing the lists Two laws, the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act, establish the federal guidelines for voter lists. Together, they direct officials to enact practices that make it easier for eligible citizens to vote. Most pertinently, HAVA requires that states create statewide databases of registered voters. Previously, in most states, each county was responsible for its own lists. The idea is good. The transition is a mess. The complexities of the ongoing transition, which are detailed in the Brennan Center for Justice report “Making the List,” essentially divide into two categories. Neither is likely to make the evening news — at least not until it’s too late. The first category involves the limits of lists. Some states block eligible voters unless they can “match” the new registrant to existing government lists used for other purposes. But one of the realities of large databases is that typographical errors, maiden names for the married, married names for the divorced, transposed fields, improperly hyphenated compound names, nicknames and similar phenomena abound.