Brooklyn Voter Purge Hit Hispanics Hardest

[Eugene]

Source: WNYC

Brooklyn Voter Purge Hit Hispanics Hardest

Jun 21, 2016 · by Brigid Bergin, John Keefe and Jenny Ye

Ever since New York State’s presidential primary in April, officials from the city Board of Elections have been trying to explain what led to two illegal voter purges that removed more than 120,000 voters from the rolls.

Board officials have said repeatedly that the purges were a mistake. The two top clerks at the Brooklyn office have been suspended without pay since shortly after the primary. Executive Director Michael Ryan announced earlier this month that the board would return all the purged voters to the rolls in time for Tuesday's congressional primary.

Ryan has apologized publicly, but he's also tried to debunk claims that any specific group of voters was unduly effected by the purge. Testifying under oath at a City Council hearing last month, Ryan said that “a broad cross-section of voters [was] removed from the voter rolls.”

But a WNYC analysis found something very different. Under the state Freedom of Information Law, WNYC obtained the list of every voter the board says was removed from the books in a major purge over two days last summer. When mapped by election district, our analysis shows that Hispanic voters were disproportionately purged from the rolls when compared to all other groups.

[font size=1]-snip-[/font]

Read more: http://www.wnyc.org/story/brooklyn-voter-purge-hit-hispanics-hardest/

[lapucelle]

1. In other words, it hurt Hillary

rather than Sanders.

[w4rma]

2. Not if they were young Hispanics. Younger folks of every ethnicity are always more susceptible to

voter suppression tactics.

[Person 2713]

3. Agree. Either way it is all bad as people lost their vote

[tonyt53]

4. How'd Bernie do with Hispanics overall? Not so well, young or old.

[OwlinAZ]

5. Can you substantiate this statement?

[w4rma]

8. He won them in some states and he lost them in other states. The African American vote is the only

minority that strongly backed Clinton. And Bernie Sanders won *every* ethnicity in the under 45 demographic. In fact, it's interesting that African-Americans under 30 went for Sanders by amounts stronger than any other ethnicity under 30.

In other words, Bernie does well with people who are still in the job market and plan to be in the job market for some time. Hillary does well among retirees who could care less about the job market, anymore.

[hrmjustin]

7. For the most part the neighborhoods hardest hit went to Clinton.

[Igel]

6. This kind of article is always a problem.

Take this:

"In fact, 13.9 percent of voters in Hispanic-majority election districts were purged, compared to 8.7 percent of voters in all other election districts. That means voters in Hispanic-majority election districts were removed at a rate about 60 percent greater than everyone else."

If they mean that Hispanic voters were purged at a greater than average rate, sure. But if they mean there was no group that experienced similar levels or greater amounts of purging, then, well, you can't know. How did Asians fare? Blacks? Whites? Are there differences in general displayed between ethnic groups for the licit reasons for removal from the voter registration list? Well, yeah. And there have been for decades. Any group can be unfavorably (or favorably) compared against the average for something, but when you start peeling out individual groups you really have to disaggregate the data to show that the "special" group is really special.

They still didn't follow the rules, though.

BTW, has anybody noticed that the Congressional District 7 that we're talking about is gerrymandered rather nicely for the purposes of having the heavily Latino areas in one district? It's a common result from a SCOTUS decision saying that it's okay to bundle voters in a district to ensure ethnicity and race-based representation. However, this entails that anything that affects that group for any reason will have the possible inference that it's either anti or pro that elected official or against that particular district.