Wednesday, September 14, 2016

On the ease of getting registered to vote in Georgia


Georgia has been hit with a federal lawsuit alleging that their modified voter registration system is very picky, and impacts minorities more than white people. (if your data doesn't exactly match what is already in several government databases, it automatically gets denied.)  Have you EVER seen a government database??

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/lawsuit-georgia-voter-registration-process-violates-law-42080632

From the article:
"For multiple reasons the records may not exactly match, including many that aren't the fault of the potential voter, the lawsuit says. Data entry errors, typos or misread handwriting can cause mismatches. Hyphenated and maiden names or initials, as well as transposed digits in a driver's license or Social Security number, can also cause problems."

I saw the article, and made the rookie mistake of reading the comment section. I saw one comment that said: "Hey, I registered with my driver's license, easy peasy." I wanted to document my response here, just in case any others out there feel like it's just too darn easy to register to vote.

"Not every potential voter in the state has a Georgia Driver's License. There are 5 million registered voters (out of 7.5 million potential voters.) Georgia has 6.6 million issued licenses, meaning over a million folks don't have one.  That's up to 40% of the unregistered voters.

Source here http://www.statista.com/statistics/198029/total-number-of-us-licensed-drivers-by-state/
Here http://sos.ga.gov/index.php/Elections/voter_registration_statistics
Here http://www.census.gov/quickfacts/table/PST045215/13

(I admit I was surprised to see that there were over 60% of all Georgians with driver's licenses... but I shouldn't have been, after sitting in Atlanta traffic.) "