CNN is reporting that 50,000 voters in Georgia have been flagged as mismatches in the state voter database, and that thousands of them may not have their votes counted this year. Kyla Berry is one of these voters:
The letter, which was dated October 2, gave her a week from the time it was dated to prove her citizenship. There was a problem, though -- the letter was postmarked October 9.
"It was the most bizarre thing. I immediately called my mother and asked her to send me my birth certificate, and then I was like, 'It's too late, apparently,' " Berry said.
Berry is one of more than 50,000 registered Georgia voters who have been "flagged" because of a computer mismatch in their personal identification information. At least 4,500 of those people are having their citizenship questioned and the burden is on them to prove eligibility to vote.
It is, of course, illegal to purge voters from the rolls within 90 days of an election, so there's no reason why Berry should have been receiving a letter on October 2 telling her to prove her citizenship. Republican Secretary of State Karen Handel says this isn't "voter suppression" but that's absurd. Not only is it voter suppression, it's blatantly illegal. Moreover, Georgia has been using the Social Security Administration database to match voter information -- essentially the most flawed method they could possibly use. In 2007, the SSA admitted that of 2.6 million voter registration records submitted to the SSA, nearly half resulted in a failed match.
Handel's lip service about provisional ballots is also plainly transparent. On average, states count less than half of their provisional ballots, so between illegal purging, the use of flawed databases to match voters and insisting that eligible voters cast provisional ballots rather than real ones, Handel is doing a bang-up job of suppressing the vote.
--A. Serwer