The Editor: LULAC was in the news
in the past few days as a litigant, with other voter protection organizations
filing lawsuits and interventions in Texas and Oklahoma over the federal
government's attempts to create chaos in voting opportunities that are in play
in these states.
The federal government is using
data it has in one data system to compare with voter data collected and
maintained Texas and Oklahoma departments that administer elections in each
state. The federal government data base contains citizenship data on millions
of persons. A sorting of the federal base and the state base might reveal names
of persons who are not citizens.
The problem with the federal
approach is that the federal data is not updated. The federal data might
include individuals that were collected from the federal immigration data base
containing persons who at the time were legal permanent residents, yet now
appearing on a state's current voter data base.
The sorting picked up names of
people who were still legal permanent residents, meaning that at the time that
the federal system picked them up, the persons were not yet US citizens.
Counties that run these sorts have come up with names of people who upon
further inquiry turned out that they were registered with the state as
citizens, an act done by these voters after they became citizens.
The problem with this massive
sorting is that it is not coordinated, the federal government is introducing
false alarms by the thousands and country voting administrators are quashing,
i.e., striking the identified citizen voter who was picked up on a false
outdated sort. The stricken voter is not notified or is not given sufficient
time to challenge the strike.
The stricken voter finds out
about the strike too late in an election cycle to correct the error.
LULAC is a plaintiff party in
each lawsuit trying prevent thousands of voters from being tossed out of
election opportunities because of the shoddy manner in which the federal government
and state and local election administrators are using unverified personal data
to deny every eligible voter the right to vote.
TEXAS
Discriminatory Voter Purges (League of United Latin American Citizens et al. v. Nelson et al.)
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