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

by Carol Anderson

But up close, neither the lists nor the database could withstand scrutiny. The problem is twofold. First, despite the hype and the marketing, the program does not actually match on every parameter. Not all states require the same information that Crosscheck uses to purge the rolls. Social security numbers, for example, are rarely used. Ohio doesn’t bother with a person’s middle name either. Suffixes rarely make it in, as well. As a result, it believes that James Willie Brown is the same voter as James Arthur Brown, as James Clifford Brown, as James Lynn Brown. The possibility for error is exponential. In Georgia alone there are nearly four hundred James Browns. And in North Carolina, the supposedly more than thirty-five thousand illegal voters simply evaporated when the state hired an ex-FBI agent to ferret them out and bring them to justice. He found “exactly zero double voters from the Crosscheck list.” In fact, researchers at Stanford, Harvard, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania discovered that Crosscheck has an error rate of more than 99 percent.63 The lack of consistency, rigor, and accuracy led a “shocked” Mark Swedlund, a database expert whose clients include several Fortune 500 companies, to dismiss Crosscheck’s “childish methodology.” It’s too error-prone. “God forbid,” he noted, if “your name is Garcia, of which there are 858,000 in the U.S. and your name is Joseph or Jose. You’re probably suspected of voting in 27 states.”64