California is disenfranchising thousands of voters.

[Ce qui la baise]

California is disenfranchising thousands of voters. Has anyone else heard about this?

http://www.debrabowen.com/blog/

I just learned of an alarming development in our fight for fair and transparent elections: The current Secretary of State, Bruce McPherson, launched a statewide voter registration database system last year that will disenfranchise tens of thousands of voters in California.

More than 14,000 new voter registration and re-registration applications just from Los Angeles County were recently invalidated under this new stringent set of regulations — and other counties are seeing similar results.

This is a 43% rejection rate! In fact, virtually all of these applications would have been accepted before Secretary McPherson rolled out his new statewide voter registration database. Typically rejection rates are 1-2%. This is outrageous.

And these applications were rejected for trivial matters — a name or driver’s license number not perfectly matching what was on file in the statewide database, for example. Or even technical system errors that prevented valid applications from being accepted.

We’re talking about thousands of eligible voters, many of whom have been registered for years, being thrown off the voter rolls. Unless they correct these trivial errors with their local registrar, these fellow citizens won’t receive sample ballots in the mail, notifying them of their polling place. They won’t receive absentee ballots. In other words, it will be much more difficult for them to get their legitimate vote counted.

If eligible voters are prevented from registering to vote, I view that as a huge problem for our democracy — I’m sorry Secretary McPherson doesn’t see it that way. We are aggressively looking into this serious issue — and we’ll keep you posted on what we find.

[NV Whino]

1. Let's be clear about this

California is not disenfranchising voters. Bruce McPherson is.

[lindisfarne]

2. latimes.com has an article about it.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-rejected29mar29,1,2998644.story?coll=la-headlines-california&ctrack=1&cset=true
(You might have to register).

San Diego County is racing to rectify rejected registrations in time for the April 11 special election to fill the seat vacated by convicted Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham.
(Note: This is the seat Francine Busby is running for)
<snip>
McCormack said that of 34,064 registration forms Los Angeles County residents sent to the database in the first 2 1/2 months of the year, 4.7% were rejected because of a database system error, such as an interrupted transmission. She said that at least 7% more contained all the required information but were rejected because a name or birth date did not exactly match state records. Among other reasons for rejection was failure to provide the identification number.

Elaine Ginnold, Alameda County's acting registrar of voters, said she doubts her county will be able to ratify all rejected registrations submitted near the deadline.

"These are errors that are not the fault of the voters and not related to voters' eligibility," said Wendy Weiser, a deputy director at the Brennan Center. "They should not prevent voters from being able to cast votes that count."