Thread by @jennycohn1

“Ohio nearly purged 10,000 voters who ended up casting 2020 ballots” by @srl

In purging voters, Rs assume that voter inactivity means they moved. Shouldn’t they at least have to double check the USPS notice of change of address list first? 1/ theguardian.com/us-news/2021/j…

In Ohio, tens of thousands of mistakes have been caught in recent years, but only bc the state made the planned purge list public, which allowed public interest groups to comb over the faulty list & alert the state to errors. I highly doubt most states do this. 2/

“Months ahead of a scheduled purge in 2019, the state released a list of 235,000 people who were set to be removed from the rolls. Voting rights groups found more than 40,000 eligible voters included on it and were able to prevent them from being removed.” 3/

“A vendor who works with county boards of elections [ES&S] mistakenly flagged more than 1,600 people for purging from the Ohio rolls of eligible voters, marking the second time in three weeks that problems have surfaced with the list...” 8/25/19 4/
dispatch.com/news/20190825/…

“Secretary of State Frank LaRose's office said it discovered problems around Aug. 16 in counties that use DIMS, a system now serviced by Election Systems & Software based in Omaha, Nebraska.” 5/

“Using a more recent voter list, LaRose's office found 1,461 registrations that should not have been flagged for cancellation.” 6/

In 2019, OH “lifted the veil on its voter purging system for the 1st time....What the organizations found shocked officials & residents. More than 40k ...names had been wrongly added to the purge list by county...officials or...election software error.” 7/ pewtrusts.org/en/research-an…

“While the [Ohio] experiment was seemingly a success, it left voting rights advocates, like Freda Levenson, legal director at the ACLU of Ohio, with lingering concerns. How could a state’s registration system produce such severe errors, she wondered?” 8/

“A secretary of state, she said, shouldn’t have to rely on crowdsourcing to effectively manage voter data.” 9/

“It’s really scary because this is the first list that we got to examine,” Levenson said. “What does it say about all those lists in the past? How many of those were wrong? How many were wrongfully purged?” 10/

Election officials can properly purge you if you move it die. But Republicans purge you if you have not voted in a few elections & fail to return a postcard, reasoning that this MIGHT mean you moved. How dumb is that? 11/ ajc.com/news/state--re…

12/ Before the 2020 election, Georgia reportedly purged 198k voters as having moved, even though they were NOT on the USPS change of address list. It was @Greg_Palast who discovered this. The ACLU sued the state, but I’m unclear what happened w/ the case. democracynow.org/2021/1/5/greg_…

13/ According to this report, federal law required that GA officials check the USPS change of address list before purging voters as having possibly moved, but GA officials seemed to have skipped that.