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Indiana Is Purging Voters Using Software That's 99 Percent Inaccurate, Lawsuit Alleges (thedailybeast.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Daily Beast: More than 99 percent of voter fraud identified by a GOP-backed program is false, a study by Harvard, Yale, and Microsoft researchers found. Now Indiana is using the faulty program to de-register voters without warning. In July, Indiana rolled out a new law allowing county officials to purge voter registrations on the spot, based on information from a dubious database aimed at preventing voter fraud. That database, the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, identifies people in different states who share the same name and birthdate. Crosscheck has long been criticized as using vague criteria that disproportionately target people of color. Now Indiana voters who share a name and birthdate with another American can have their registrations removed without warning -- a system ripe for abuse, a new lawsuit claims. Crosscheck's premise is simple. The program aims to crack down on people "double voting" in multiple states, by listing people who share a first name, last name, and birthdate.
Indiana has used Crosscheck for years. But until July, the state had a series of checks on the program. If Crosscheck found that an Indiana resident's name and birthdate matched that of a person in another state, Indiana law used to require officials to ask that person to confirm their address, or wait until that person went two general election cycles without voting, before the person's name was purged from Indiana voter rolls. Under the state's new law, officials can scrub a voter from the rolls immediately. That's a problem for Indiana residents, particularly people of color, a Friday lawsuit from Common Cause and the American Civil Liberties Union argues.
Indiana has used Crosscheck for years. But until July, the state had a series of checks on the program. If Crosscheck found that an Indiana resident's name and birthdate matched that of a person in another state, Indiana law used to require officials to ask that person to confirm their address, or wait until that person went two general election cycles without voting, before the person's name was purged from Indiana voter rolls. Under the state's new law, officials can scrub a voter from the rolls immediately. That's a problem for Indiana residents, particularly people of color, a Friday lawsuit from Common Cause and the American Civil Liberties Union argues.
Because some names are statistically more frequent among ethnic groups: Lee among Koreans, Singh among Sikhs, etc. The article did explain this, and thereâ(TM)s lots of scholarly research on the topic
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
It mentions it in the story
"Black, Latino, and Asian Americans are statistically more likely to have the same name as someone else in the country.
“If you’re matching a John Lee with a John Lee, that surname is very common in the Korean community, for example,” Chapman said, pointing to a 2014 Al Jazeera investigation that found that 50 percent of U.S. racial minorities share the same last names, as opposed to 30 percent of white Americans."
that is assuming you were actually asking that as a question and not just being a worthless troll.
You've never heard of the birthday paradox have you?
Page seven of 2010 Census' surname data.
https://www2.census.gov/topics...
For people to lazy to look, the White population has 4.5% of the population in top 10 surnames (last names) and would require 239 surnames to make up 25% of the population.
The Black population has 13% in the top 10 surnames and only 43 surnames to make up 25% of population.
And the the Hispanic population is 16.3% for top 10 surnames and 26 surnames to cover 25% of population.
God you people are so fucking dumb. The numerator is not the only thing that counts (frequency of surname); the denominator counts too (number of people). John Smith is statistically *less frequent* as a name among white men than Maria Garcia is among Hispanic women. It just is. It's a fact. Go look it up and then crawl back into your sewer of self-righteous bigotry.
"Flamebait" being of course saying what is universally accepted as true, even by the GOP itself...
No, not really. THINK about it. people brought over as slaves were given arbitrary english names in many cases. I doubt that naming was particularly creative. Their descendants are still here and still have one of the fairly small and unimaginative last names assigned to their ancestor 150 years ago/
From TFA...
We were able to obtain more lists – Georgia and Washington state, the total number of voters adding up to more than 1 million matches – and Crosscheck's results seemed at best deeply flawed. We found that one-fourth of the names on the list actually lacked a middle-name match. The system can also mistakenly identify fathers and sons as the same voter, ignoring designations of Jr. and Sr. A whole lot of people named "James Brown" are suspected of voting or registering twice, 357 of them in Georgia alone. But according to Crosscheck, James Willie Brown is supposed to be the same voter as James Arthur Brown. James Clifford Brown is allegedly the same voter as James Lynn Brown.
Minne-snow-da: Winter is comming...
Since when? Are you a racist bigot saying minorities are too stupid to have a photo id?
No, you're the racist bigot for jumping to intelligence as the reason to not have a photo ID.
The reason minorities are less likely to have a photo ID is money. Members of minority groups are much more likely to be in poverty, especially in the strict voter ID states.
IDs cost money. Even when the ID itself is free, the documentation required to get the ID (ie. birth certificate) is not free. The offices you have to go to to get the ID and supporting documentation are only open during business hours, and minorities are more likely to be working in a job that will not let them easily take time off to go to those offices.
Then there is also the careful efforts in placing the offices where one gets IDs or supporting documentation. In states with strict voter ID, they tend to not be in places close to public transportation. Frequently there are very few offices in the state, thus requiring a long trip to get to the office, exacerbating the "need to take time off work" issue.
This is to get an ID that will only be used to vote. Since we're talking about people in poverty, they are less much likely to own a car, so a driver's license is a waste of money.
Oddly enough, easy to get IDs like hunting licenses are accepted in certain strict-ID states, but student IDs are not. On an unrelated subject, the demographics of who has a hunting license vs who has a student ID miraculously happens to favor one party.
Oddly enough, the poor prioritize paying for necessities like food over the cost of getting an ID, even when getting that ID risks their job.
Meanwhile, you probably already have a car and thus already have ID that works.
You had a birth certificate issued, you have a SSN, you pay taxes
And if a birth certificate, SSN card or copy of your 1040 were accepted as ID, you'd have a point.
Unfortunately, those are not accepted as ID. So you have to pay to get a photo ID.
Even if the state makes the ID itself free, getting a copy of the supporting documentation is not free. For example, to get a certified copy of my birth certificate via the not-at-all-screwing-the-public contractor that allows me to order one online would cost $80. If I can wait for a mail-in form to be processed and then the response returned, I only have to pay $50.
And that's just one supporting document. To get the ID, I have to have more than one supporting document.
And if you're not paying for utilities where you live (say, living with a family member like many people in poverty do), then it is nearly impossible to get sufficient supporting documentation.
Further, strict ID states have ensured that the offices to get those IDs, as well as the supporting documentation, are only open during business hours. People who are poor tend to work jobs that will not let them randomly take time off to go get an ID.
And even further, there has been a lot of work done in strict ID states to locate the ID offices away from public transportation. And to significantly limit the number of offices that can issue such IDs, ensuring an even longer period of time has to be taken off in order to get an ID.
in the US you can't seem to get your groceries without a car
Not even remotely true.
First, a whole lot of people live in cities. Especially the poor. That makes getting your groceries without a car quite possible.
Second, in places where that is not possible, poor people rely on friends or family members to drive them. Despite this, they still have the right to vote.
Btw, you know what's a fantastic way to get deported if you're in the US illegally? Go to a polling place. Lots of people, potentially law enforcement presence. They have to guess at what name to use, and if they guess wrong (someone who already voted) they get arrested and thrown out of the country. That's why undocumented workers don't actually try to vote. It would be incredibly stupid.
How is the right not to vote more important the the right to vote without obstruction, and instead being enabled to vote by requirement? Democracy requires participation, that is the price of it. If you want government without representation you have a number of dictatorial options.
Yes. Because slaves were given the surnames of their owners, which were then passed on to their descendants, there is less variety in last names among the African-American community. You will see very few German, Italian, Scandinavian, etc. last names in the African-American community.
Since just about 80% of black Americans are the descendants of slaves, that's a big population of people who have the same surnames. Remember, only about 1.5% of the US population owned slaves at the height of slavery. That's a very small pool of names start from.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Perhaps, but far from unique. How about adding a unique identifier, like their Social Security Number perhaps?
That's a great idea ... why has no one thought of that before. ;)
From the study cited in TFA: "Crosscheck’s data ... contain, when available, the last four digits of each registration’s Social Security number (SSN4)." So they used that to compare name/DOB pairings (the proposed criterion for removal) where SSN4 was available in the data. Thus:
Using data provided to Iowa in 2012, we identified 1,483 [name/DOB] pairings with complete SSN4 information in which both registration records were used to vote in 2012. In more than 99.5% of these pairings, the flagged registrations had different SSN4s, supporting our intuition that our model estimates an upper bound on the number of double votes cast in 2012.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
Actually, there was just a story about this on This American Life, this last weekend. A statistical study of the expected occurrence rate of the same name/birthdate across the entire US voter registration base.
https://www.thisamericanlife.o...
The details in short...
- There are 3 million name/birthday matches across all states (roughly what DT/GOP claims are fraudulent votes)..
- Removing bad data (i.e. no birthday so use a default day of Jan 1, etc.) reduces that to 750,000 matches.
- Using a simple expected match based on statistical distribution (the 1 in 23), shows an expected 720,000 matches of different people in different states with the same name/birthdate.
- Expanding the above to include common naming practices and oddities (i.e. Naming children "June" born in the summer, naming children "Carol" around the holidays, etc.) results in another 10,000 expected matches.
- Going back to the "bad data" problem, the researchers then went back and reviewed the actual voting signature roles compared against the database reported voters who showed up... which removed another 20,000 matches nationally.
That leaves... 720,000+10,000 statistically expected name/date matches, plus 20,000 statistically found database errors, out of 750,000 "double voters".... i.e. ZERO actual double votes.
The claim is that more minorities have common names than Caucasians apparently, although I haven't seen strong data to support that claim. I do buy the argument though because minorities do have a lot of common surnames at least.
According to the 2010 US Census the most common Surnames at least in the US are Smith, Johnson, Williams, Brown, Jones, Garcia, Miller, Davis, Rodriguez, Martinez, Hernandez, Lopez, Gonzalez, Wilson, and Anderson. 6 of those are Spanish: Garcia, Rodriguez, Martinez, Hernandez, Lopez, and Gonzalez. I am not sure if any of the others are mostly minority. The fastest growing surnames are also minorities: Zhang, Li, Ali, Liu, Khan, Vazquez, Wang, Huang, Lin, Singh, Chen, Bautista, Velazquez, Patel, and Wu. I don't see Census data on common both first and last names.
https://www.census.gov/newsroo...
I haven't seen numbers on Crosscheck purges by race, but apparently African Americans and minorities are heavily represented.
Crossheck is apparently very partisan where purges are about 50% democrats, 29% republicans, and 21% independent/other. There is plenty of data to show that Crosscheck is partisan.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/u...
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