This scares me: purging voters

I always think of Georgia as a sister state to NC, our partner in shaping a new South, as it were. At Dem NC, we also often get calls from people Georgia seeking to replicate our ex-felon outreach, same day registration and voter-owned elections programs. So it was with great dismay that I learned Georgia’s Secretary of State is once again attempting to put in place procedures that would purge thousands of legal voters from the registration rolls, even in the face of clear evidence that his screening procedures are flawed:

Think we don’t need the Voting Rights Act anymore? Welcome to Georgia, May 2010: A coalition of civil rights groups is asking a federal court to block Georgia’s Secretary of State from putting in place procedures that purge thousands of legal voters from the registration rolls. In 2008, without proper pre-clearance from the U.S. Justice Department, Georgia began denying registration if a person’s name matched a non-citizen designation in the state’s databases. But the databases were filled with errors, chronically out-of-date, and proven to purge legal voters. The Justice Department eventually ruled that the procedures violated the Voting Rights Act and a federal court ordered them stopped, but the Secretary of State wants to resume using them anyway.

From Dem NC's Link of the Day