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A random NPR segment about voting rolls changed my view on election coverage
I usually skip political news because it is all noise. But last Tuesday I caught a local NPR piece about how counties in Ohio purge voter rolls, and it mentioned a specific 2019 law that removed 20,000 inactive names before a primary. The reporter interviewed one guy who found out he was purged only when he showed up to vote, and he had voted in every election since 2004. That detail hit me because all I ever see are poll numbers and pundit takes, never the actual mechanics of who gets left off. Now I check the full text of any voting law before I believe a headline about election integrity. Has anyone else found one obscure government process that made them rethink their whole media diet?
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wren2302d ago
The 2019 Ohio law you mentioned, HB 420, is actually the one that made me look into how these purges work in the first place. I started tracking my own county's purge list after that, and found out they send postcards to addresses people haven't updated in two years, but if the postcard gets returned, that's it. No follow up, no second notice, just gone. The craziest part is that 20,000 number seems small compared to what some other states do, like Georgia purged over 300,000 in 2017 alone, most of them because they didn't vote in a couple of federal elections. That made me realize all the cable news fights about voter fraud are missing the real story, which is how many people get dropped for not moving a mailbox.
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