Voter Suppression

There is a new report out from the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law about the practice of purging voter rolls to supposedly prevent "voter fraud."  But what's wrong, you may ask, with making sure the voter roles only contain legitimate voters?  If only it were that simple.  From the report via Digby:

Voter Purges finds four problematic practices with voter purges that continue to threaten voters in 2008: purges rely on error-ridden lists; voters are purged secretly and without notice; bad "matching" criteria mean that thousands of eligible voters will be caught up in purges; and insufficient oversight leaves voters vulnerable to erroneous or manipulated purges.

Digby adds:

Much of this "purging" is undoubtedly innocent. But when you have national vote suppression projects like those initiated by the Republican National Lawyers Association, scandals like the US Attorney firings around the same issues, and a decades long campaign to create a sense of crisis around something that doesn't exist in any meaningful way --- voter fraud --- this kind of thing becomes a lot more suspicious.

As I've noted before, pressing bogus voter fraud cases was at the heart of the U.S. Attorney firings currently under investigation.  This insidious practice is nothing more than an underhanded attempt to subvert the democratic process while claiming to protect it.  It's something we should all be on the lookout for in November.