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As Texas joins Georgia, Florida and 11 other states in new voter suppression laws this year, it’s worth considering some of the voter suppression over the last 15 years.
From 2005 til 2019 the notorious ‘Crosscheck’ program developed by Kris Kobach, then Secretary of State from Kansas, routinely struck hundreds of thousands of voters from the election rolls. The program was ended by a federal lawsuit in 2019 (though it was in a suspended status after a Homeland Security Audit found security vulnerabilities) by the ACLU.
In 2017, 12 years after it’s creation and after almost as many years of critiques and demonstrations of it’s high error rate 25 states were sharing voter data through this program. This program identified hundreds of thousands of these potential voters, and despite evidence that these matches were inaccurate 99 percent of the time (since they included people with different middle names as the same person, ignored Sr. and Jr suffices etc) states like Virginia used them to purge at least tens of thousands of voters from the rolls.
In the 2000 election, the closest and at least secondmost contentious in modern history, at least 1,100 voters were wrongly purged for supposed felony convictions. As the Tampa Bay times reported “ The company warned the state that many people on the list would not be felons, but…
