Comment by asaegyn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by asaegyn | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand how this isn't a bigger story. This purging is massive, and smaller purging arguably had a bigger effect on the 2016 election than any Russian interference.

It was most recently pulled off in Georgia as well: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/10/georgia-elec...

In Georgia, Kemp won by ~58,000 votes, yet in a similar tactic, they:

> • In the three months leading up to election day, more than 85,000 voters were purged from rolls under Kemp. During 2017 668,000 voters were purged, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

> • Of those 2017 numbers, investigative reporter Greg Palast told Salon, 200,000 people left the state, died or moved out their district, making them legitimate cancellations. However, through litigation, he got the entire purge list. “Of the 400,000 who supposedly moved, our experts will tell a court that 340,134 never moved – wrongly purged,” Palast told the Guardian, saying people had been purged for not voting in an election or two.

> • Furthermore from 2012 to 2016, 1.5 million voters were purged – more than 10% of all voters – from records, according to a 2018 report from the Brennan Center for Justice. In comparison, 750,000 were purged from 2008 to 2012.

The article mentions a purge of 107k voters in, what I thought, was a reasonable approach to regulating polls.

> In July 2017, more than half a million people were removed from Georgia's voter rolls. Of those, 107,000 were purged because they had decided not to vote in previous elections and they failed to respond to mailed notices from the state.

Ignoring notices from the state often have larger consequences than not being able to vote in a specific district...where you can't prove you live. Even if you were to vote in a general election, you could register without prompting from the state. Ignorance of the law and such, the state did it's minimal duty, in this case.

Given the disparity in numbers being thrown around, it's hard to know what's factual and what's misconstrued. Either way, informed consent is what US citizens seem to mobilize around. Getting cancer from eating sausage? Shoulda said it was a danger on the box. Removed from the voting roster because you didn't receive notice? Tough.

There is absolutely no purpose to these purges, except to stop legitimate voters. Considering these are people who did not vote in some prior elections, it seems unlikely that they would now suddenly start voting multiple times. Plus, of course, in-person voter fraud is basically non-existent: there is about one case for every ten million votes, and almost all of them are due to negligence.

"It's the law" is also a strange argument when it's the law that's being criticised.

I serve as a voting officer in my county.

The voter role is a database.

This is database maintenance.

It is necessary.

Every voter should verify that they are signed up to vote in the one (1) place where they pay federal income tax.

People who have property in multiple states are among the weakest links in the system, as getting an absentee ballot for a place where you have a legitimate residence tends not to be hard.

Voting isn't database maintenance.

Voting isn't an opt-in either.

Did you read the article? It's talking about anomalous purging of voters.

Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I also manage a database. I would never equate the destructive operations involved in managing my records to those in a voter database. The latter is a grave responsibility that requires higher than normal confidence that the management being performed is just.

> There is absolutely no purpose to these purges, except to stop legitimate voters.

Just as an exercise, you should consider trying to make a good faith argument in favor of doing these purges. You might be surprised.

> Given the disparity in numbers being thrown around, it's hard to know what's factual and what's misconstrued.

Considering they destroyed evidence to cover their tracks, it's not that hard https://apnews.com/877ee1015f1c43f1965f63538b035d3f

I don't see anything there about specific numbers of deletions, but I do see 2 things that worry me.

1. "I don’t think you could find a voting systems expert who would think the deletion of the server data was anything less than insidious and highly suspicious," is a clever piece of misdirection, wherein there is a hidden assumption about available information (in absence of context, of course deletion without record is suspicious, then again, according to privacy policy it may be warranted) and what a "voting systems expert" is, being left to the imagination.

2. The story tries to conflate a number of voting events as part of a larger conspiracy.

That article not only fails to address what concerned me about all the reports in Georgia, but it is not compelling that "covering their tracks" for the specific act(s) is accurate.

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