Who Is Abusing Voter Roles?

Regarding "The ‘dead’ awfully loud in protesting voter purge" (Wednesday City & State), Patricia Kilday Hart seems to buy into Harris County Tax Assessor Don Sumners' contention that the efforts of the State of Texas to use Social Security records to purge voters rolls of the dead is unjustified.  And what evidence are we given?  Two anecdotes. 

 

That strikes me as pretty lazy proof on Sumners' part, particularly given that his office couldn't even be bothered to answer the telephone call of one such person - Mary Miller - who explained to Hart that she called Sumner's office to report that she was still alive, but "was left on hold for a 'loooooong' time", forcing her to mail him a letter.  It seems likely that the other voter identified - David Smith - also had to write in to Sumners. It's also interesting that Ms Hart so readily takes Sumner's word that he "heard.....from many presumed dead Harris County residents", without bothering to ask him exactly how many.  Was it just the two, twenty or two hundred?  And did they too have to write letters because they couldn't get their calls through?

 

As to the other major theme of the article, in which Hart imputed some sinister effort to disenfranchise Democrat voters by Republicans, that belies the facts she herself cites.  If - as Hart states - the rolls in question came from the Social Security Administration, one would be hard-pressed to say how state Republicans could - or would - corrupt them, much less why they would do so in such small numbers.  The risk/reward factor just isn't there, even assuming their basic nature is as dastardly as she suggests it to be.

 

I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that the actual number of voters identified as dead - against a social security database of some 9,000 records - is less than 1%.  I'll further predict that the actual source of the mistakes is likely the Social Security Administration, in which case this effort is performing a public service.  As to the repeated theme that others deliberately attempted to disenfranchise voters by reporting them to be dead, it is much more likely that this action was taken by a handful of Democrat activists creating a handful of anecdotes precisely because they could count on kindred souls like Patricia Kilday Hart to lend credibility to their claims of Republican misconduct.

 

Ms Hart seems intent in recent months on discrediting any Republican efforts at voter reform, and this latest effort is disturbingly fact-free.  It will be interesting to see if Hart's next report confirms the low numbers, and if she will then hold Sumners to task for misleading the Public, much less challenge him on whether he is taking phone calls from his constituents.

 

Pete Smith

Cypress