I commented a lot about this on DailyKos - wade through the comments here if you like, but I'll try to summarize:

- Indiana has for several years had a notoriously BAD voter registration list. States are required by NVRA (National Voter Registration Act of 1993, popularly knows as Motor Voter) to do list maintenance to account for moving voters (like removing duplicate registrations when a person moves within state) and deceased voters - Indiana has been out of compliance for quite a while. The state was even sued by the DoJ for NVRA non-compliance in 2006 and entered into a consent decree with DoJ to do some list cleaning.

- For example, at various points IN's voter registration list has contained nearly 5 million voters - this would exceed 100% registration when compared with Census estimates (granted, imperfect estimates) of voting eligible population (~4.4 million).

- IN's voter registration list, even after the purge, STILL contains 4.3 million registered voters according to the SoS website. So, while there may be some cases of voters being wrongly removed (though they are supposed to be notified by the SOS), I don't think this is a massive disenfranchisement effort. Granted, I don't exactly give the Indiana gov't the benefit of the doubt and I think these "cleaning" efforts should be monitored, but unlike Florida's controversial purges, this one seems justified.

- What's sad is that poor registration lists were one of the arguments put forward by the STATE to justify voter ID - so the state was saying, "yeah we didn't do our job, so we need a restrictive ID law to keep potential fraudulent voters from exploiting the mistakes we have made."

Posted at May 6, 2008 3:02 PM in response to Indiana Voter Suppression: 1 Million Purged