"GOP-led Purge Threat to 3.5 Million Voters"/Greg Palast Documentary Airs" Links

[KoKo]

Heads Up: "GOP-led Purge Threat to 3.5 Million Voters"/Greg Palast Documentary Airs on Al Jazeera

GOP-led Purge Threat to 3.5 Million Voters/Greg Palast Documentary Airs on Al Jazeera Tonight but the Report Available for READ at:

http://www.gregpalast.com/

For 15 years, Greg Palast has been uncovering voter suppression tactics in investigative reports for BBC Television, The Guardian, Harper’s and Rolling Stone.

Greg Palast is the author of several New York Times bestsellers including The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits.

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Election officials in 27 states, most of them Republicans, have launched a program that threatens a massive purge of voter rolls, especially targeting minority voters.

Al Jazeera America has obtained 2.1 million names from the target lists, kept confidential until now. Experts reviewing the lists conclude it is suspiciously over-weighted with Black, Hispanic and Asian-American voters.

The targeted voters have been tagged as “potential duplicate voters,” suspected of voting twice in the same election, in two different states, a felony crime punishable by 2-10 years in prison.

Until now, state officials conducting the purge have refused to turn over their lists on grounds that these voters are all subjects of a criminal investigation.
Read the full exposé:

http://www.gregpalast.com/


Watch the Trailer for the 2-part TV report
on Al Jazeera America Tonight,
tonight & Thursday night at 9pm ET
(check your local channel guide)

[Scuba]

1. Crime of the Century.

[Bill USA]

2. Great post! why isn't this on Good Reads??

recommended!!

[Overseas]

3. This is an extraordinary story. More voter purging-- Those who "vote twice" -- by their names

I've been following this story for a while. We are so accustomed to GOP vote suppression that we don't notice some of their grandest schemes.

This "interstate votecheck" system looks for people with similar names who have voted in other states. They go for first name and last name and never mind the middle names.

The lists are heavily over-weighted with names such as Jackson, Garcia, Patel and Kim, common to minorities who vote overwhelmingly Democratic. Indeed, one in seven African-Americans in those 27 states are listed as suspected of the crime of voting twice, one in eight Asian-Americans, and one in eight Hispanic voters. White voters too, one in eleven, are at risk, though not as vulnerable as minorities.

This is a dangerous place we are in. Republicans have so many kinds of voter suppression in operation in any one election that we get accustomed to wild stories. Or think it is a discussion of the one kind of voter suppression we already heard about.

Or the PR professionals do their best to discredit the messengers because Greg Palast pointed out the voter purging in Florida that cost Al Gore the votes of many of the 40,000+ people who were dropped from those voter rolls way back then. Another name search scheme-- to supposedly find felons by looking for similar names.

They're still at the similar name game. I didn't realize that names are strongly correlated with ethnicity. But I didn't realize 73% of Asian Americans vote Democratic. And there are so many identical names among them.