DAR
I was on Greg Palast's email/newsletter list for a long time. He makes some very interesting points and he's funny, bombastic and fearless but I don't trust him as a source. I lost respect for him when he made a complete fool of himself in a chapter on peak oil in his book Armed Madhouse (as discussed in this thread). Even worse, his ego wouldn't let him admit his errors after they were carefully and politely pointed out by an expert.
So now he is going around talking about stolen elections and purged voters. That's good, it should be talked about. But the issue is not well served when inaccurate information is relied upon. I was reading this article and was stunned by one of his claims and thought I would do a little checking.
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DARHow McCain Could Win
Monday 03 November 2008
by: Greg Palast, t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Snip...
"That's the nightmare. Here's the cold reality.
Swing state Colorado. Before this election, two Republican secretaries of state purged 19.4 percent of the entire voter roll. One in five voters. Pfft!"
As usual, he throws out an extraordinary claim with no reference or support. Lefties go nuts. Oh my gosh, corrupt republicans have, "before this election" thrown off almost 1/5th "of the entire voter roll."
So I pop "colorado voter purge" into google and educate myself a little on this subject. Here is an article from the Denver Post which responds to a NYT's article which caused a stir:
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Colorado disputes voter purge
By Tim Hoover
The Denver Post
Article Last Updated: 10/10/2008
Secretary of State Mike Coffman says the news story was "way off."
Secretary of State Mike Coffman said Thursday that a published report was "way off" in asserting that Colorado had purged almost 37,000 people from voter registration rolls over a three-week period.
But in reviewing voter rolls, Coffman's office discovered there were 2,454 duplicate voter registrations canceled within 90 days of the November election. Coffman said his office was trying to determine whether that violated federal law.
And there were another 4,000 or so voters who were given bad information about when their registrations had to be completed, something the secretary of state's office admitted was its fault.
Coffman held a news conference Thursday to respond to a New York Times article that said Colorado is one of six battleground states that may be illegally purging thousands of voters from registration rolls.
"I have no idea where they got the numbers from," Coffman, a Republican, said.
The secretary of state's office does not remove voters from registration rolls. That job is done by local county clerks.
The Times story said that some 37,000 people had been removed from voter registration rolls in the three weeks after July 21, exceeding the number of people who died or moved out of the state during the same period.
But Coffman's office presented data that only 14,049 voter registrations had been removed from the rolls from July 21 through Thursday. Of those, 6,572 voters had moved out of the county or state, 4,434 registrations were listed as duplicates, 1,145 voters were deceased and the remainder was a mix of convicted felons, people with incomplete applications, those who were not U.S. citizens and withdrawn registration applications.
The story also said Colorado had seen a net loss of nearly 100,000 registered voters since 2004. Coffman's office disputed that, providing figures that showed there are now 3,150,289 registered voters compared with 3,114,566 in October 2004.
Though that might not seem like a large increase, officials pointed out that so few voters cast ballots in 2006 that many had been removed from rolls.
Voters who miss three consecutive federal elections are removed.
LINK
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DAR
So, the NYT's article uses a number of 100,000 purged since 2004 (and the above argues that that number is considerably too high). That is about 3% of the registered voters and not entirely unreasonable when you consider that in a state of 4.7 million, people die, people move, people go to jail and people don't vote for "three consecutive federal elections" and are removed.
I read a few more articles on this issue. It quickly became obvious that Palast's claim is pure distortion. I am not going to read the rest of the Palast article. This is not sloppy, this is spinning to the point of dishonesty. Palast cannot be trusted. He is a Hannity of the left and an embarrassment.
D.