If you’ve read Mother Jones’ recent story on 11 sneaky vote suppression tactics, you might think you know every trick in the bag. But just in case you aren’t already feeling paranoid, more concerns have been brought to light in Cast Out, a new report by NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice:
Wireless Technology in Voting Machines
A year-long Brennan Center study, completed in June, found many voting machines include wireless components that could be infiltrated by a Trojan horse virus using technology as simple as a palm pilot. Only Minnesota, New York and California ban machines with wireless components. The report found the machines “pose a real danger to the integrity of national, state and local elections.”
The Help America Vote Act Inverted
Passed by Congress in 2002 to improve access to the polls, the Help America Vote Act requires all states to create computerized databases of registered voters by January 1, 2006. “For the first time we are seeing virtually every state with a centralized voter list,” says Cast Out author Wendy Weiser. The databases are supposed to be more reliable and easily updated than paper versions, but, as they come online, many states are cross-checking them against databases maintained by other state agencies such as the Department of Motor Vehicles and purging any names that don’t match up. According to Weiser, these cross-checks can improperly reject up to 20 percent of voters from the rolls. Voters may have no way of knowing they’ve been booted until the show up at the polls on election day.
And Don’t Bother Registering Either
Some states are also using DMV and Social Security databases to reject voter registration applications as soon as they arrive. Challenged in a lawsuit, Washington State and Pennsylvania abandoned the practice but Florida, North Carolina, South Dakota and Iowa still use it.
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