In Texas, 300,000 Eligible Voters Targeted In Purge

[jaxx]

In Texas, 300,000 Eligible Voters Targeted In Purge
By Guest Blogger on Jun 4, 2012 at 11:59 am

Florida voters are not the only ones who should be worried about whether their state has erroneously purged them from the list of eligible voters; the state of Texas also has a voter purge policy that erroneously targets eligible voters. The Houston Chronicle reports that, in a two year period, 300,000 eligible voters were warned that they may be removed from Texas voter rolls. Texas voter registration rates are already among the lowest in the nation, and one out of every 10 Texas voters’ registration is currently suspended. The almost 1.5 million voters who are suspended could be purged if they fail to vote in two consecutive general elections.

Texas has responded to state and federal laws that require voter rolls be reviewed to remove duplicates and ineligible voters by creating an error riddled process:

<..> In the two years between November 2008 and November 2010, over 300,000 valid voters were warned that they may be removed from Texas voter rolls. Eligible voters were threatened with removal most often because they failed to respond to generic form letters or because they were mistaken for someone else, which is even more worrisome given that there is a high incidence of voters sharing a name in Texas, particularly among Hispanics. Across Texas, 21% of voters who received purge letters later proved that they were eligible to vote.

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/06...-in-purge/

Damn those GOP ghouls.

[sandnsea]

I think all states have a system like this. Oregon sends cards to all voters. If you don't send the card back, you're taken off the list. If this isn't done, you end up with complaints about dead voters on the rolls or more voters on the rolls than who live in the precinct. In Oregon, I believe we do it by county and it's very straight-forward.

There are a couple of differences in Florida. One is that they are targeting immigrants which is completely against anything motor voter requires, they want to go into DHS database even. The second, is that they use these massive databases to try to eliminate voters. Texas has done that too, I don't know if it's included in the purge in the article. It's the use of these databases that is causing the problem and is not part of motor voter.