An article tucked deep in the back pages of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette triggered my spidey-sense this weekend.
Conservative group warns county to clean up voter rolls
The conservative organization Judicial Watch is threatening to sue Allegheny County for allegedly not properly managing its voter rolls.
The county is not alone. The nonprofit sent “notice of violation” letters to 19 counties in Pennsylvania, California, Colorado, North Carolina and Virginia.
The Dec. 11 letter addressed to former Allegheny County Council President John DeFazio alleges that the county violated the National Voter Registration Act by “removing only 72 voter registrations in the last two year reporting period[s].” The organization also claims that the county has an “implausibly high registration rate of 98%.” The numbers are based on the organization’s own analysis.
County officials dispute that analysis, citing publicly available information.
Given that I eat, breathe, drink and bleed North Carolina voting rights, the Tar Heel State’s name jumped off the page at me. I mean, my heart certainly goes out to the other states on Judicial Watch’s hit list, but I have more than enough to worry about here at home — the rest of y’all will need to fight your own battles on this one.
A couple of quick emails to friends in high places provided me with a copy of Judicial Watch’s letter to the Guilford County NC Board of Elections, plus the information that a similar letter was also received by Mecklenburg County.
No surprise there in Judicial Watch’s choices of counties to terrorize. Guilford and Mecklenburg rank #1 and #3 in black voter population among the state’s 100 counties. Between them, their 360,000 black voters account for 25% of the state’s total. And an unusually high fraction are young black voters, because both counties are home to large HBCUs and other universities.
Here’s the first page of Judicial Watch’s ransom note to Guilford County’s Board of Elections.
What follows in the letter’s next 3 pages is a mish-mash of incorrect information and analysis:
The County has a total registration rate of 102%….
There are about 72,000 inactive voter registrations on the County’s rolls, or about one out of every five registrations….
The County reported removing only about 3,400 voter registrations per year in the last reporting period on the grounds that the registrants failed to respond to an address confirmation notice and failed to vote in two consecutive federal elections. This is a very low number of removals for a county of this size.
These facts establish clear violations of Section 8(a)(4) of the NVRA.
In communications that have been shared with me, Guilford County Board of Elections Director Charlie Collicutt takes detailed exception to all of Judicial Watch’s numbers, demolishing them, and concludes, with perfect southern charm: “I think they pull stats from a very strategic window.”
Speaking as a data scientist who spends absurd amounts of time minutely analyzing North Carolina voter registration data both for fun and for my clients, I completely agree with Mr. Collicutt: Judicial Watch has pulled its ‘statistics’ out of its ass.
But accuracy is hardly Judicial Watch’s goal. Scaring the two counties’ boards of elections into hastily dropping more voters from the poll book is the point, because the more you drop, the more fully qualified voters you will accidentally drop. And ‘pruning’ the state’s black voter population before the November election is what it’s all about for trump-humpers like Judicial Watch.
North Carolina’s annual list maintenance to remove deceased and moved voters was very thoroughly and very carefully conducted this year. I spent weeks going over their list maintenance data, and can attest to its thoroughness and its extraordinarily low error rate.
Judicial Watch is holding a busted flush. This is nothing more than simple harassment aimed at intimidating the state.
And it won’t work. But y’all continue to check your NC voter registration records, hear now? It’s easy at the state’s official voter lookup page, at vt.ncsbe.gov/...