Progressive Media Resources Group

I've been following this story for a while. We are so accustomed to GOP vote suppression that we don't notice some of their grandest schemes.

This "interstate votecheck" system looks for people with similar names who have voted in other states. They go for first name and last name and never mind the middle names.

The lists are heavily over-weighted with names such as Jackson, Garcia, Patel and Kim, common to minorities who vote overwhelmingly Democratic. Indeed, one in seven African-Americans in those 27 states are listed as suspected of the crime of voting twice, one in eight Asian-Americans, and one in eight Hispanic voters. White voters too, one in eleven, are at risk, though not as vulnerable as minorities.

This is a dangerous place we are in. Republicans have so many kinds of voter suppression in operation in any one election that we get accustomed to wild stories. Or think it is a discussion of the one kind of voter suppression we already heard about.

Or the PR professionals do their best to discredit the messengers because Greg Palast pointed out the voter purging in Florida that cost Al Gore the votes of many of the 40,000+ people who were dropped from those voter rolls way back then. Another name search scheme-- to supposedly find felons by looking for similar names.

They're still at the similar name game. I didn't realize that names are strongly correlated with ethnicity. But I didn't realize 73% of Asian Americans vote Democratic. And there are so many identical names among them.