College
senior Kyla Berry was looking forward to voting in her first presidential
election, even carrying her voter registration card in her wallet. "Vote
suppression is real. It does sometimes happen," said Daniel P. Tokaji, a law
professor at Ohio State University. But about two weeks ago, Berry got
disturbing news from local election officials. "This office has received
notification from the state of Georgia indicating that you are not a citizen of
the United States and therefore, not eligible to vote," a letter from the Fulton
County Department of Registration and Elections said. But Berry is a U.S.
citizen, born in Boston, Massachusetts. She has a passport and a birth
certificate to prove it. Watch some of the concerns of voting experts The
letter, which was dated October 2, gave her a week from the time it was dated to
prove her citizenship. There was a problem, though -- the letter was postmarked
October 9. "It was the most bizarre thing. I immediately called my mother and
asked her to send me my birth certificate, and then I was like, 'It's too late,
apparently,' " Berry said.
Berry is one of more than 50,000 registered Georgia voters who have been
"flagged" because of a computer mismatch in their personal identification
information. At least 4,500 of those people are having their citizenship
questioned and the burden is on them to prove eligibility to vote. Experts say
lists of people with mismatches are often systematically cut, or "purged," from
voter rolls. It's a scenario that's being repeated all across the country, with
cases like Berry's raising fears of potential vote suppression in crucial swing
states.
Ed.note: Here we are again. Every four years the Republicans come up
with the same 'October surprise' of removing from the voter rolls as many as
possible of the people likely to vote for the Democratic presidential candidate.
Because a majority of the federal judges are Republican appointees, the
Republican election officials tend to get away with this illegal activity.
