JOE, MEET IRONY.

October 16, 2008

9:20 PM

It looks like Joe the Plumber, the Republican Party's new mascot, had he registered recently, could have been disenfranchised by the very error-prone databases the GOP has been championing to prevent the virtually non-existent problem of voter fraud.

Purging voters or blocking their registration because of data errors is disenfranchisement by typo," said Michael Waldman, the executive director of the Brennan Center for Justice, a liberal legal group involved in litigation in those states. "Joe is a perfect example. If he were anew voter, he would be being challenged right now as not eligible to vote."
"Joe the Plumber is not committing voter fraud by having his name spelled differently on two different lists," he said.

Ohio probably won't conduct another purge before the election, since that would be illegal and they've already done it anyway. And as a registered Republican, it's unlikely that the GOP poll goons will be hiring would challenge his registration anyway. With the no-match list, they can pick and choose which ~~typos~~ voters they believe are unraveling the very fabric of democracy.

Jim Geraghty, meanwhile, concludes there's "no reason for paranoia" surrounding error-prone voter databases.

This is ridiculous. Every ballot from every person who shows up at the polls is to be counted, even if their ID doesn't match the voter registration information, out of the fear that a voter may not have the patience to clear up the discrepencies between their official records and the name on the voter rolls? Then why ever remove any name from the voter rolls? Why even have voter registration? Why not just turn the election into a race to see which candidate can get supporters to vote the most times?

The problem isn't when the ID doesn't match the registration, the problem is that when the ID doesn't match something like the Social Security Administration database the voter is purged without notice and doesn't find out until election day. How are voters supposed to "clear up the discrepancy" if they have no idea it exists?

For example, between 2004 and 2005, the Social Security Administration had to raise more 23,000 people from the dead, because they were, you know, still alive. While it's been proven time and time again that people have been purged erroneously from voter rolls, there isn't a single instance of organized voter fraud that Geraghty can actually point to, despite being up in arms about it. That's "paranoia".

--A. Serwer