One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy

by Carol Anderson

Crosscheck’s overreliance on a handful of selective data points, therefore, feeds into the second major problem: it is a program “infected with racial and ethnic bias.”65 Minorities in America tend to have common or shared last names. If your last name is Washington, for example, there is an 89 percent chance that you’re African American; Hernandez, a 94 percent chance that you’re Hispanic; Kim, a 95 percent chance that you’re Asian.66 Similarly, Garcia, Lee, and Jackson all signal a strong probability of being a minority in the United States because “minorities are overrepresented in 85 of 100 of the most common last names.”67 As a result, when Crosscheck zeros in on name matches, whites are underrepresented by 8 percent on the purge lists, while African Americans are overrepresented by 45 percent; Asian Americans by 31 percent, and Hispanics by 24 percent.68 With Crosscheck perseverating on similar last names, it has blasted a hole through minority voting rights. Indeed, as The Root reported: “Roughly 14 percent of all black voters were purged from databases under the guise of preventing ‘double-voting’ and ‘fraud’.”