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I Voted Already. Did You?

I voted already last week.

To rephrase the joke about voting “early and often,” I voted. but just once.

And in reference to another old voting joke, I had a pulse when I voted.

These days we have new electoral problems that are no joke.

Voter fraud zealots, mostly Republican, are now concentrating on “double-voting” as a way to possibly purge millions of black,Hispanic, and Asian American voters from the voter rolls, according to a national investigation by Al Jazeera America.

The effort is being done in 27 states that use the Interstate Crosscheck program. It’s a list of seven million names that are used to weed out double voters.

Voting twice is a high crime in democracy, a felony that will get you 2-10 years.

States election officials have already used it to remove tens of thousands of minority voters in battle ground states. But  most states don’t release the records.

Al-Jazeera obtained the lists from Georgia, Virginia and Washington, which numbered two million names

It found that Crosscheck matched the names from 110 voters in participating states to see if names of voters came up twice.

But by focusing on common names like Jackson, Garcia, Patel and Kim, the crosschecking resulted in a high number of “suspicious” fraudulent voters.

In those 27 states that use the program, as many as one in seven African American voters were considered fraudulent; One in eight Asian American; One in eight Hispanic Americans; and even one in eleven White voters.

Still, it’s the minority voters, who tend to vote democrat that are the targets. And are under suspicion because of the coincidence of having the same name.

“It’s Jim Crow all over again,” said the Rev. Joseph Lowery to Al Jazeera.

Lowery, 93, a  cofounder of  the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Martin Luther King, Jr. said it was just a sophisticated way of the same old thing. “I think [the Republicans] would use anything they can find. Their desperation is rising.”

These are the new methods being used to take your vote away.

Value that democracy moment with your ballot.

Use your power on election day.

Vote.

Emil Guillermo writes on issues of race, culture and politics  for the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (www.aaldef.org/blog)  Like him at www.facebook.com/emilguillermo.media ; twitter@emilamok

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