
Ohio Was Set to Purge 235,000 Voters. It Was Wrong About 20% - tysone
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/14/us/politics/ohio-voter-purge.html
======
rdtsc
> She went online and discovered that her name had also been flagged as an
> inactive voter. The state was in the process of removing her from its voter
> rolls.

> “I voted three times last year,” said Ms. Miller.

I am still baffled at the election system in this country. Every state does
its own thing. One state uses paper, other uses some machines which can be
easily hacked, some use both. Somehow voter ID is controversial, but India,
with more people, poverty and issues seems to have managed it. Why can't they
issue free IDs and track every voter in a database and call it a day?

> The state of Ohio had released names of 235,000 voters it planned to purge
> from voter rolls in September [...] voting rights groups found an
> unexplained tranche — around 20,000 people

But that means 200k some thousand should have been purged. If they died, and a
death certificate was issued, doesn't some government database know about it
and say, "yeah, person is dead purge their voter record". It's 2020 almost, we
flew people to the moon, there is a Tesla roadster in Sun's orbit, self
driving cars, but somehow managing a few hundred million voter records is an
impossible task and I don't understand why.

~~~
wongarsu
In Germany every person eligible to vote just gets a letter telling you the
day of the vote and your voting station (and a list of stuff being voted on,
local elections usually coincide with more important ones). At voting day (a
Sunday) you go to your polling station with that letter and photo id and after
five minutes you have cast your vote and are on your way.

It's dead simple. But it hinges on the state having a database with every
citizen's address. As I understand it such an idea would be very unpopular in
the US.

~~~
scrooched_moose
I mean, that's largely what voter registration is - a database of every
citizen's address.

The problem comes in when those addresses change. There's no requirement to
inform your old state you left, so millions of inactive voters are left in the
database. Generally there's a requirement to register in the new state
(drivers license) within 30 days which is often missed, or not required for
temporary moves like college students.

These purges do serve a legitimate purpose, but are often used as a political
tool to alter turnouts.

~~~
wongarsu
> There's no requirement to inform your old state you left, so millions of
> inactive voters are left in the database

In Germany when you arrive somewhere we know that you are coming from
somewhere. So when you register at your new address that usually involves your
new city hall informing your old one that you moved.

I guess that doesn't really work if registration isn't universal (in Germany
we track you place of residence basically from birth, it's used not just for
voting but also for determining where your taxes go, for government
communication, to make sure nobody skips out on bills by moving, etc).

~~~
CompanionCuuube
> (in Germany we track you place of residence basically from birth, it's used
> not just for voting but also for determining where your taxes go, for
> government communication, to make sure nobody skips out on bills by moving,
> etc).

If we tried to institute that kind of system, the political party which
currently is all against voter id would be up in arms too.

~~~
ebiester
So long as it isn't used to disenfranchise people from a single vote, there's
no problem. Now, things get complicated and we would have to do work to get it
right in that we have inconsistent rules on residency in terms of students and
temporary housing, and we have a significant number of people who don't want
to see a national registry of citizens (see issues with using SSN as a
national ID) but there's nothing specifically that Democrats would object to
philosophically.

The problem comes when we start trying to purge the rolls and there are false
positives. The bigger problem is when those false positives are
disproportionately citizens of color. Similarly, voter ID cards are not
problems philosophically as much as these ID laws disproportionately affecting
poor people and people of color.

If you want an ID law, you make IDs free, you account for many of the edge
cases like elderly people who don't have birth certificates yet are clearly
citizens, and you bend over backwards to make sure everyone who can vote gets
one regardless of it costing a little more.

~~~
9HZZRfNlpR
In Germany and Europe (UK is outliner) you pay a fee for ID card, but it's
valid for 10 years or so and cost is around 20-30 euro. Really don't
understand what's the panic about in America, you don't have to do and pay it
every year.

~~~
ebiester
Germany hasn't had an issue with making it more difficult for minorities to
vote since WWII. This was an attempt from last year:
[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/23/us/randolph-county-
georgi...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/23/us/randolph-county-georgia-
voting.html) \- It took a fair amount of protesting to stop it.

------
biomcgary
According to the article, moderate Republicans in Ohio insisted on
transparency for purging voter rolls. They sent out the proposed list to
various voter advocacy groups across the political spectrum, which reviewed
the proposed changes and flagged mistakes. 80% were purged correctly. 20% were
not.

Rather than condemning Ohio, they should be praised for bringing transparency
to the process (as long as the mistakes are corrected).

~~~
crispyambulance
No one should be praised other than the people who discovered "the mistakes".

The tactic here is voter disenfranchisement. It's a tried and true tool of the
Republicans and has been around since forever.

The thing is inactive voters are just that, _inactive_. There is very small
risk that some of their names might get used for voter fraud. But every time
this is researched, only a handful of incidents are discovered and it takes
thousands to swing an election. Those thousands can _easily_ be achieved,
however, with sloppy aggressive and unnecessary purging.

I wish there existed the political will to issue "citizen ID" cards (or other
mechanisms) to all citizens, like they do in civilized countries. These could
be used for residency and authentication for voting, banking, taxes, and other
functions. This authentication mechanism would instantly remove the phony
concern of voter fraud amongst republicans while not disenfranchising voters.

~~~
andrewla
> The thing is inactive voters are just that, inactive. There is very small
> risk that some of their names might get used for voter fraud. But every time
> this is researched, only a handful of incidents are discovered and it takes
> thousands to swing an election.

You claim the risk is small, but I'm not aware of anything that actually
supports this assessment. This form of manipulation is nearly impossible to
detect in a meaningful way. All the studies I'm aware of [1] have used
prosecutions for voter fraud as a measure of the extent of fraud, but that is
obviously contingent on the fraud being discovered.

I'm part of an apparently nonexistent group of people who both believe in
Voter ID laws and believe very strongly in maximizing potential voter turnout.
People have ID -- opponents of voter ID have deliberately exaggerated the
number of people without ids [2].

[1] [https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-
reports/debu...](https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-
reports/debunking-voter-fraud-myth) has a good set of articles attempting to
debunk the notion that various types of voter fraud occur. They all rely on
"credible allegations"

[2]
[https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legacy/d/d...](https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legacy/d/download_file_39242.pdf)
\-- just look at the first footnote and the description of the methodology,
and if you buy their results then you're a sucker.

~~~
crispyambulance
> [Voter fraud] is nearly impossible to detect in a meaningful way.

If the "victims" of voter fraud truly cared enough, they could audit the voter
records for any election. Unless I am wrong, there exists a record of whether
or not each person on the rolls actually voted. The intersection of the people
who voted with those that are deemed truly inactive would be the extend of the
voter fraud (at best).

No one seems to do that kind of study, however, because it's a lot of work and
it's more "fun" to just blow thousands of people (mostly democrats) off the
rolls.

~~~
andrewla
> If the "victims" of voter fraud truly cared enough, they could audit the
> voter records for any election. Unless I am wrong, there exists a record of
> whether or not each person on the rolls actually voted. The intersection of
> the people who voted with those that are deemed truly inactive would be the
> extend of the voter fraud (at best).

To be clear -- what do you mean by "truly inactive"? Usually "truly inactive"
means they haven't voted. So people who voted are by default not "truly
inactive". You would have to take some sort of heuristic estimate of how
likely it is that a voter is inactive, and cross that with the voting record,
and then attempt to individually contact the voter to verify that they did
vote. The quality of such a heuristic would fundamentally affect the results.
In other words, the experiment would either confirm widespread voter fraud,
or, way more likely, provide no evidence for or against voter fraud.

~~~
crispyambulance
By "truly inactive" I mean voters who can't vote because they're dead, no
longer live in that voting district, never actually existed, or are ineligible
to vote. If these names appear as having voted, those are invalid and _might_
be an indication of fraud.

There's the another type of fraud, of course, where people use the names of
active voters. A lot of people don't vote, so yeah, it could happen that
someone else just takes their place.

Whatever the case, _both_ of these "fraud" scenarios are insignificantly small
compared to the ham-fisted improper purging of _thousands_ of names, and other
suppression tactics such as gerrymandering.

------
empath75
Anybody who thinks these schemes are about anything other than removing
legitimate voters from the roles is deluding themselves.

~~~
gatherhunterer
That much is clear. This is only a few months after SCOTUS found Ohio’s new
election districts to be illegally gerrymandered.

------
josefresco
"And voting rights groups found an unexplained tranche — around 20,000 people
— who had been marked to be purged because of inactivity in future election
cycles, but were actually active voters in previous Ohio elections. These
voters were in Franklin County, a Democratic stronghold in the state."

Aaaand there it is.

~~~
not_a_cop75
How hard is it really for a voter to reregister? You guys are making it sound
like it they're taking away driver's licenses or something. All you have to do
is hit the website. If you don't have internet access hit a library.

~~~
spamizbad
Because this is HN and you're probably young-ish: When you're older and you've
set down roots the last time you updated your voter registration was probably
a few decades ago. Chances are your polling place hasn't likely changed
either. So you know when elections come, you go to your usual polling place,
give your name, get your ballet and "pull the lever" so to speak. You're not
thinking "Oh I better double-check my voter registration!" because you haven't
needed to do that in ages because your address and party affiliation hasn't
changed in years.

The US is strange: It will wring its hands over low voter turnout while also
actively making it more difficult to vote.

~~~
not_a_cop75
I update my voter registration sometimes twice a year to match the party I
most like at the time, It's always been online - easy peasy. I expect to get
downvoted to hell but I also don't get why showing an ID to vote is such a big
deal. After all, I have to look up the numbers in my drivers license to vote.

Also, how is it hard to vote? Absentee ballots are totally easy to get. If I
was blind, I might have to plan ahead to get the help to do it. Otherwise, no
biggie.

~~~
wbronitsky
US history is why its a big deal to show your ID to vote.

Wikipedia has a great summary of the racist policies voter ID laws were made
to enforce, and that voter fraud is "vanishingly rare"
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_ID_laws_in_the_United_St...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_ID_laws_in_the_United_States#History)

~~~
weberc2
Maybe voter fraud is "vanishingly rare", but that statement in the wikipedia
article only links to a NYT article which says:

> Academic studies have repeatedly concluded that fraud at the ballot box —
> the sort that photo identification requirements might reduce — is already
> vanishingly rare.

With no citation.

Anyway, "vanishingly rare" could mean that fewer than 1% of votes are
fraudulent, but those fraudulent votes could be concentrated in a handful of
key counties thereby having a big impact. I'm not arguing in favor of tougher
voter ID restrictions but rather in favor of educated discourse.

~~~
wbronitsky
I want to point out that there is no citation for this straw-man thought
experiment.

Even the Heritage Foundation, which is incentivized to dig up as much voter
fraud as it possibly can, has only found fewer than 1250 individual cases in
what seems to be the last decade. This is overwhelmingly lower than the
preposterous 1% presented in the above straw-man.
[https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud](https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud)

Indeed my point was not just about voter fraud, but the racist history of
Voter ID laws in the US. My overall point was that there is overwhelming and
easily accessible evidence that voter ID laws are racist and that voter fraud
is not an issue.

~~~
weberc2
I can't tell what the "straw man" argument you're referring to. Could you
clarify?

------
mschuster91
In Germany we do not have this problem (neither voter suppression nor voter
fraud), for a multitude of reasons:

1) everyone has a government-provided ID document: a passport, for German
nationals the ID card Personalausweis also works, and for EU nationals (who
can vote in municipal and EU elections) their country's ID document

2) the legal requirement to register at the city/region office
("Meldebehörde") where you live, and you have to prove this with a copy of
your rent contract or property deed

3) everyone getting a document ("Wahlschein") by mail a couple of weeks prior
to election date. If you don't get one but should have gotten, you can contact
the election authority to investigate, and if you lose/misplace it you can
easily look up where your voting place is, go there and have them locate you
on the voter roll.

4) if any piece of official mail goes returned by the post as "undeliverable",
the Meldebehörde will investigate and de-register you (thus also removing you
from the voter roll)

The only real vote fraud in the last years was from a politician who had
seasonal workers register at a company and apply for mail-voting, but that's
it.

~~~
thinkling
Yeah, from the European perspective the American situation is hard to
understand. In the U.S., requiring everyone to register their address is going
to be met with cries of Big Brother and small but vocal resistance. This is
despite the fact that the vast majority of people have to declare an address
to file their tax return and/or to have a driver's license.

The other piece is that the constitution, written before direct elections were
common, explicitly leaves the execution of elections to the states, which
makes it hard for the federal government to set standards or require this kind
of registration. And it's politically intractable to fix these silly things in
the constitution.

~~~
crooked-v
It becomes much easier to understand when you realize that the modern
Republican Party opposes centralized voter ID at the national level and
supports stricter but wildly patchwork voting ID requirements at the local
level for the same reason: it makes it harder for demographics they don't like
to get acceptable IDs for voting.

For example, in 2015, North Carolina's Republican state legislature literally
looked up the forms of ID statistically most likely to be used by black people
for voting ID in the state and banned those for use in voting, while leaving
the forms of voting ID most used by white people as valid.
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/07/29/the-s...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/07/29/the-
smoking-gun-proving-north-carolina-republicans-tried-to-disenfranchise-black-
voters/)

------
kregasaurusrex
As a Franklin county resident, I see multiple groups of volunteers who have a
big push around August-October to concentrate efforts around the the Ohio
State campus and downtown areas to register voters. This includes groups
affiliated with campus political organizations, the League of Women Voters,
and groups who seek signatures to bring issues to a ballot vote. The extent to
which the article describes purging 40,000 Franklin County voters is much more
than what I'd expect than people being ineligible to vote for reasons like
leaving student voters leaving the state/county (and not updatign their
address), becoming deceased, or the recent case regarding the "use it or lose
it" rule. In my opinion there should be a formal audit that includes other
state data to correct the discrepancies in the spreadsheet of voters to be
purged.

Additionally, Ohio voter ID laws themselves can be regressive in harming
poorer populations. Many don't have access to a nearby BMV bureau to get an
ID, aren't aware of the registration deadline which has already passed, lack
utility bills in their name, or can't get a stamp for an absentee vote to be
mailed. For the the current and next ballot cycle it's important to allow
citizens to voice their opinion at the box and to register with a party for
primary votes as well.

------
specialist
TLDR: We need national, universal, automatic voter registration.

#1 Our VRDBs only contain eligible voters. Ineligible voters are removed. This
is very hard to verify, audit.

The Correct Answer is to list everyone, with a flag for eligibility, with a
separate audit log for changes. aka standard DBA best practices.

#2 We already have virtually complete rosters of every person, living or dead,
updated in near realtime. Commercial data brokers, facebook, law enforcement,
national security. We should license or repurpose these readily available data
sources for both voter database and the census.

#3 States _administer_ elections. Feds make the rules. Anyone who opposes
nationwide standards should also oppose currency, weights & measures, intra-
state trade, the entire American experiment, etc.

FWIW, some states already share data, to better track people who move,
students, overseas voters (registered at home), deaths, etc. I haven't been
active for a while, so don't know how far along those efforts are.

\--

Now about this article. Purging (caging) is the weaponization of normal data
quality efforts for partisan reasons.

Option 1: Send verification mails to inactive (but still eligible) voters.
Some sizable fraction won't be returned. USPS's UAA rate is %1, more for high
density areas. Many people just don't response (eg looks like junk mail). Then
aggressively, silently remove anyone who doesn't respond.

Option 2: Any official communication sent by election admin which is returned
(recall USPS UAA 1%) is used to purge.

Option 3: Ignore or inject data quality problems. Match voter roll against
other demographic databases, eg DMV. Purge any records for any error
whatsoever. eg Mike vs Michael. Missing commas, hyphens. Whatever works.

This is from memory, I'm sure there's other strategies used, but these are the
big ones.

Note that The Correct Answer above moots the entire problem. And would be both
cheaper and nearly error free.

------
oftenwrong
There doesn't appear to be an explanation for the purges. I can understand the
need to purge the voter lists of "dead" (literally or otherwise) entries, but
surely it would be best if the state provided an explanation for each removal?

~~~
creaghpatr
I think that's what happened here, which is how the 20% were found to be
incorrectly marked.

~~~
oftenwrong
I'm not so sure:

>And voting rights groups found an _unexplained_ tranche — around 20,000
people — who had been marked to be purged because of inactivity in future
election cycles, but were actually active voters in previous Ohio elections.

and

>The experience has left some voters like Jennifer Kulina-Lanese, a former
veterinary professional, shaken. She got a call from the League of Women
Voters shortly after it received the list, informing her that the county where
she had voted just last year had started the process for her to be purged.

>“I still don’t know why, and that’s what’s scary,” said Ms. Kulina-Lanese,
who is 45. “The idea that Franklin County was starting a process to remove me
was terrifying.”

------
blockmarker
America, the country where you can't stop massive voter fraud because every
time it is tried, one of the two parties disallow legal voters from voting.
America might be richer than Europe, but it seems to me to be much more
dysfunctional.

------
Der_Einzige
Lol all you have to do is vote by mail like all other sane States...

------
SolaceQuantum
I couldn't get past the paywall, but are there any independent watchdogs with
real political sway about this, or do we need to rely on journalism and rights
groups? The issue I have is that journalism could be intensely valid and yet
also considered so politically biased that anyone on 'the other side' would
dismiss legitimate corruption because of the source. And if a 'same side'
media doesn't cover it, it could look like a complete fabrication because what
someone understands to be legitimate news sources don't cover the
corruption...

------
etxm
How does the purging actually work? Is there sole evil republican henchman
with database access? Is there no oversight into what is actually purged?

Trapped behind the paywall.

~~~
notfromhere
The Secretary of State is Republican, and surprise, the GOP pursues policies
that restrict the ballot in a way that benefits them and disadvantages
Democrats.

Ohio is a state where the GOP holds 75% of federal House seats despite winning
only 50% of the vote. Similar effect holds for the state legislative offices

~~~
tathougies
80% of 235,000 is 188,000. Your argument is that it is okay to keep 188,000
invalid voters on the books because otherwise the republicans might win? Don't
you see how fraudulent or no-longer-active voter registrations may bring about
questions of legitimacy? 188,000 is no small number of people. Trump won Ohio
with a smaller margin.

~~~
notfromhere
If the state can't put together a list that doesn't disenfranchise one in
every five voters on it, it shouldn't bother.

Voter fraud is a non-existent issue and these mass-removals serve no basis
except as cover to remove voters that don't support their party.

~~~
tathougies
You don't think removing dead or moved voters is important? This is not about
voter fraud. This is just about keeping your records in order, and making sure
no one can raise suspicions about your electoral mechanisms.

~~~
notfromhere
Unless the state has an effective mechanism that doesn't disenfranchise
voters, and that those moved or dead voters aren't voting, the motives are
suspect.

~~~
tathougies
> the motives are suspect.

Um, no they're not. Simply wanting to maintain a clean record is a personality
difference that it is unreasonable to get suspicious over given the varying
personalities of the various secretaries of state (the one who ultimately
decides such policies).

~~~
notfromhere
It's not unreasonable when the party they're a part of has a long history of
disenfranchising voters to gain an electoral edge.

