Thread by @DavidPepper

🚨 🚨

NEW Voter purge in Ohio and a 💨 gun

A 🧵

As part of his latest round of purging of voters from the rolls, Ohio’s Secretary of State tweeted the following 👇 yesterday

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https://twitter.com/franklarose/status/1798432007019769943

What Frank doesn’t tell you is that a few years ago, when he released a list of voters “to be purged,” outside groups (not his staff) found that the list included 10,000s of voters on it in error

These voters HAD voted regularly, hadn’t moved, but were tagged to be purged

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..anyway.

Overall, it was a near 20% error rate. Shockingly high.

And again, it was only found because outside groups dug through LaRose’s list and found that enormous number of voters mistakenly listed—which was caused by a combination of errors in the process and data

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Embarrassed, LaRose blamed others for the gaffes, pointing fingers at vendors and local county boards of elections for the mistakes.

Still, despite how clear it was that the purging process was wildly inaccurate, LaRose proceeded to purge voters anyway.

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And to no one’s surprise, more voters were later found to have been purged in error. Again, identified by outside groups and lawmakers.

And right now, another purge is happening.

So why do I bring up LaRose’s tweet from above?

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Because he wrote the words that his purging process is “more accurate[]” than before.

Now that’s a hell of an admission!

Because if his 20% error rate (only detected by those outside his analytics team) is MORE accurate than before…

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…he’s admitting that, out of the millions of Ohio voters purged over the past decade+ (from lists that were never seen, and therefore never scanned for mistakes) at least 100,000s of Ohioans were purged in error.

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And THAT means we’ve suffered a major league attack on Ohio’s electorate and democracy over all this time, especially when we know that the purging process has had a disproportionate impact on voters in our major cities and communities of color.

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20% inaccuracy, in any field, is terrible.

When it comes to voters being purged at the scale we’re talking about, it’s downright stomach churning.

And LaRose’s tweet now admits it used to be even worse!

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One final thing: LaRose now touts his release of a new list as a sign of transparency.

The truth is, it’s obviously necessary when his office’s own track record has been so bad in the past—and it’s been the outside groups that catch his team’s mistakes.

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But what he again doesn’t tell you is that the way he releases these lists—without the Secretary of State’s voter identifier numbers included—he makes it far more difficult for outside groups to scan these lists quickly and broadly to find the same type of…

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…mistakes they have found in the past.

So yes, individual voters can and should go here to see if they’ve been purged:

But LaRose’s crack data team should also release the list in a way that best allows outside…

12/RegistrationReadiness.OhioSoS.gov

…groups to quickly search for and find the mass mistakes that LaRose’s team made before.

Not doing that is, once again, a bad sign about this entire, rotten process.

As if they want to make it harder to detect the egregious mistakes they made just a few years back.

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Finally, there’s an easy way to correct all this. These days, there are lists generated on a regular basis of Ohioans who have moved and Ohioans who have passed away.

Those are the triggering events to be removed from voting rolls.

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So of course use THOSE lists to keep OH’s voting rolls clean, like most states

To use a formula of infrequent voting as a proxy for who’s moved and/or passed away is simply a bad system—guaranteeing that far more people will be caught up in the purging process than should

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…be. And opening the door to all the errors Ohio has experienced.

So…check to be sure you haven’t been purged. Demand that LaRose release a list that groups can more easily search. And demand, long term, that Ohio cease purging infrequent voters once and for all.

END