[EL] Racial dilution in voter lists

[Bev Harris]

Have begun releasing reports from my study of 89 voter lists from Shelby County,
TN. Here is first report.

* * * * *

In June 2007, a steady voter in Memphis named Effie Washington was a Black
woman.  But before the 2008 presidential election, Effie's voting record was
changed to read "gender: man; race: other".  In June 2009 her voting record was
changed, to "gender: woman; race: other".

At one time Sharonda Williams* was listed as a Black woman. She was purged from
Shelby County (TN) voter rolls with a code indicating she had moved out of the
county, even though she lived in Millington, a Memphis suburb in Shelby County.
Sharonda was issued a different voter ID number and then listed as "race:
other".  Sharonda voted at her polling place in the May 2010 primary, selecting
a Democratic ballot, which is marked  as "cast" in the electronic poll book.
But that poll book log never was made public, and the official voter history
records report that Sharonda Williams did not vote. In August 2010, Williams is
reported as voting Republican.

*There are only two persons on the Shelby County voter list named Sharonda
Williams. One has a birthdate in 1978, one in 1981. The information above
pertains to the one born in 1981.

HOW DOES IT AFFECT THE RESULT IF VOTER LISTS ARE INCORRECT?

First, let's take a look at general bookkeeping issues before racial identity
comes into the mix.

For an election to be valid, the books have to balance. And for an election to
be democratic, the public must be able to see and authenticate the following:

1) Who can vote (the voter list)
 2) Who did vote (the participating voter list, which is later stored as the
voter history)
 3) Chain of custody
 4) The count

When dead people, duplicates, and persons long departed for other jurisdictions
sit on the voter list, they can vote -- or more precisely -- be voted for, by
insiders, creating a powerful mechanism for fraud. Though the public can never
control the hearts, minds, and bribe-sensitivity of every person with inside
access to an election, we can mitigate fraud in a meaningful way through full
public transparency, by developing the habit of public examinations of who can
vote, who did vote, chain of custody and the count.

WHO CAN VOTE: The public needs to be able to examine voter lists to ascertain
whether the people on these lists actually live there, are still alive, and
that there is only one of each person on the voter list. Without accurate voter
lists and public ability to authenticate them, an election fails the test of
transparency and opens itself up for fraudulent results.

WHO DID VOTE: When votes are counted, they must match up to the number of people
who voted. You cannot have 100 votes if you have only 90 voters.

In a primary election, you can't have more Democratic votes than Democratic
ballots; likewise for Republican votes and ballots. In many states, voters
choose a party affiliation when they register; in others, like Tennessee,
voters can choose which party ballot to vote on Election Day. Regardless of
which method is used, you can't have more Republican votes than Republican
voters or ballots. Without an accurate record of who voted, and in primaries,
who voted Republican or Democratic, an election fails the test of transparency
and opens itself up for fraudulent counts.

Some people may try to tell you that if the voter list is wrong, or the list of
who voted or what party ballot they voted happens to be incorrect, this has
nothing to do with the vote count itself. Not true.

If you have 280 Republican primary votes and just 240 Republican ballots cast,
one or the other of those counts is just flat wrong. Such an election cannot be
valid, because it is based on impossible numbers.

If a dog casts a vote, like Duncan the dog did in Washington State's absentee
voting system, or a poll worker casts votes on behalf of dead people, as in
Shelby County in 2010 (resulting in invalidation of Ophelia Ford's initial
election), or if some people have two votes cast in their names, as happened in
Shelby County in the August 2010 contest, the election cannot be valid because
it is based on invalid votes.

HOW ALTERING RACIAL IDENTITIES CAN AFFECT THE COUNT

The above information pertains in a generic way to all elections. In locations
where a significant number of voters belong to a racial minority, additional
factors come into play with voter list accuracy.

Many states use a racial identifier on their voter list, originally set up to
protect minority voters. The idea is that by identifying the historically
targeted voters in a given jurisdiction, it will ascertainable if they have
been targeted for disenfranchisements, such as non-working voting machines,
ballot shortages, or procedural "glitches."

In locations with strong political affiliations tied to race, racial identity
provides another check and balance against wrong election results. If you know
that the Cuban population in a particular location votes heavily Republican, or
that the Black population votes 96% Democrat, as voter histories show is the
case in Shelby County, any result that noticeably diverges from known racial
political preferences may become suspect.

In Shelby County, precincts are racially polarized; some are mostly Black, some
almost all White, and some are "in play", meaning they are mixed enough that
it's anybody's guess which party will win. If votes were simply flipped so that
Republicans got the Democratic votes and vice versa, it would be immediately
seen in a county with known racially-related political preferences and
concentrated ethnic populations. If you wanted to flip the counts, you'd need
to either (1) dilute the reported racial demographic or (2) create a
precinct-specific vote flipping method, or both. Both of these factors exist in
Shelby County. The subject of this report is racial identity dilution; the
precinct-specific mechanism available for vote-flipping will be described later
in this report series.

In Shelby County, the 2009 census reported a population that is 52% Black, and
voter histories show Black voters choosing Democratic primary ballots 96% of
the time. White voters choose Democratic ballots 25-40% of the time, depending
on the election. In August 2010, this demographic yielded a surprising White
Republican sweep. When 10 candidates filed a lawsuit which called the accuracy
of the count into question, its accuracy was justified by Republican election
commissioners who stated that the results matched the demographic for citizens
who turned out to vote.

But what if the demographic is incorrect?

I examined 89 voter databases created between Sept. 2006 and July 2010.

Between 2006 and 2009, racial identity for Black voters in Shelby County was
diluted by 10.6%, with racial identities for 6.1% of White voters also removed.
A total of 40,881 Black voters show race changes during this period, with
24,029 White race changes, for a total of 64,881 voters whose race was changed
in the voter lists. Most changes removed the racial identifier by converting
Black or White to the "Other" category.

Current voter lists have removed tens of thousands of voters who moved away,
passed away, were removed for committing felonies, or were purged for other
reasons. Remaining on the 600,000-voter list in 2010 are 32,918 voters whose
racial identifiers were removed; 21,860 of these were originally Black, and
11,058 were originally White.

Thus, when the media reports, as it recently did for Early Vote action in a
Memphis election, that "52% of those who cast votes were Black", that number is
not the number of Black voters, but instead, represents the diluted number of
people who are now said to be Black.

Comparing the list of names on the Memphis Early Voting Participating Voter list
with historic voter lists showing the racial identify by name for who "used to
be Black", in fact 62% of voters were knowably Black, 24% White,  14% Other.

In truth, the number in that recent early voting list is probably 70% Black, 27%
White, 3% Other.

By examining older voter histories, one can see that the number of "Other" who
have been identified as Hispanic, Asian, or American Indian was less than one
percent. It is likely that the Hispanic population in Shelby County has grown
past one percent by now, and will probably climb towards five percent in the
foreseeable future.

Based on historic data, after taking out an estimate for Asian, Hispanic and
Indian, we would expect to find two-thirds of this remaining pool to be Black,
and one-third White. That would give us not the reported 52% Black, but 70%
Black voters in the recent Memphis early voters. (52% currently reported, 10.6
percent "used to be Black", and about 7.4% unidentified other we can assume to
be Black based on past history in voter lists).

WHY THESE NUMBERS MATTER

If election results are being justified because the vote count "matches the
demographics" but the demographics are off by 10 to 18 percent, the vote count
actually does not match the demographics. That would indicate that (1) the
political preference for Black voters in Shelby County has changed -- but there
is little indication that this is the case; or (2) the vote counts may not be
reported accurately.

This kind of analysis is important for any location with significant populations
of Hispanic, Indian, Asian, or Black voters.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

1. Get copies of the latest voter history list every month. These lists can be
read by anyone, if you want to take the time. They are just lists. Really,
really long lists, provided in files that end in ".txt", ".csv", or ".tab"
--files you can open with Notepad on any computer. You can also open them with
Excel 2010 (earlier versions of Excel don’t hold enough records); and you can
open them with any database program, like Filemaker or Microsoft Access.

2. Compare the changes to the voter list each month. It's not hard. Any database
person can identify all the changes within about five minutes. You can merge
the files together by using the voter ID number to connect matching
records from different databases, and then use an "IF-THEN" formula to identify
changes, like this: "If a = b, 0, 1" (if column a is same as column b, put 0
here, otherwise, put 1 here). Then just sort for the "1s" and you have flagged
all records with a change in the field.

3. Hook up with someone in your local political party, or an ex-candidate, and
collect archive copies of the old voter lists. To find out if voter lists have
had race identifiers diluted in your location, compare racial identities in the
old lists with current lists and identify voters who have had their racial
identity changed.

4. Using voter histories in primary elections, see if you can identify political
preference for each group.

5. If voters are obstructed or disenfranchised, compare with actual racial
demographics to see if a minority group was disproportionately harmed (a civil
rights violation). If you know there are racially-related political
preferences, compare with election results to spot red flags.

I will provide examples of this process with video and in our 2012 Tool Kit. Get
started now collecting and archiving a chronological sequence of voter
databases. If you have a database guy in your group, show him this article.
He'll know what to do.

HOW AND WHY WERE SHELBY COUNTY RACIAL IDENTITIES DILUTED?

When changes are made in voter records, a transaction log is created. In October
2009, for example, we see race changes made by two employees, Tijuana Barrett
and Shirlee Borin. They made entries for thousands of voters indicating that a
racial identifier was created or changed.

By reviewing before-and-after voter lists, we see that Barrett was changing race
"A" (Asian) to "Other", and Shirlee Borin was adding race "other" for new
registration cards and changing race to "other" with voters who had moved to a
new address.

At some point in 2009, under the administration of Republican-appointed election
supervisor Richard Holden, all voters identified as "H" (Hispanic), "I"
(American Indian) and "A" (Asian) were changed to "O" (Other). These racial
categories have, in the past, represented a miniscule portion of the Shelby
County voter list, but the Hispanic component is growing and its actual
representation on the voter lists is now not being tracked at all. Fifteen
voters who had been identified as "C" (Colored) were changed to "Other",
instead of changing them to "Black".

One reason racial identifiers are eroding is that the Tennessee voter
registration card has changed. It used to contain a check box for race, but now
has a blank and the word "optional" over it. When someone moves or changes
marital status, or corrects information, or a duplicate is removed, this tends
to correspond with removal of racial identifier. If they fill out a new
registration card and leave racial identifier blank, Shelby County staff has no
choice but to match that blank space by changing race to "other".

Routine updates are resulting in loss of racial demographic information. My
examination of the records shows no targeting, no disproportionate alterations
for any precinct. It does not appear that anything illegal is going on.

This issue doesn't need to be illegal to be important, however.

You simply can't use racial demographics as corroboration for any election
result if the lists are not accurate. Organizations involved in protecting
minority rights should take steps to "un-dilute" the information, at least for
internal use, to best protect their voting blocs.

BIGGER INACCURACIES

Several hundred Shelby County voter records had issues that are hard to justify
as routine voter update-caused changes in race/gender identity. Consider the
following:

- Ronald Lacey, of Collierville, was listed in June 2007 as a White male. As of
Oct. 2008, Ronald Lacey was shown as a Black female. In 2010, he was listed as
"Other, male."

- Eunice Cathey was shown in June 2007 as Black, female, but after September
2009, is being shown as White, male.

- Lisa Truesby was reported as White, female in 2007; Other, female, in 2008;
and White, male in 2009.

- Meredith Stewart was shown as White, female in 2007; then Black, male in 2008,
then Black, female in 2009.

Altogether there are over 500 records that have bounced back and forth in both
race and gender. These are hard to explain.

My next reports will cover:

- Voter registration and data entry timing issues
 - Issues with electronic pollbook design, likely to produce error
 - "The personnel problem" -- staff alterations of the data in Shelby County
voter records.


Bev Harris
Founder - Black Box Voting
http://www.blackboxvoting.org

* * * * *

Government is the servant of the people, and not the master of them. The
people, in delegating authority, do not give their public servants the right
to decide what is good for the people to know and what is not good for them to
know. We insist on remaining informed so that we may retain control over the
instruments of government we have created.

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