Gaming the System

Pittsburgh PA

Description

The facts are irrefutable. Systematically over the last decades The Republican Party has aimed at control of the masses at the local level culimating in Trumpism. Gerrymandering, reduction of voters, and a 1965 Supreme Court decision spurred the Republicans push to Voter Supression. The common practice over centuries is to recruit new members for a political party not to suppress the opposition. Party growth comes from good ideas and policies. Not for Republicans, apparently, they try to game the rules instead. Here is a excerpt from an article by Danielle McClean at : https://archive.thinkprogress.org/17-million-americans-purged-from-voter-rolls-between-2016-and-2018-new-report-finds-38c2c5c3124b/ "The number of names eliminated by election officials has surged since the Supreme Court in 2013 significantly weakened protections of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That decision, Shelby County v. Holder removed protections that forced communities with a history of discrimination to get Department of Justice or federal court approval before changing local voting laws, a process known as pre-clearance. The report indicates that the communities with a long history of discriminating against African Americans and Latinx voters may still be discriminating against minorities by illegally purging names from voter rolls now that pre-clearance provisions have been lifted. States such as Virginia, Texas, Georgia, and Arizona between 2016 and 2018 purged voters at much higher rates than other states that were never under federal pre-clearance supervision. “There is something about the structural and systemic nature of these states that has caused them to look differently at least with respect to purges,” said Myrna Pérez, director of the Brennan Center’s voting rights and elections program. “I think this shows a certain stickiness to their history of discrimination,” Pérez added. “This demonstrates to me that the Supreme Court was wrong in its assessment that there is nothing special or unique in these states anymore and that they moved on.” A roll of I Voted stickers sits on a table at Oakman Elementary School during the US presidential election on November 8, 2016 in Dearborn, Michigan. / AFP / JEFF KOWALSKY (Photo credit should read JEFF KOWALSKY/AFP/Getty Images) Election officials often remove voters from rolls when they become ineligible to vote in that community, such as when a voter moves to another state or dies. However, voters who are still eligible to vote are often removed from rolls without their knowledge, and only find out that their names were purged when they are denied a ballot on Election Day. Republicans say voter purging is essential to preventing the nearly non-existent issue of fraud the ballot box and to that end, officials in several GOP-controlled states have put into place burdensome voter regulations that often have the effect of suppressing legitimate votes by college students, African Americans, members of the Latinx community and other Democratic-leaning voters. While there are federal laws in place to protect voters from being improperly removed from the rolls, there nevertheless have been examples in Republican-controlled states of names being illegally removed. A number of states purged names using the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, which flags people who may have voted in different states but has an extremely high margin of error. Last year, a federal judge ordered a preliminary injunction stopping Indiana from purging voters that were flagged under the crosscheck program. The Brennan Center is among the organizations challenging the Indiana law and the case is still in federal court. Earlier this year, Texas’ former Secretary of State David Whitley resigned after a federal judge blocked him from purging state voter rolls of the names of nearly 100,000 people who were falsely identified as non-citizens. Emails later suggested that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott led the effort to purge the names. The Brennan Center’s report relied on data from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission survey showing that at least 16 million names were removed from voter rolls between 2014 and 2016, immediately following the Supreme Court decision. The latest update to that report, which was released last week, showed the number of people that were purged continued to grow, with at least 17 million voters removed between 2016 and 2018. "