Jim Crow returns

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There are 6,951,484 names on the target list of the 28 states in the Crosscheck group; each of them represents a suspected double voter whose registration has now become subject to challenge and removal. According to a 2013 presentation by Kobach to the National Association of State Election Directors, the program is a highly sophisticated voter-fraud-detection system. The sample matches he showed his audience included the following criteria: first, last and middle name or initial; date of birth; suffixes; and Social Security number, or at least its last four digits.

That was the sales pitch. But the actual lists show that not only are middle names commonly mismatched and suffix discrepancies ignored, even birthdates don?t seem to have been taken into account. Moreover, Crosscheck deliberately ignores Social Security mismatches, in the few instances when the numbers are even collected. The Crosscheck instructions for county election officers state, ?Social Security numbers are included for verification; the numbers might or might not match.?

In practice, all it takes to become a suspect is sharing a first and last name with a voter in another state. Typical ?matches? identifying those who may have voted in both Georgia and Virginia include:

Kevin Antonio Hayes of Durham, North Carolina, is a match for a man who voted in Alexandria, Virginia, as Kevin Thomas Hayes.

John Paul Williams of Alexandria is supposedly the same man as John R. Williams of Atlanta, Georgia.

Robert Dewey Cox of Marietta, Georgia is matched with Robert Glen Cox of Springfield, Virginia.

Mark Swedlund is a specialist in list analytics whose clients have included eBay, AT&T and Nike. At Al Jazeera America?s request, he conducted a statistical review of Crosscheck?s three lists of suspected double voters.

According to Swedlund, ?It appears that Crosscheck does have inherent bias to over-selecting for potential scrutiny and purging voters from Asian, Hispanic and Black ethnic groups. In fact, the matching methodology, which presumes people in other states with the same name are matches, will always over-select from groups of people with common surnames.? Swedlund sums up the method for finding two-state voters ? simply matching first and last name ? as ?ludicrous, just crazy.?

Helen Butler is the executive director of Georgia?s Coalition for the Peoples? Agenda, which conducts voter drives in minority communities. Any purge list that relies on name matches will contain a built-in racial bias against African-Americans, she says, because ?We [African-Americans] took our slave owners? names.? The search website PeopleSmart notes that 86,020 people in the United States have the name John Jackson. And according to the 2000 U.S. Census, which is the most recent data set, 53 percent of Jacksons are African-American.

Yet demands to purge lists of double voters have reached a histrionic volume. In April of this year, former presidential counselor Dick Morris told Fox TV audiences that ?probably over a million people that voted twice in [the 2012] election. This is the first concrete evidence we?ve ever had of massive voter fraud.?

Crosscheck instructs each participating state to send a postcard or letter to suspected double voters, requiring them to restate and verify their name and address, sign the card and return it. While this seems a benign way to save one?s voting rights, the problem, says voter advocate Butler, is that few people are likely to notice, fill out and return such a card. She reviewed the one being sent out in Georgia, which she says ?looks like a piece of trashy mail that you get every day that you just throw away.?

Al Jazeera America reached one of ERIC?s creators, the Pew Trusts? David Becker, in Baltimore. He is dismissive of Crosscheck?s claim of finding legions of fraudulent double voters. Even of ERIC?s own lists, he says, ?99.999 percent of those people would not be thinking of voting twice in two states.? He adds, ?There?s no widespread evidence of voting in two states. There?s a real problem of millions of people registered in more than one state ? though this is hardly an indication of fraud.?

What pushed North Carolina to use an ex-FBI agent in tracking down alleged double voters through the Crosscheck list? Al Jazeera America traced the state?s involvement in Crosscheck to lobbying by a group of self-proclaimed vote-fraud trackers, the Voter Integrity Project. Al Jazeera America met the vote-theft vigilantes at their offices in a strip mall in Raleigh.

VIP?s director, Jay DeLancy, exhibits a stern and sincere concern over keeping fraudsters off the voter rolls. His group has garnered much media attention for exposing suspected voting by the dead, by foreigners, by felons and, now, by double voters. This has made him a welcome guest at Tea Party events. Unfortunately for DeLancy and VIP, not a single zombie, alien, criminal or body double has, in fact, been captured based on their accusations. Nevertheless, DeLancy says his group did convince the Republican leadership of North Carolina?s legislature to adopt Crosscheck and hire FBI agent Stuber.

DeLancy says he is on the trail of an unnamed double voter who is ?currently on the run.? The unnamed man is, he admits, a traveling salesman, so ?on the run? may mean ?on the job.?

One of those suspected of voting twice lives a five-minute walk from the VIP offices. When confronted with his name on the Crosscheck list as a voter in both Fairfax, Virginia and in Raleigh, North Carolina, Robert Blackman Finnel Jr. confesses that he indeed once lived and voted in Virginia. But, he protests, ?I swear on a stack of Bibles? that he was not in, nor voted in, that state in the 2012 election. His oath is in doubt, however, as, from his wheelchair, the senior-home resident did not appear to be able to lift more than one Bible at a time.

My name was mistakenly crosschecked with a felon last year, and my voting rights were revoked. I had to go to the Virginia State Police in Richmond to get fingerprinted, in order to prove I was not involved with the case of a man across the state who shared my name. I then had to go to the local election board to have my voting rights restored. The amount of work I had to put in for this atrocious system's mistake was absurd.

Last time I read about this, when actually looking at who was excluded, the far majority excluded were white, and that did not even include "Hispanic white people".

The total number of people excluded, and the race of each one is known. How does that crucial , definitive piece of evidence get left out of the article? I will try to find it on another topic where I researched it.

EDIT: I could not find the actual data anywhere.

Actually, it didn't leave it out. If you look, there is a bar that shows who was excluded, who were mostly white people. However, on a proportionate basis, a racial minority person was more likely to be affected than a white person, given the much larger white population.

The list of double voters are largely people registered in two states. It is possible that there are many duplicates on the list. Thus, there is no data on a per person basis. And it is very possible that there is no bias towards minorities.

Actually, that was addressed. Many African-Americans' ancestors, after they were freed, took their master's names; 53% of Jacksons in this country are black, for example. The same was true with names among Asian-Americans, where they are much more likely to share surnames than white people are. Minorities have the more common names and so are more likely to be ensnared in this.