Jay Kenworth, a spokesman for the Indiana Republican Party said Monday, "We are obviously deeply disturbed by the news of these fraudulent registrations."
An attorney for the Indiana State Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, filed papers in federal court alleging Curley's opposition to early voting was an unconstitutional to discriminate against black and Hispanic voters of the county.
It smells. And it smells because if you look back at what has been happening in Indiana, you see that Indiana (with full support of its governor, Mitch Daniels, who used to be the Office of Management and Budget Director for the Bush Administration before running for governor in Indiana) has been engaging in political measures to keep the state red.
A couple days ago it was reported that Indiana Republicans were suppressing voters by opposing the opening up of satellite voting centers.
Brad Blog reported in May of this year that 1.1 million voters were purged from Indiana Voter Registration according to state data:
“Matt Tusing, Chief of Staff to Indiana's Republican Sec. of State Todd Rokita. According to Rosenfeld, Tusing explained that the 1.1 million registration records marked as "Canceled" in the state database don't actually mean the voters were purged. He was told anytime a record is changed in the database it results in that record being marked as "Canceled." So voters purged because they died, or voters who moved from one location to another who changed their registration, would both result in a "Canceled" voter, according to Tusing's explanation.
We checked with Harris, who wrote back to say that she had been hearing that "the numbers could be explained this way or that," as the dKos diarist mentioned above, "but Porter County could not be explained at all no matter what."
In reply to Rosenfeld's explanation, as received from the IN SoS along with a few other sources he'd cross-checked against, Harris still had concerns, even in the light of "Canceled" not actually meaning canceled, but meaning changed...
…Okay...But let's think about this. It doesn't say "edited." It doesn't say "updated". It says "canceled."
And in Porter County, this would mean that 115% of the current registered list was changed, edited, updated, what have you. That means basically every voter in the county, some more than once. In Monroe County, 85% of the records were altered, edited, changed, what have you.
That's a different concern, but still very much a concern. At least, in Indiana (I think), it does no good to go in and alter a Democrat registration to make it Republican, because Republicans can vote in the Democratic primary. I'm not sure it goes the other way though.
It is also a concern now that they've added the new ID laws, along with a requirement that the names match on the roster and the government-issued ID.
Think about this: You don't have to purge if you can just go in and alter a bunch of spellings, or addresses. And with electronic pollbooks, how would they ever even find you? If I change your name to Brad Freeman [ed note: my name is actually spelled "Brad Friedman"], and your address from 56143 Oak Lane to 65413 Oak, that electronic poll book --- and maybe that stubborn or partisan pollworker --- won't find it.
Indiana also has a voter photo ID law that the Supreme Court recently upheld in April 2008 and that Barack Obama declared unconstitutional in 2007. His senate website won’t let me access his statement from 2007, but here is his click here on the Supreme Court decision:
“I am disappointed by today’s Supreme Court decision upholding Indiana’s photo identification law — one of the most restrictive in the nation,” said Obama in a statement. “The right to vote is one of our most privileged rights and important responsibilities as Americans. I filed a brief in the Supreme Court challenging the constitutionality of this law because I believe that it places an unfair burden on Indiana residents who are poor, elderly, disabled, or members of minority groups.”
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