And spread it did. Swing states that would decide the 2020 election—Ohio, North Carolina, Wisconsin—had done a “Kemp job” on their voter rolls.
Purge-mania was moving through GOP states like poop through a goose. By mid-2020, leading into the Presidential race, the urge to purge took over:
Ohio—432,000
North Carolina—576,534
Arizona—258,000
Wisconsin—99,000 (+232,000 listed for purge)
. . . and so on.
As the methods in these states were just variants on the Georgia system, I can tell you, as a former professor of statistics, the 70%+ bogus factor would be the same.
And, with at least two dozen other states rushing to “Georgia-fy” their lists, the total of voters wrongly removed would hit many millions by November 2020.
How many? I dove into the deeper files of the federal Elections Assistance Commission, the EAC. An odd number jumped out: between 2014 and 2016, the number of voters purged for moving their residence had soared to 16,696,470—one in 12 registered Americans. Wow, we are a restless bunch.
But not according to the Census. The number of purged voters was nearly double the number of voters the Census counted as having moved out of their county or state.
And the statistics got curiouser and curiouser. The purged-for-moving number had gone up by 1.9 million in the two years leading up to the 2016 election. How strange. The Census reported that the number of Americans on the move in those two years had declined.
Worse, the EAC purge numbers were seriously undercounted. The EAC footnotes (I always read the footnotes) state that several states and counties don’t report their purge operations. While Kemp had conducted his Big Purge with a lot of fanfare, other states quietly removed voters using Kemp’s dead-wrong methods before the 2016 race.
And who was removing voters? The Democrat-controlled state of New Mexico purged only two out of every thousand voters, or 0.2%. But then there was Indiana. Barack Obama won the state in 2008. However, by 2016, the Hoosier state wrenched violently into the Republican Red Zone. Where had the Obama voters gone? According to Indiana’s report to the EAC, they moved out. In the two years leading into the 2016 race, under Governor Mike Pence, Indiana purged a breathtaking 22.4% of its registrants—one in five voters.
☐ ☐ ☐
The number of voters wrongly purged—340,134 and more in Georgia alone—is so huge, so staggering, so jaw-droppingly large, I was, at first, afraid to report it.
With trepidation, I filed the exposé of the Big Purge in Georgia with Salon. And warned of millions at risk in two dozen other states for 2020. But who would believe me?
Among officialdom, just one: the Hon. Stacey Abrams.