So, why didn’t you read about the 340,134 voters that Kemp illegally slashed from the voter rolls? And why didn’t you read about the hundreds of thousands removed for “moving residence” in Ohio who never moved at all?
Because there was good news to report instead. In October 2019, the New York Times ran a heartening article that Husted’s replacement as Secretary of State, Republican Frank LaRose, had prevented the wrongful purge of 40,000 voters.
Frank LaRose is shown photographed in a thoughtful and heroic pose next to his office window.* The Times article was full of praise for the Ohio GOP official for having published the purge list.
A concerned amateur, Steve Tingley-Hock of Marysville, Ohio, simply matched the list of purged voters to the list of active voters—and found some 40,000 about to lose their vote had, in fact, recently voted.
LaRose removed them from the purge list. The New York Times and local hacks couldn’t praise LaRose enough for saving those 40,000 from electoral capital punishment.
The Times reported:
Around 40,000 people, nearly one in five names on the list, shouldn’t have been on it, the state determined. And it found out before anyone was actually turned away at a polling place . . .
Every wrongfully purged voter’s registration was saved—by the Republican officials! Hey, and you thought I only write about evil, racist vote-snatching.
The Columbus Dispatch repeated this heartwarming story but noted that, hmmm, nearly one out of three purged voters not restored was age 25 to 34; Democrats outnumbered Republicans almost 2 to 1.
The local rag also joined in the praise for the thoughtful, heroic LaRose, allowing him to blame “human error, vendor errors.” Those dang humans! Those darned vendors! The Dispatch added, “just one software glitch.” Damned software glitches!
But, hey, remember the happy ending: the error was caught “before anyone was actually turned away at a polling place.”
☐ ☐ ☐
I saw similar stories around the country, as “investigative” reporters did the simple thing, imitating the amateur from Marysville, checking active voter lists against purge lists and finding errors—lots of folks who had never skipped an election.
Wow.
☐ ☐ ☐
This appears to be good investigative reporting by the Fourth Estate.
But there’s something wrong.
Remember what Husted v. APRI was all about? As the Supreme Court states in the Ruling’s opening, the case was about “removal of ineligible voters from state voting rolls” made
ineligible “by reason of” a change in residence.
It’s all about the National Voter Registration Act’s
requirements that a State must meet in order to remove a name on change-of-residence grounds.
Nothing more. Nothing less. It’s not about whether a voter voted or whether a voter is “inactive.” (Remember the “Failure to Vote” clause?)
Non-voting is not the issue. The single and only issue is whether the voter changed their residence, moved from the county or state.
Did the Times review the rolls to determine if voters had moved? Nope. (I asked.) Did NPR or the Columbus Dispatch check if the “moved” had in fact moved? Nope.
In other words, LaRose had the last laugh. He was happy to concede his list was 20% wrong—damn human vendor glitches! . . . When he had to know that the list is at least 80% wrong, as we found in Georgia.
You can’t fool all the people all the time, Lincoln noted, unless they are reporters.
It’s as if a German journalist said to Hitler, “Your deportation list of Jews . . . it’s wrong! 20% of the people on the list . . . aren’t Jews!”
No, the problem is not that the list is 20% wrong. It’s that creating the list is wrong.
* Note: Anytime a paper wants someone to look thoughtful and heroic, they photo their chosen hero next to a window, partly lit with natural light, shot slightly below eye level, with the hero not looking at the camera but rather looking out the window deep in higher thoughts. With that pose and lighting, you could make Bugs Bunny seem like Albert Schweitzer. My fellow journalists will hate me for letting you in on this. F’m.