Indiana Is Purging Voters Using Software That's 99 Percent Inaccurate, Lawsuit Alleges (thedailybeast.com) 509
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.
Not a bug but a feature. (Score:5, Insightful)
More than 99 percent of voter fraud identified by a GOP-backed program is false
So then for the GOP it’s working 100% as designed. Sounds like a feature not a bug in their perspective.
Re:Not a bug but a feature. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not a bug but a feature. (Score:4, Insightful)
For the life of me, I can't imagine how this would affect "voters of color" more than it would any lighter skinned race.
Heck, with the colorful and imaginative names that blacks are giving their kids these days, I'd have thought that it would NOT target them, since they use so many uncommon spellings and uncommon names?
I'd have thought you'd have a whole lot more "Robert Cooper" vs "Shaquillia Jackson" born on any given date?
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Parents often name their babies after some event that happened on their birth date. Perhaps certain groups in society are more disposed to this practice?
Just wondering...
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This lawsuit is about potential abuse, there is no evidence of actual abuse, and its not clearly stated exactly how
Re:Not a bug but a feature. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not the "kids" that are having their voting rights revoked, it's the adults.
There are a lot of black Robert Coopers. I happen to know one, who's a professor at UCLA and another who has been recruited by Florida State to play defensive tackle next year. Both are of voting age.
Re:Not a bug but a feature. (Score:5, Insightful)
While I too would question the validity of something just using name and birthdate as identifying factors.... For the life of me, I can't imagine how this would affect "voters of color" more than it would any lighter skinned race. Heck, with the colorful and imaginative names that blacks are giving their kids these days, I'd have thought that it would NOT target them, since they use so many uncommon spellings and uncommon names? I'd have thought you'd have a whole lot more "Robert Cooper" vs "Shaquillia Jackson" born on any given date?
What's that word for when you have stereotypes and incorrect assumptions based on race, don't bother investigating whether they're true, and they end up with you not recognizing/acknowledging that a racial group ends up being treated disproportionately unfairly?
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For the life of me, I can't imagine how this would affect "voters of color" more than it would any lighter skinned race.
Minority groups tend to have a smaller pool of last names. That leads to more name collisions.
Heck, with the colorful and imaginative names that blacks are giving their kids these days, I'd have thought that it would NOT target them, since they use so many uncommon spellings and uncommon names?
Unusual names are still not common. There's about a dozen men named something like "John" for a unique name you can think of.
Re:Not a bug but a feature. (Score:5, Informative)
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... [census.gov]
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... [nbcnews.com]
Re: Not a bug but a feature. (Score:5, Insightful)
It does not automatically kick off the voter from the rolls, it is at the discretion of the registrar. If the registrar suspects "Jose Sanchez" as suspicious but doesn't blink when seeing "John Smith", then it will disproportionately affect some ethnicities and not others.
Re:Still not a problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Still not a problem (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't know you've been purged until you show up to vote. So you vote won't count but you may get a provisional ballot. But the very fact of asking for one makes people suspicious that you're one of the mythical hordes of people bused in to sway elections, so good luck getting counted that way. Then in the intervening two years, you accidentally get removed again...
Actual fraud is rare. This is solving a problem that does not exist.
Re: Still not a problem (Score:5, Insightful)
a) good for you
b) you're spreading bullshit
Re:Not a bug but a feature. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Not a bug but a feature. (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems that 1% of these turn out to be fraud when checked.
For a definition of fraud that includes moving to another state and never voting in the old state again even though you are still technically registered. This definition of fraud takes in Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, and many other members of Trump's administration. Really, to call it fraud, you need to have other evidence that they were trying to be sneaky about it - like changing their gender on one of the registrations.
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US National Registration Required (Score:4, Insightful)
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When/how do you propose amending the first Amendment? No biggie, I mean, it's all that stands in your way.
Remember, the courts have generally took a dim view on compulsory (forced) speech... which voting would almost certainly qualify as.
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Re:US National Registration Required (Score:5, Insightful)
That's what US right-wingers are probably scared of.
EVERYONE in the US should be scared of this. It would force people who give absolutely zero shit about the process to vote. It would increase the effect of political advertising because the pool of people who would vote based on name recognition or sound bites would be vastly larger. It would increase the likelyhood of vote fraud because everyone would be registered, so it would be much easier to pick names of people who won't vote to use fraudulently. It would also increase the opportunity for spouses or employers or others to vote on someone's behalf because people who don't give a single damn about voting would be sent a ballot -- in states with vote-by-mail.
No, forcing people to vote is not the right way to solve any problem.
Re:US National Registration Required (Score:5, Insightful)
It would increase the likelyhood of vote fraud because everyone would be registered, so it would be much easier to pick names of people who won't vote to use fraudulently.
How do you NOT vote if it's compulsory? Come to think of it, how is everyone being automatically registered to vote NOT a huge problem in my country? :-p You Americans seem to have awfully peculiar problems.
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How do you NOT vote if it's compulsory?
By not voting. How is any law violated? Given the number of ways a ballot can be lost between the voter and the election office, how do you prosecute?
Come to think of it, how is everyone being automatically registered to vote NOT a huge problem in my country?
I don't know what country you live in, so I can't tell you. If it's the US, it has to do with some small concepts like "freedom" and "Constitution" and "First Amendment" stuff. Otherwise, who knows?
You Americans seem to have awfully peculiar problems.
Yes, we (the USA, not "Americans") are a different country, which is not a bad thing.
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Through individual registration at each polling station.
I have no idea what this sentence fragment refers to.
What is a "polling station"? What is "individual registration"? Here in Oregon, everyone who gets a driver's license is automatically registered. There is nothing "individual" about the process. And we vote by mail, so there is no "polling station".
Advantages include requiring time off legal obligation
Simply saying "obligatory voting" does not imply "time off legal obligation". Even in places where there are polls, the polls are open long after the normal workday ends, and there is absentee for anyone who
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Your fantasy of arrest is what fuels your stupid rant,
If the state makes something mandatory, it also provides a punishment. Fine, arrest, whatever, the concept is that you think you are going to punish people for not voting when there are any number of reasons why that is impractical at best and unethical at worst.
Compulsory voting is enforced with fines.
You're ignoring the concepts because you don't like one specific word. It doesn't matter if it is a fine or jail time, it is punishing people for exercising what should be a basic human right, the right not to vote.
Re:US National Registration Required (Score:5, Informative)
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If it's the US, it has to do with some small concepts like "freedom" and "Constitution" and "First Amendment" stuff. Otherwise, who knows?
I would think that a citizen being allowed to vote implicitly entails more freedom than having to beg the state to graciously allow poor old me to vote before I get to vote. And considering constitutions, this is one of its articles around here.
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I would think that a citizen being allowed to vote
Well, there's a big difference between whatever country you live in and the US. "Allowed to vote" is a clue.
implicitly entails more freedom than having to beg the state to graciously allow poor old me to vote before I get to vote.
Another difference, it appears. "Beg the state" is a clue.
Having the freedom to ignore the process is more freedom than being forced to vote even if you don't care. Making it mandatory for people who already vote changes nothing for them. Putting a legal obligation and penalties on those who choose not to is a big difference for them, and will simply result in a lot of people who know nothing at all
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No, they don't check if you submitted a ballot.
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Apparently there's a huge benefit in having mandatory voting in Australia because candidates can't pander exclusively to the base in an attempt to get out the vote, as it is now in the US. I'm all for trying mandatory voting and seeing how it would change things.
http://freakonomics.com/podcas... [freakonomics.com]
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If voting is mandatory does that mean violating the secret ballot, or do I just have to show up? Does it mean I have to vote yes or no every time a local restaurant wants an exemption to allow Sunday liquor sales, regardless of whether or not I live in the immediate neighborhood? Choose between two city council candidates I've never heard of and never spoken to? Vote yea or nay for every state constitutional amendment, even when I'm not decided on what I think is best? What's the penalty if I forget to
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white's a color, too (Score:2)
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Actually, in the strictest (hue) sense, white is the absence of color. I know that's not what you meant, but I had that fact drilled into my head at 8 years old by an art teacher who smoked way too much pot, and I've never forgotten it.
Actually, you're wrong.
Color is something we perceive based on the wavelength(s) of light incident upon our retinas. It's an additive system.
Subtractive systems that children use are the opposite and represent a secondary effect, one step removed from the phenomena of color vision.
So, in the "strictest" sense, you're wrong.
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Walter is talking about "hue" which is not a physical description of colour and has more relevance in an artistic domain. However even in the physical sense it can depend on what the "colour" is being attributed to... if you are talking about the light received by your sensor/receptors (alternately the object's or light source's appearance) then white is indeed a uniform mixture of the visible spectrum (or a mix of narrow bands red blue and green as a hack exploiting our eye's limited cone receptors i.e LED
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Walter is talking about "hue" which is not a physical description of colour
You mean HSV isn't a thing? And of course it's a physical description of color, as much as "red" or "Hershey Squirts Brown" is.
The only objective physical description of "color" would be frequency or wavelength and perhaps intensity (due to how it affects how we perceive things).
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I'm thinking of mixing colors, not materials that reflect colors.
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Clearly, the prism takes in a rainbow, sucks all the color out of it, and spits out a boring white beam.
Also it reverses how shadows work.
I thought it was illegal immigrants.... (Score:2)
absolutely easy to check if this works (Score:2)
All that Indiana needs to check is how many people within the state have their dmv id having same birthdate and same name. Since US population is about 50 times larger, there will be 50 times more people across all states with the same name. So they can identify how many valid people they are removing. By comparing with total they are removing, they can find the accuracy of their system.
Profiling or not (Score:2)
Re: Erm (Score:5, Informative)
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
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The fact is they are purging the voter rolls for no good reason.
No, they are doing it for a good reason, but the data is not sufficient to the task. Its lack of "sufficient" applies across the board, to John Smith and Chan'e'qua N'Gboro both.
Re: Erm (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re: Erm (Score:5, Informative)
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/
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Like Smith or Jones, you say? Both quite common surnames among Englishmen and Welshmen (respectively). Or Baker. Barber. Cook. Farmer
Yes, a lot of people, black, white, everything in between have "profession" surnames from back in the day.
Note that my own last name isn't a "profession" surname, it's a "location" surname. I used to think it was rare, till I found myself in an airport in northern England and discovered it was (relatively) common in that particular place....
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Somewhat like that, only moreso.
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people brought over as slaves were given arbitrary english names in many cases.
As were many people from countries with difficult-to-pronounce or spell monikers given simple names by the immigration officials when they got off the boat. It wasn't an exclusive problem at the time.
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Now, consider what might have constituted "Hard to pronounce", the fact that many slaves HAD no last name, and how much say a slave might get in what they're called.
Re:Erm (Score:5, Informative)
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And how many of those have the same birthdate and have been independently verified as being different people? Without that information the database cannot be said to be stopping hundreds of thousands of Jose Garcia's from voting.
Re:Erm (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Great. So how many of those browns have the same birthdate? And did they do a similar analysis of white people to see whether or not the same occurence is happening there?
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I've got the most 'basic bitch' white boy name in the world, I swear. There are hundreds of people with my exact same first and last name in every state of this nation. Even if you add my middle name, you'll still find dozens of matches in a state like California or Florida. Add date of birth? I've had at least one exact match (first, middle, last, DOB) like that while going to physical therapy. Now I'm going to have to double check that I am properly registered to vote, even though I do not live in In
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Possibly, but I can't find any sources that even attempt to debunk this particular article.
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"Vague" as in "necessary but not sufficient" criteria.
Re:Erm (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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But there are less minorities than there are white people (duh) which means they're less likely to have the same birthdate than white people with the same name. So it cannot be said they are more likely to be excluded than white people
Re:Erm (Score:5, Informative)
https://www2.census.gov/topics... [census.gov]
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.
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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.
Don't worry, it sounds like the officials have some discretion so not every flagged name will be immediately crossed off.
If some officials happen to cross off minorities with much greater frequency than whites... well I guess that's unfortunate but surely not an entirely desired and expected outcome.
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I'll answer your 2nd question first:
We don't know what criteria uses to put people in its database -- that makes it vague. Sure name and birthdate are mentioned, but its not exactly defined in depth how those are used.
For example, if you thought John Wesley Washington and John Arthur Washington were two different names, according to crosscheck, you'd be wrong. It doesn't count middle names or intitials.
Additionally stuff like John Smith Sr., John Smith Jr., and John Smith III, are all considered name match
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That is what I thought. And all this is due to states *refusing* to provide Social Security Numbers in their publicly available data rolls.
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Because having a publicly available database of names with social security numbers would have absolutely no consequences at all.
Oh wait, it would. [bottomlineinc.com]
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They can be more affected due to some specific name or last name distribution among population. For example over 39% of Vietnamese have last name Nguyen which greatly increases chance of collision. In comparison even the most popular "white" last names in US (e.g. Smith) don't reach 1% of population.
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Can someone please explain to me how "people of color" are more likely to have the same name and birthdate as people in other states?
Blacks have less variety in their last names. When slavery ended in 1865, most freedmen took the name of the plantation owner where they worked. At the time, the states of the ex-Confederacy were mostly of English or Scottish ancestry. So blacks have names like Smith and Jones, but very rarely Kowalski or Schmidt.
Asians and Hispanics are also much more likely than whites to have name collisions.
From the Wikipedia page [wikipedia.org]: "white voters are underrepresented by 8 percent, African Americans are overrepresente
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how is "same name and birthdate" considered to be "vague criteria"?
It is not uncommon to have many instances of multiple voters with the same first and last name and date of birth within a state wide population. So comparing records nationwide is sure to generate many false positives. And if the comparison is as simplistic as advertised, and does not account for a voter's status in either jurisdiction, you will likely have many cases where the voter is the same person and their status may not be eligible for their previous address (e.g. status may be "moved from jurisdict
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Can someone please explain to me how "people of color" are more likely to have the same name and birthdate as people in other states?
There might be various reasons. Maybe people of color are more likely to have collisions in names/birthdays for some reason. I'm not sure and I haven't RTFA.
Sometimes, when they say it disproportionately impacts people of color, it's not necessarily that it happens more likely in those populations, but that those populations have a harder time dealing with it when it happens. Like maybe it happens equally in all populations, but minority populations have less access to challenge their de-registration, f
Re: Erm (Score:2, Informative)
You've never heard of the birthday paradox have you?
Re: Erm (Score:4, Interesting)
Itâ(TM)s closer to 1 in 23 for a birth date but that doesnâ(TM)t work if you include birth year.
So statistically speaking, if you have 100 people with the exact same First, Middle and Last Name born in the same year, on average 4-5 people per common name pair across the US will share the same birthday.
Not sure how this pans out across 300M people with a somewhat uneven birth year distribution but I highly doubt a few hundred votes are going to matter.
Re: Erm (Score:5, Informative)
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... [thisamericanlife.org]
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.
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Ooooh exciting! Apparently, there's a "correct" way to spell names! Who decides that, pray tell?
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Your right. The criteria is bad, but there is no evidence that minorities are being excluded more often than white people.
Re: Erm (Score:2)
Because then they would find that voter fraud is more common than we imagine. I know for a fact there are some people (mostly GOP voting older people) that register in multiple counties. These people donâ(TM)t consider it fraud because they have a presence in those counties (perhaps through family or property) and from what I understand it is commonly encouraged to do so by get-out-the-vote representatives.
I donâ(TM)t understand the complaint either, I do understand statistics and I will grant the
Re:Erm (Score:4, Informative)
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 [dropbox.com] 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.
Re:Erm (Score:5, Insightful)
Because the Democrats won't provide one in Blue States (and in some states, it's not a part of the dataset to begin with, which to me, proves the Republican point that Democrats are into voter fraud).
I, on the other hand, consider evidence of fraudulent votes to be evidence of "voter fraud".
But I guess if you can't find any evidence of fraudulent votes then you need to take whatever kame argument is available to justify disenfranchising legal voters.
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What would you use? Seems like name and DOB isn't that great, either.
Re: Erm (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re: Erm (Score:4)
Oh fuck off. This is exactly how my son got disenfranchised.
Tighten the ID laws, have the place to get ID 50 miles away with no public transit and charge $70 for that ID.
My wife, they even got more creative. Tell her she is still registered in the same name that her government ID is in and she has used for at least a dozen elections and then change it so when she shows up to vote, her ID is no good.
Re: Erm (Score:5, Insightful)
That's how populists get voted in: their simple worldview is easier to explain.
While you're still trying to explain all the subtleties about the jobs market, they just shouted "mexicans out means more new jobs!" and "climate change is fake news!". Now you have two stories to tell while they're already on number three to seven. That' race is hard to win.
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Re: Erm (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Exactly what has that got to do with having a photo-id?
So, according to you, in a state that requires photo-id to register or vote, instead of actually having a photo-id, I can just open up a government database, there and then, point to the entry that describes me and say: "see, I don't need no stinkin photo-id, I'm in your database, bitches!"
Somehow
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What they did to my wife was showed she was still registered in her maiden name that she has used for over a dozen elections and is the name that she has on all her ID and bills and then magically changed it on voting day to her married name. And of course, the marriage license she brought along was not good enough.
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You keep saying ripe. I don't think it means what you think it means.
This is the second article in a short time with this issue. Are we trending a new lose/loose issue?
Nothing wrong with "ripe for abuse". Now, if TFS had said, "ripe with abuse" (instead of "rife with abuse"), you'd have a point.
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I guess they're just as likely to have the same birthdate, but more likely to have the same firstname+lastname combo, possibly due to culture differences. Smaller specific name pool?
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They can be more affected due to some specific name or last name distribution among population. For example over 39% of Vietnamese have last name Nguyen which greatly increases chance of collision. In comparison even the most popular "white" last names in US (e.g. Smith) don't reach 1% of population.
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It doesn't matter what the most popular name is. What matters is the total number of people affected.
If "Smith" counts for 1%, but Johnson, etc. also count for large chunks, the odds that any given person will have a first+last match with another is still substantial. People aren't matching against X Smith, they're matching against X Y. Smith being a common value for Y means nothing.
Similarly, pointing to 39% Nguyen is also pointing to 61% NOT Nguyen. What are the distributions of the NOT Nguyen names?
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Are "people of color" more likely than average to have the same name and birthdate?
Yes.
Data is in a post upthread: https://tech.slashdot.org/comm... [slashdot.org]
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Except there are statistics to prove the claim.
Re: particularly people of color ???? (Score:2)
I would call CPS for verbal abuse. If theyâ(TM)re verbally abusive outside, imagine how they are once they get inside.
Obviously given their political status they wonâ(TM)t be prosecuted but at least attempt.
Mostly agree (Score:2)
I've got no problem with most of this. But with automatic registration--provided it is for citizens only--you'd still need to verify that the person voting is a) who they say they are, and b) legally a resident of the district in which they are voting. Voter registration is just as much about swearing under penalty of perjury that you live at the address provided and are thus in a particular district, e.g., for House of Representatives or statehouse or city council elections as it is about "signing up to vo
Re:This is a huge problem for me. (Score:4)
About 4 million kids are born in the US every year. The distribution of birthdays is probably not uniform, but 4M / 365 is about 11,000 kids per day, give or take. Birth DATE includes the year you're born, so you probably don't share a birthdate (vs birthday) with millions of Americans. You might share a birthday with something close to 1M Americans, given US population is about 325 million (325 million / 365 is about 890,000).
Worldwide population is about 7.6B, so you probably have a common birthday with some 20M people. World population increase is about 83M per year, so about 225K people worldwide share a birthdate.
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I forgot that so many slashdotters are named Anonymous Coward...