Interstate Crosscheck and the Election Integrity Scam

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The Republican War against your right to vote. Over the next few months the entire book will be here, new chapters posted every Sunday, for subscribers to read at no cost. If you want to get a physical book to mark up or share with others, just click on the picture above, visit your local bookstore, or check your favorite online seller.

Interstate Crosscheck and the Election Integrity Scam

The Republicans have successfully pushed their monstrous lie of double voting and non-citizen voting because of the ways that states handle voter registration rolls. Ideally, a state’s voter registration rolls should carry only the names of people who are both currently legal residents of the state and qualified to vote. The reality is much different.

For example, I grew up in Michigan and voted in that state until I was 27 years old, in 1978. That year, we moved to New Hampshire, where I registered to vote—and never told Michigan that I’d left. Five years later, we moved to Georgia, where

I registered to vote and did so for more than a decade—again, not telling either Michigan or New Hampshire that I’d moved out of state. In 1997, we moved to Vermont, where I again registered to vote. In 2005, we moved to Oregon, and the same story. In 2010, we moved to Washington, DC, then back to Oregon in late 2017.

Most states remove a person from the rolls only if the person doesn’t vote for at least a few presidential elections in a row or if the person has notified the state that he or she has moved (a rarity), and therefore only occasionally update their voter rolls. Thus, odds are that my name would have been found on the rolls of two or maybe even three or four states over the years, registered to vote in every one of them.

I never voted in two states at once. And outside of the dozen or so people a year who do so nationwide, mostly in error, neither does anybody else.

But it’s easy enough for a partisan like Kobach to point to duplicate voter registrations in multiple states like mine as “proof!!” of double voting. He and Trump (and most of the right-wing media) constantly cite figures of people registered in multiple states—something that is not a crime in any state—as if those people were in fact double voting, which is a crime.

Kobach helped put together and promote an elaborate scheme called Interstate Crosscheck to catch these “double voters.” By comparing names of registered voters in one state against rolls in multiple other states, he was able to identify millions of people who, like me, were still registered to vote in more than one state. Again, no crime and no double voting — but a heck of a sound bite for Fox News.

Kobach compiled huge lists of “duplicate” voters for one red state after another, with hundreds of thousands of names on each list. Republican secretaries of state enthusiastically purged the “duplicate” names from their rolls. As Republican strategist Paul Weyrich admitted in 1980, “Our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”127

But there was an added benefit for Kobach and the GOP: many (and perhaps most) of the people “caught” by Crosscheck weren’t people like me who move a lot. They were, instead, people who had identical or similar names.

White people came to America from wildly diverse places speaking dozens of different languages, from northern Russia to southern Italy, from the British Isles to Serbia to deep within India. They brought with them a huge diversity of names.

On the other hand, Asians, Hispanics, and African Americans tend to have much smaller name pools. Enslaved African Americans were often named after their owners, and because most of the slave states were settled by a relatively non-diverse population of white people, their name pool is smaller than that of whites. Ditto for Hispanics, who acquired their names from the Spanish conquerors, representing a single-country name pool. And Asians draw from a relatively small pool of names to begin with.

Thus, when running Crosscheck, the “duplicate” names — particularly within a state — tend to disproportionately belong to people of color, which accounts for why voting purges in places like Georgia leading up to 2018 bit so hard into the pool of registered African American and Hispanic voters.

Because of these problems, select states have stopped using Kobach’s program, but others are still purging away and will continue to as long as there is no actual right to vote codified in either our law or our Constitution.

Kobach took his system with him to the White House, where Donald Trump appointed him in May 2017 with much fanfare to his Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity—charged with proving that double voting and in-person voter fraud were rampant nationwide.

Unable to find any proof of these charges anywhere in the United States, though, just as had happened a bit more than a decade earlier when George W. Bush was firing federal prosecutors for not being able to locate these malefactors, the commission dissolved, by executive order, on January 3, 2018, with almost no mention in the media and nary a tweet from Trump, who continues to maintain that three million people voted illegally in 2016.