A team of database experts, statisticians, lawyers and investigators working with the Palast Investigative Fund discovered — and Indiana now admits — that these thousands of voters were cancelled in violation of a June 2018 federal court order that barred the state from using the notorious Interstate Crosscheck purge list sent to state officials by Kris Kobach, Secretary of State of Kansas.
The court order stemmed from a suit by the NAACP and League of Woman Voters against a 2017 Indiana law ordering counties to remove voters if they appear on Kobach’s list which purports to identify voters who have left the state. The NAACP and League cited the Palast team’s evidence in our 2016 Rolling Stone article showing that Crosscheck is overwhelmingly wrong in identifying voters who have moved — and extremely racist in operation.
Altogether, Indiana cancelled the registrations of a mind-boggling 469,000 voters, the majority using suspect methods.
The problems, say our experts, go way beyond the violation of the federal court order. A name-by-name analysis indicates the vast majority of the nearly half million purged remain Indiana residents who should not have lost their rights..
The Palast Investigative Fund, which obtained the list after sending a formal notice that, unless Indiana opens its files, the state will be hauled into another federal suit under the National Voter Registration Act of 1993. Indiana is one of 26 states receiving notice of suit resulting in a flood of responses now being analyzed by our investigations team.
Admission of violation of the court ruling
Rachel Garbus, researcher with Mirer Mazzocchi & Julien, our New York based attorneys, asked a top Indiana official for the reason our database experts found 27,000 voters purged whose names appeared on the Crosscheck list of voters who allegedly left the state. Post Office files indicate only 7,000 of them have moved.
The official agreed that the only reasonable explanation was a violation of the court order against using Crosscheck, though he considered the error inadvertent.
“I’m just speculating, but it is possible that some counties used the 2017 legislation so were cancelling voters using that method.”
Asked if this violated the federal court order, the official, whose name we are withholding, stated: “Yes, I’m not sure, but the county elections officials follow the law, so if that’s what the law said, then it’s possible that’s what they were doing.”
The official’s “speculation” is doubtless correct as there is no other explanation for the wrongful purge of over 20,000 citizens other than a violation of the court order overturning that 2017 law.
The Palast team and our lawyers are considering our next steps.
In the meantime, we will continue to release purge lists as states surrender to our lawsuit threat (after they have been analyzed and prepared for public review).
I am sorry that many lists are on the last days of registration or after the final date. We have been demanding this data for several months.
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Greg Palast has written four New York Times bestsellers, including Armed Madhouse, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, now a major non-fiction movie, available on Amazon — and can be streamed for FREE by Prime members!
Featured image is from the author.
