But Crosscheck functions by merely matching the first name and last name of voters in the 28 Crosscheck states. This screenshot of the Georgia-Virginia suspect list created by Kobach shows that Barbara ANN Jackson of Georgia is identified as potentially the same voter as Barbara FAYE Jackson of Virginia. Similarly, Billy RAY Jackson may be the same voter as Billy MANUEL Jackson JR.
Detail from Crosscheck results identifying potential 'duplicate' voters in Virginia and Georgia.
(Image by Greg Palast) Details DMCA
The matches may seem ludicrous, but all these voters could lose their vote.
Swedlund calls Kobach's approach a "simplistic, childish" matching algorithm. He says, "If your name is Jose Hernandez, you're likely suspected of voting in 28 states!"
Indeed, in Virginia, at least 12 percent of voters on Kobach's list lost their votes before the last election.
Virginia has purged tens of thousands of voters from the state's rolls using the Crosscheck suspect list.
Before the election I spoke with Kobach at a Republican ice-cream social and asked him about Crosscheck potentially misidentifying voters as duplicate registrants. "Our system would not yield this match," Kobach insisted. But when I showed him that Crosscheck contained literally millions of mis-matches, he jumped up, clutching his vanilla ice-cream -- and ran for it.
He did call later to answer my questions, and stated he saw no problem in Crosscheck's approach "to get the widest list possible" in the hunt for illegal voters.
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