
Indiana Purging Voters Using Software That’s 99% Inaccurate - clumsysmurf
https://www.thedailybeast.com/lawsuit-indiana-purging-voters-using-software-thats-99-inaccurate
======
alistproducer2
Anyone with half a brain knows that these purges are designed to advantage a
side not protect the system. I read an article the other day that stated that
some America's voting system had essentially been compromised on many levels.
It made me think about why so many of our polls have, in the last few years,
been so off the mark. Now I'm beginning to think it's not because the polling
models suddenly don't work. It is quite possibly something more nefarious than
that.

~~~
brian-armstrong
Yeah, I remember the outrage when the original Diebold hacking announcement
was made in the Bush Jr era. The concerns in that were never addressed and
doubtless things have simply since got worse.

If Google, Facebook et al wanted to make amends for biasing the election, they
could bring some of their engineering prowess to bear on defeating systematic
voting machine fraud.

~~~
liquidise
> _Google, Facebook et al wanted to make amends for biasing the election_

I'm still surprised by the anger for this. For the purposes of the viewer,
Google and Facebook are effectively media companies. By that measure, all
media companies bias elections heavily during election cycles. This is done
both with content and well as paid advertising.

But to "make amends" for something sounds as if their influence is either
unprecedented or morally wrong. Perhaps the argument is that the bias from
international influences was wrong. Something else entirely?

I suppose i fail to see where the real complaint here is. What behavior or
lapse triggered these accusations?

~~~
lurker456
There are some (poor, outdated, ineffective) checks and balances on the use of
traditional media for political advertising. The new media successfully
lobbied to be even excluded from those. Additionally, a lot of people who are
not in this business were surprised about the extent.

------
pulisse
De rigueur pointer to a discussion of the birthday paradox for those who don't
understand why the combination of first name, last name, and birth date is an
unavoidably flawed way of uniquely identifying individuals:
[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bring-science-
hom...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bring-science-home-
probability-birthday-paradox/).

~~~
ThrustVectoring
Personal anecdote: my parents used a pediatrician who identified minor
patients by first + last + birth month. The office had to start using middle
initial as well to disambiguate me from another patient.

~~~
fencepost
Separate personal anecdote. My wife changed gynecologists after receiving a
message on our answering machine with very sensitive and concerning medical
data that was not for her.

She hadn't even seen the doctor in question for more than 9 months, had never
had any indication of the problems in question (but had had tests done that
could have identified such) and was generally thoroughly freaked out by this.
Turns out the practice had another patient with the same name and was just a
little sloppy about which person got called.

------
adamw2k
Lawsuit was filed shortly after SB 442 was passed (which is what allowed the
process to begin): [http://www.naacp.org/latest/naacp-files-lawsuit-indiana-
unla...](http://www.naacp.org/latest/naacp-files-lawsuit-indiana-unlawful-
voter-purges/)

Sadly, it will have to work its way through the court while names continue to
be purged.

~~~
rtkwe
Doesn't have to, the NAACP applied for an injunction that would stop the
purges while the case is making its way through the court. It's basically the
first step any time a law or something like this is challenged in the court.

Couldn't find any follow up articles from a (admittedly super cursory) search
saying if it was granted though.

------
Bud
This is a crime. The power to unregister voters must be forcibly taken away
from states; especially red states, since they are the only ones abusing this
power.

It should require federal action, instead.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _It should require federal action_

Shooting from the hip is a good way to trash a democracy. What you're
proposing would allow a single, centralized actor to purge voters from the
rolls. De-centralised systems will always have longer, more-idiotic tails.
That's the tradeoff for their robust central tendencies.

~~~
wahern
Software means one idiot's algorithm can quickly become every idiot's
algorithm.

That said, the urge to federalize everything is troublesome. Democrats want to
protect Alabamians from Alabama, but who's gonna protect us when Alabama takes
over the federal government?

De-centralization at the very least makes it easier to fix mistakes piecemeal,
even if it doesn't prevent everybody from making the same mistake.

~~~
Mountain_Skies
One benefit of the electoral college is that it compartmentalizes voter fraud
to the state in which it happens. If I'm a corrupt election official in a
state that is going to give a presidential candidate a large margin of
victory, I have no incentive to risk being caught manipulating vote tallies
(for president). If we ever switch to using the national popular vote instead,
think we'd see lots of cases of local officials trying to 'save the country'
by offsetting votes from other states that vote primarily for another
candidate.

~~~
Bud
You are misusing the term "voter fraud" here. It doesn't mean what you think
it means. "Voter fraud" refers only to intentional voting by people who don't
have the right to vote, or who are voting more than once.

There basically is no such thing as "voter fraud"; there have only been a few
handfuls of cases in the past two decades, out of billions of votes cast. So
it's important not to play fast and loose with the use of this term.
Republicans are using professional liars to allege that voter fraud is a real
thing. It's not.

------
kevin_thibedeau
New York purged me back in 2010 and I was forced to vote provisional despite
voting there consistently for many years. The fail extends all around.

~~~
fencepost
And odds are high that your provisional ballot was simply tossed unless you
contacted your county Board of Elections, probably with documentation to prove
that you were allowed to vote and probably within just a few days after the
election.

What happens with provisional ballots is very highly variable, but quite
frequently ends up with them simply being tossed.

~~~
taserian
Are they tossed because of malicious intent, or because they can't change the
outcome of the election?

For example, if the outcome of the election has Candidate X ahead of Y by D
votes (D = X - Y) and there are less than D provisional ballots to count, is
there a reason to count them?

(This being for a simple one-post election; if there are multiple posts where
_proportion_ of votes allows for a seat being won/lost by a party, the formula
would have to be different.)

~~~
fencepost
> Are they tossed because of malicious intent, or because they can't change
> the outcome of the election?

Highly variable, but I'm pretty sure it's a lot more to do with the laws of
the states than with whether there are enough provisional votes to matter. In
looking up some things for an earlier comment I saw one mention of persons
casting a provisional ballot then having 3 days to bring proof of eligibility
to the county Board of Elections and a separate mention (for another state) of
the Board of Elections investigating provisional ballots and informing voters
if their ballot was discarded instead.

I'd be surprised if anyplace had a law of "you don't have to count them if
there aren't enough to change the outcome," but I've been surprised before.

------
jeffdavis
The headline is wrong. A 99% false positive rate does not mean the software is
99% inaccurate. That's a statistical fallacy.

~~~
kafkaesq
It's one "kind" of inaccurate, if you will. They're just trying to simplify.

They also explain exactly what they mean in the caption under the title.

------
MR4D
I get the obvious point of the article; something is clearly fishy.

However, let’s look at the numbers.

According to
[https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/IN](https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/IN) ,
the population of Indiana is roughly 6.6 million. Roughly 85% are white ( so
about 5.6 million people) and ~15% are non-white ( roughly 1 million people).

Now, the article says “50 percent of U.S. racial minorities share the same
last names, as opposed to 30 percent of white Americans”. So just using this
as an issue, about 1.7 million whites and 0.5 million non-whites hit the first
hurdle.

Honestly, if they really are using this against minorities, then they sure
suck at it. They’ve already got MORE THAN 3 TIMES as many white folks as non-
whites thru the first hurdle towards un-registering them!!

Serves them right if the article is anywhere close to being correct!

------
mox1
Too add a data point, here is a list of the 10 most common <FirstName,
LastName> pairs in the United States.

[https://blogs.ancestry.com/cm/calling-james-smith-10-most-
co...](https://blogs.ancestry.com/cm/calling-james-smith-10-most-common-first-
and-surname-combinations/)

I hesitate to guess ethnicity based on names, but I see mostly Caucasian and
Latin names (Smith is represented heavily).

~~~
thephyber
I think the goal is less to target racial groups directly, but rather to
target those who are less likely to have the desire, the knowledge, or the
resources to rectify the issue.

This tends to target the poorest Americans -- either those who can't afford to
take time away from work to get the documents required to re-register or those
who simply would give up after finding out they are not registered.

------
deveshkhanal
Yay, more good news.

~~~
deveshkhanal
[sarcasm]

------
s73ver_
The inaccuracy is a feature, not a bug.

~~~
awalton
Perhaps more specifically, it's its _intended_ feature, not some goofy side-
effect. The whole game here is voter suppression, and this is just one of its
many new implementations as heralded under this administration's plan. Can't
beat them with Gerrymandering? Deregister people who will vote against you.

~~~
travmatt
If that fails the next step is to launch lawsuits against the voting rights
act, and if even that fails then you claim fraud and refuse to recognize the
validity of the election, as the Republican Party in Georgia did.

------
danblick
In the US, there's a lot of concern about making it easy for voters to
register and stay registered, because in the past officials used this to
disenfranchise blacks in the south and minority groups.

I think they are not paying enough attention to the risk of intentional voter
fraud (by hostile outsiders) in the modern world. In the last election,
Russian election manipulation became a big topic because they hacked e-mail
servers and placed some fake news ads. Can you imagine what it would have done
to the country if they had _actually placed fraudulent votes in key
districts_? Would you have accepted Donald Trump as president if there had
been serious questions about whether he'd been elected by fraudulent votes?
This is not really that hard to imagine!

The system today is pretty vulnerable to manipulation by outsiders, and the
discussion about voter disenfranchisement is keeping us from fixing that...

~~~
ch4s3
That's complete nonsense. The Supreme Court and several district courts have
found states like North Carolina to be actively using purges and registration
changes for the purpose of disenfranchising voters. Furthermore, if you want
to protect the integrity of the vote, registration is the last logical place
to start, as in person fraud is vanishingly rare. Only 2 people were charged
with doing so in this past election, 2.

If we want to secure the machines, that is a totally different scenario, and
unrelated to purging voter rolls.

~~~
wang_li
It doesn't get charged often because there are parties that fight tooth and
nail to prevent the implementation of processes that would allow the detection
of ineligible voters voting.

It is shown in every election cycle that there are cases of voters voting who
should not be because of their citizenship or felon status or voting in
multiple districts.

When you say that only 2 have been charged, why is that relevant? What number
of people would be disenfranchised if the voting system required photo ID? And
I mean people who literally cannot get a photo ID at all, not someone who has
to pay $10 or who has to spend a few hours once every four to six years
getting their ID renewed.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _It is shown in every election cycle that there are cases of voters voting
> who should not be because of their citizenship or felon status or voting in
> multiple districts._

Source? Because every [1] source [2] I find [3] says the opposite.

[1]
[http://library.uwp.ac.id/digilib/files/disk1/13/\--publicadmi...](http://library.uwp.ac.id/digilib/files/disk1/13/--publicadmi-624-19-19.pdf)

[2]
[http://open.mitchellhamline.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...](http://open.mitchellhamline.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1237&context=wmlr)

[3]
[http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/washington/12fraud.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/washington/12fraud.html)

~~~
wang_li
Your own links say that it happens, but then hand wave it away as not
significant.

Your [1]:

>However, in only 26 cases was there a conviction or a guilty plea by the
citizen.

From your [2]:

>n the state of Washington, for example, six cases of double voting and
nineteen instances of individuals voting in the name of the dead yielded
twenty-five fraudulent votes

From your [3]:

>Although Republican activists have repeatedly said fraud is so widespread
that it has corrupted the political process and, possibly, cost the party
election victories, about 120 people have been charged and 86 convicted as of
last year.

I'm not saying it's widespread, but I suspect that there have been local
elections where the outcome was changed due to fraudulent votes. The question
is do we care that each fraudulent vote voids the vote of a legitimate voter?
And if something such as voter ID requirements were in place, would that have
any value? Would requiring states to cross check their voter registration have
any value?

As an aside, people seem to enjoy comparing the US to places like Canada and
Germany on many different things, health care, progressive tax rates,
commitment to green policies, immigration, etc. yet surprisingly no one ever
says brings up voter ID, which both of those countries require.

~~~
mikeash
Very few people object to the concept of voter ID. They object to its
implementation in the US, which is virtually always done to disenfranchise
legitimate voters.

The fight against voter ID laws is really a fight against voter laws
accompanied by biased ID requirements and intentional difficulties foisted on
the opposition voters.

~~~
zo1
How exactly can you have a citizen that is unable to get a government-issued
ID? That is a failure of the government. They either have the documents and/or
government records to prove that they are a citizen, or they're not a citizen.

A law requiring citizens to have IDs to vote is not the problem. The problem
is the processes that aren't assisting citizens that struggle to get IDs.

~~~
mikeash
You're treating it as two separate problems, but in reality they're
intertwined.

In an ideal world, you create a voter ID policy in order to ensure the
integrity of the vote. You figure out sensible policies to ensure that every
eligible voter can vote, and enact them. Separately, you create an ID system
that all citizens can use.

In reality, voter ID policies are often created with the intent of making it
more difficult for certain groups to vote. They figure out policies to ensure
that voters on the "right" side can vote, and voters on the "wrong" side
can't. For example, they might accept a form of ID commonly held by one group,
and not accept a different form of ID commonly held by the other group. Or
they might restrict hours or shut down ID offices in areas populated by the
"wrong" side to make it more difficult for them to obtain acceptable ID. Both
of these have actually been done in various states.

Voter ID laws and making it more difficult for certain groups to obtain ID are
two sides of the same coin here.

