Program Used to Stop Voter Fraud Is Allegedly Flawed

Republican election officials in some states have been cracking down on what they believe is massive voter-fraud activities under way in some districts. The officials are championing the Interstate Crosscheck program—an initiative that allows states to crosscheck their voter-registration files to see which individuals are registered to vote in more than one state and which individuals have, in fact, voted multiple times in the same election—a practice that is illegal.  

According to an Al-Jazeera report, the way it works is that states have to agree to participate in the program, and have their voter-registration files reviewed and crosschecked against other states’ files. As of today, Interstate Crosscheck says that it has approximately 7 million names that “represent legions of fraudsters who are not only registered but have actually voted in two or more states in the same election,” Al-Jazeera explains.

Interstate Crosscheck began in 2005 and is the “pet project” of Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who has been adamant about unearthing voter fraud in the U.S.

As a result of this effort, individuals who were once registered to vote may find that they are no longer registered to vote on Election Day if they are one of the thousands of people whose names appeared on the Interstate Crosscheck list, and were thus removed from the voting rolls.

“Based on the Crosscheck lists, officials have begun the process of removing names from the rolls— beginning with 41,637 in Virginia alone,” Al-Jazeera said.

But the process is causing concern among those who say the way the Interstate Crosscheck program goes about identifying duplicates is flawed. Each voter’s personal information (a person’s date of birth, Social Security number, etc.) is not always taken into account during the duplicate search.

“But the actual lists show that not only are middle names commonly mismatched and suffix discrepancies ignored, even birth dates don’t seem to have been taken into account. Moreover, Crosscheck deliberately ignores Social Security mismatches, in the few instances when the numbers are even collected,” the report explained.

Read more at Al-Jazeera.