VOTING HOAX PLACEBO. From [HERE] An investigative journalist who is trying to obtain records from across the country of voters whose registrations have been purged from state voter rolls says he will likely sue Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach for denying him access to those records.

Greg Palast, an investigative journalist, author and researcher who wrote a 2016 feature story in Rolling Stone magazine about the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck program, which is administered by Kobach’s office, said in an interview that he is now trying to document how many voters in the United States have been wrongly purged from the voter rolls.

Kobach’s office, however, says it cannot provide that information because his office doesn’t maintain the voter registration lists. The process of cleaning up voter rolls, as required by federal law, is carried out in Kansas by each of the state’s 105 counties, and they are the ones that would have to provide that data.

But Palast indicated he’s not buying that explanation.

“I’m filing against Secretary of State Kobach because he has stonewalled our request to get information – the names and information of the persons he’s purged from the voter rolls in Kansas – and also because he’s the national head of Interstate Crosscheck, which is what I investigated for Rolling Stone,” Palast said in an interview.

Palast was in Kansas Friday and Saturday to screen a new movie he has released about Kobach and the Crosscheck system, a computer database that is intended to identify voters who may be registered in more than one state, or who may even have voted in more than one state.

The Crosscheck program began in 2005, under former Secretary of State Ron Thornburgh, and initially was a cooperative project between four states — Kansas, Missouri, Iowa and Nebraska — as a way of tracking people who move across state lines and register to vote in their new state without canceling their previous registration.

But it was greatly expanded after Kobach became secretary of state in 2011, and it has been the source of widespread criticism for producing false-positive matches of people who have similar names.

Two million voters altogether have been wiped off the voter rolls since the 2016 election — net — which would be impossible without the mass purges coordinated by Kris Kobach. The Brennan Center found that between 2014 and 2016, states removed almost 16 million voters from the rolls using purges. 

Palast reveals that millions of Black, Latino & Asian voters were removed from voter rolls in swing states by Interstate Crosscheck, a so-called "voter fraud" program created by the GOP. Thirty (30) states participated in Interstate Crosscheck in 2016. Palast calls Crosscheck the "Great White Hope Machine."  

Interstate Crosscheck removed voters from the voter list if a voter's name appeared to be registered in more than one state. Around 7 million names were put on the list of “potential double voters” before the 2014 election. Crosscheck then compares each state’s list with lists from other states in the program. Specifically, according to Palast, the Crosscheck list contains 7,264,422 voters.

Although the Crosscheck program aims to prevent individuals from voting in more than one state in the same election, Crosscheck has been doing the exact opposite and is used to remove legitmate voters from voting rolls. Greg Palast has claimed that before a single vote was even cast, the election was already fixed by Trump operatives who eliminated millions of legitimate African American, Latino and Asian voters from the voter rolls in North Carolina, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

An investigation in Rolling Stone found that Crosscheck uses a biased and questionable methodology that puts voters with African-American, Latino, and Asian names in greater danger of being purged from the voter list and being falsely accused of double voting. Crosscheck supposedly matches first, middle and last name, plus birth date, and provides the last four digits of a Social Security number for additional verification.

However, in practice a quarter of the names on the list did not have a middle name match or were only partially the same name. The list contained thousands of errors. The system also neglected to take into account designations of Jr. and Sr., and did not include any Social Security numbers to croscheck whether the suspected voter is the same person. 

An overwhelmingly disproportionate number of non-whites have been removed who have typical Black, Latino and Asian last names and who reside in predominately minority zip codes. Names such as Jackson, Garcia and Wong in areas such as Detroit, Milwaukee and Philadelphia. U.S. Census data shows that minorities are overrepresented in 85 of 100 of the most common last names. “If your name is Washington, there’s an 89 percent chance you’re African-American,” says Palast. “If your last name is Hernandez, there’s a 94 percent chance you’re Hispanic.” Finding these common names the GOP targeted non-white voters and put them on the list and then stopped them from voting on election day. 

His investigators calculated 1.1 million non-white people, many spread over crucial swing states were deprived of their right to vote on election day in 2016 - to elect Donald Trump. 

Trump victory margin in Michigan:                    13,107 

• Michigan Crosscheck purge list:                       449,922

Trump victory margin in Arizona:                       85,257

• Arizona Crosscheck purge list:                           270,824

Trump victory margin in North Carolina:        177,008

• North Carolina Crosscheck purge list:              589,393 

Enough votes to swing the election away from the Hillary Clinton victory predicted in polls – explaining suspicious exit polls inconsistencies – and towards a "suprising" result for Trump and Republican victory in the Senate. 

Palast also provided evidence that thousands of votes were intentionally not counted in Black, Asian and Latino voting precincts in swing states, such as Flint & Detroit, Michigan in 2016. His new effort challenges mass purges affecting elections post 2016. [MORE]

The system is already the subject of one federal lawsuit in Kansas, which the American Civil Liberties Union filed in June on behalf of Kansas voters whose sensitive personal information, including partial Social Security numbers, was released to the public after their data had been transmitted to Florida, where other parties obtained the information through a Florida open records request.

It was also the subject of two federal lawsuits in Washington, D.C., after President Donald Trump’s Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, which Kobach led as its vice chairman, sought to gather registration records from all 50 states to run through the Crosscheck system.

That commission was disbanded in January, and the lawsuits were settled when the White House confirmed in court filings last week that it had deleted all of the records it had obtained.

Palast, meanwhile, said he is trying to compile national data about voters whose registrations were wrongfully canceled because of Crosscheck.

So far, he said, some states have complied with his requests, but others have not, most notably Kansas.

“I should note that Kobach’s case is the most important in the country because he runs the Interstate Crosscheck program,” Palast said. “And he’s kind of Trump’s voter-fraud hunter.”

Kobach’s office, however, said Palast is barking up the wrong tree.

“We anticipate a baseless lawsuit from Palast,” Kobach’s spokeswoman Danedri Herbert said in an email. “He has been told repeatedly that the Kansas Secretary of State’s office does not do voter roll maintenance. The 105 counties of Kansas do.”

Attempts by the Journal-World to obtain the information in two counties revealed how difficult that can be.

Douglas County Clerk Jamie Shew said in an interview that his office hasn’t used Crosscheck for years, mainly because of the number of false positives it produces and the time it takes to verify information from the system. He also said most other elected county clerks in Kansas who administer elections also have stopped using it.

In the state’s four largest counties — Sedgwick, Johnson, Wyandotte and Shawnee — elections are managed at the local level by county election commissioners who are directly appointed by the secretary of state.

Shawnee County Election Commissioner Andrew Howell, however, said in a phone interview that he wasn’t sure whether the kind of information Palast is seeking can even be tracked.

That’s because even if Crosscheck indicates a possible dual registration, counties still have to follow federal standards in deciding whether to strike someone from the rolls. He said that includes multiple attempts to contact the voter after he or she has failed to vote in the previous two federal elections.

Palast, however, insisted that information about people who get deleted from the voting rolls is supposed to be open to the public under federal law.

“Any American has the absolute right to ask for the details of who is purged, how they’re purged, why they’re purged,” he said.

Palast also denied any suggestion that his research project is an attempt to damage Kobach’s chances in the upcoming gubernatorial election, in which Kobach is the Republican nominee, because he said he has been seeking the information from Kobach’s office since 2014.

“I don’t even care who becomes governor of Kansas,” Palast said. “That ain’t my problem, that’s your problem.”