Anyone who does anything with names and data knows that connecting two records just by name is difficult to do. In short, there are way too many duplicate names out there in the world. Saying that two people are the same just by first and last name doesn't work well even within a sizable company, let alone across the nation (at times at my last company there were three different "Dave Hill"s in the global email address list at the same time; at my new company, there are two).
But that sort of crude matching is exactly what Crosscheck — a program used by a number of Republican states — tries to do, seeking to identify miscreants who voted in more than one state. Bet you didn't know that's a real problem, did you? Because it's not.
And, so, Crosscheck, when configured "right," lets those states discover that Donald Alexander Webster Jr., from Ohio is also registered and voting in Virginia as Donald Eugene Webster (no "Jr."), letting both states start proceedings to purge both individuals from the voter rolls. Because cheaters never prosper!
The program could be set to only provide matches when SSNs or middle names align, too — but that wouldn't produce the numbers that are wanted
And how does this benefit the GOP? It turns out that minorities (Black, Hispanic, Asian) are overrepresented in common last names (89% of the people in the US with a last name of "Washington" are black), so these efforts conveniently target minority groups — which, it so happens, tend to vote Democratic. And that, in turn, means Crosscheck is a great tool to keep hundreds of thousands of people from voting in November in a way that would inconvenience the GOP.
I'm not sure this is what Donald Trump had in mind when he said the election might be rigged …
The GOP’s Stealth War Against Voters
Will an anti-voter-fraud program designed by one of Donald Trump’s advisers deny tens of thousands their right to vote in November?
