http://rules.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=InNews.MajorityNews&ContentRecord_id=f72bc608-5056-8059-76f6-97bcc0202f3dWASHINGTON, DC – U.S. Senator Charles E. Schumer, Chairman of the Senate Rules and Administration Committee, announced Wednesday that, according to a groundbreaking new study conducted by leading election experts, as many as seven million registered voters were prevented or discouraged from casting their ballots in the 2008 election, demonstrating major malfunctions in the country’s election process.
“This report is beyond troubling. Hidden in the excitement of this past election was the fact that millions of voters, through no fault of their own, were shut out of this process due to fixable problems,” Schumer said. “More people than ever wanted to vote last year in a Presidential election that ignited greater interest than any election in decades. But for far too many of these energized voters, the trip to the polls ended in frustration, disappointment and disenfranchisement because of our flawed system of voter registration.”
The report was released at a hearing of the Rules committee, which is the panel that oversees elections. The study--produced by the Cooperative Congressional Election Survey, led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology--detailed that as many as 3 million registered voters were prevented from voting due to a range of administrative mishaps. According to Stephen Ansolabehere of Harvard University, the study's lead author, those factors include: a failure to provide photo identification; a failure to record the voter’s name on the rolls at the time of registration; an accidental purging of the voter from the rolls subsequent to registration; or an error in the initial recording of the voter’s information so that their actual information does not match the voter list. Schumer said these issues, while often made accidentally, can have a troubling cumulative effect.
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You know....I don't usually buy left-wing tales about "voter disenfranchisement" and the like.....and this article doesn't offer any support for "conspiracy theories", but I do think it's pretty frightening....especially the numbers given by the MiT.
I don't know all that much about the issue....and there are probably people here that can comment more accurately.
Seems at least, that despite these numbers, that it doesn't appear to greatly benefit one party....as pre-election polls, in 2004 and 2008, were almost entirely accurate.
Take Indiana as an example....Democrats said that picture ID laws would kill their chances as it would unfairly have an effect on low-income minorities, but IN had one of the strongest DEM trends in the country.
So....a couple of questions:
a.) Is this report accurate?
b.) If yes, what does it mean?
