Seawytch
Information isnt Advocacy
And there they go again...
Many Texans Bereaved Over 'Dead' Voter Purge
Quite a few Texas voters are seeing dead people in the mirror these days when they go to brush their teeth in the morning.[...]
Like all states, Texas regularly purges its rolls of voters who've died. Normally, this is a low-key process where the state passes along to the counties a small list of dead voters as they become available. But this massive mailing two months before the election is new.
Democrats are skeptical that a person whose name is not on the roll will be allowed to vote. They say Hispanics especially are likely to be suspected as illegal immigrants trying to vote illegally.
"The secretary of state has notified 80,000 individuals that it says are deceased," Texas Democratic Party Chairman Gilberto Hinojosa says. "And so when a Hispanic is being told that he's dead, most sociologists will tell you a Hispanic is probably more prone to just accept it and walk away, say, 'Somebody made a mistake. I don't have time to bother with this.' "
Texas got the names off the Social Security Administration's death list. Social Security warned Texas that the list shouldn't be relied on, but to no avail. The state Legislature and Texas Gov. Rick Perry passed legislation last session mandating the change.
In Houston, after Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector Don Sumners got hundreds of calls from elderly voters who'd gotten the death notice, he looked at the Social Security list that was being used.
"And then a quick check of some of the information on that database led us to believe that there was a big probability that even a majority of the names on the list were people that were still alive," he says.
Like all states, Texas regularly purges its rolls of voters who've died. Normally, this is a low-key process where the state passes along to the counties a small list of dead voters as they become available. But this massive mailing two months before the election is new.
Democrats are skeptical that a person whose name is not on the roll will be allowed to vote. They say Hispanics especially are likely to be suspected as illegal immigrants trying to vote illegally.
"The secretary of state has notified 80,000 individuals that it says are deceased," Texas Democratic Party Chairman Gilberto Hinojosa says. "And so when a Hispanic is being told that he's dead, most sociologists will tell you a Hispanic is probably more prone to just accept it and walk away, say, 'Somebody made a mistake. I don't have time to bother with this.' "
Texas got the names off the Social Security Administration's death list. Social Security warned Texas that the list shouldn't be relied on, but to no avail. The state Legislature and Texas Gov. Rick Perry passed legislation last session mandating the change.
In Houston, after Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector Don Sumners got hundreds of calls from elderly voters who'd gotten the death notice, he looked at the Social Security list that was being used.
"And then a quick check of some of the information on that database led us to believe that there was a big probability that even a majority of the names on the list were people that were still alive," he says.
Many Texans Bereaved Over 'Dead' Voter Purge
