As the Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, the co-chair of Donald Trump’s voter suppression commission, has set up a program called Crosscheck to look for people committing voter fraud by voting in multiple places. Crosscheck has some serious problems, to say the least—at least if the goal is to respect legal voter registrations (which is not Kobach’s goal). Crosscheck’s problems are so big, in fact, that Indiana’s Republican Secretary of State Connie Lawson, who is also a member of the voter suppression commission, has put serious back-up measures in place to avoid disenfranchising people who are following the law:
As she explained to the Committee on House Administration, Indiana has layered its own software on top of Crosscheck’s findings to weed out the false positives generated by Crosscheck. “As it regards the Crosscheck program [in which] Indiana participates, we developed a software program where we have a confidence level,” she said. Lawson described software that assesses each Crosscheck match by using additional data to assign points for matches, including a voter’s driver’s license number and Social Security number. (Crosscheck looks only at voters’ first name, last name, and birthdate—hardly enough data to distinguish among millions of voters.) If the points don’t add up to a certain threshold, then the state doesn’t forward those names to the county election officials who are responsible for removing ineligible people from the rolls. [...]
After the hearing, Lawson confirmed to Mother Jones that Indiana had adopted the software because Crosscheck was generating false positives. “We had never done it before we entered Crosscheck,” she said. “We got a lot of what we were afraid might be false positives, so we decided that the county clerks couldn’t possibly work all this information, so we decided to develop a confidence level so that we wouldn’t be sending all this information to the counties for them to go through.” She added, “I think that they would have caught these false positives themselves, but we didn’t want to make them go through all that when they were already busy running elections.”
How much are you willing to bet that there is no one in the country with your name and your birthdate? If you were in charge of running elections, how much would you be willing to bet that no two people in the Crosscheck system had the same name and birthdate? Considering that:
in 2016, researchers at Stanford, Harvard, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania found that on voters lists Crosscheck had sent to the state of Iowa before the 2012 and 2014 elections, “200 legitimate voters may be impeded from voting for every double vote stopped.” (Minorities are at a particularly high risk of being erroneously flagged since they’re likelier to share common last names.)
But Kris Kobach wants to bet the entire nation’s voting systems on that. Or, in reality, he’s betting on getting an advantage for Republicans because of the last sentence in that passage. It’s a good thing there are even some Republicans who aren’t willing to go all the way with him—but Donald Trump is not one of them, and that should scare us all.
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