Interstate ‘Crosscheck’ Program Could Strip Millions of the Right to Vote

Truthdig contributor and investigative journalist Greg Palast reports that, under the pretense of stopping mass “voter fraud” — a phenomenon for which there is no evidence — 27 states are participating in a program that is being used to prevent Democratic-leaning voters from going to the polls.

Palast found that tens of thousands of voters have already been stricken from the records, and millions more are threatened. How does it work? He told “Democracy Now!”:

Well, I had read that the state of Kansas and 27 other states had matched their voter files, and they found, supposedly, 6.9 million people—actually three-and-a-half million people voting twice. Now, voting twice is a go-to-jail crime. You get five years in the federal penitentiary. And here were three-and-a-half million people supposedly committing this extraordinarily difficult voting in two states in the same election. They had their names. They had their addresses. So, I said, “I need the list.” And I went through six months of hell, because all these states, like North Carolina, said, “Well, these are criminals. We can’t give you the list, because they’re suspects.” I said, “You’ve got three million suspects?” So, finally, I got—three states relented after six months, and I got two million names, supposedly one million double voters.

And this is a very, very typical list. For example, Robert Steven Jackson Jr.—or, Robert Steven Jackson is supposed to be the same person as Robert Herman Jackson Jr., and one voting in Virginia, one voting in Georgia. Now, you have to understand, that’s not unusual. If you look at my whole list—in fact, I think it was up on the screen there—there isn’t a single name where the middle name matches on that list. In fact, we went through the entire two million names. One out of four names has a mismatch of just the middle name. Junior-senior—you know, junior-senior used to be father-son. Well, they say, no, it’s the same voter, just, you know, taking a different shape and a different age. They claimed that there is no—that they used birth dates to match. There were no birth dates, none. They claimed that there was a Social Security match. This is Kris Kobach, the secretary of state of Kansas. He’s kind of the Katherine Harris of 2014. He’s always finding illegal voters. But there are no Social Security matches. And they said if there’s a mismatch of Social Security number—that’s basically everyone on the list. It actually says in the instructions, which we found, that you don’t—that they ignore the mismatch. They ignore the middle name mismatches, Social Security number mismatches, birth date mismatches. Half a million people in Georgia alone are supposedly actual double voters—not double registered, double voters.

Read Palast’s detailed report for Al-Jazeera here.

— Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.