Terri Lynn Land’s office punches back at NYT, voter purge finding

(Photo: mightymoss via Flickr.com)

On Thursday, the New York Times published a story that reported voter purging practices in Michigan that appear to be illegal.

While the paper did not suggest that the alleged irregularities were a result of partisanship or malice, it did describe the overall result of the alleged practices as being counter to the Barack Obama campaign’s well-publicized voter registration efforts.

Later in the day spokespersons for Michigan Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land, a Republican, responded to queries from the Detroit Free Press and The Associated Press with strong denials of the allegations from the Times article.

Land’s office had not provided the Times with comment when requested to do so for the original report, titled “States’ Actions to Block Voters Appear Illegal.”

At the center of the allegations is a dispute over the number of voters Land’s office purged from the state rolls in August.

The Times notes that it is illegal to remove voters from the rolls 90 days before a federal election for reasons other than “when voters die, notify the authorities that they have moved out of the state, or have been declared unfit to vote.”

The Times story goes on to report:

In Michigan, some 33,000 voters were removed from the rolls in August, a figure that is far higher than the number of deaths in the state during the same period — about 7,100 — or the number of people who moved out of the state — about 4,400, according to data from the Postal Service.

Michigan Elections Director Chris Thomas told the AP, “There is no illegal purging going on,” in a story published Thursday evening, suggesting that the Times had grossly exaggerated the August purge total. According to the AP story:

Elections officials in several states disputed that any voters were illegally removed from rolls. Michigan elections director Chris Thomas said the state removed only people who have died, notified authorities of a move or who were declared unfit to vote, which is well within the parameters of the law. Thomas said only 11,000 voters were removed from Michigan rolls in August — not 33,000, the figure cited in the report.

The Times says that death records and Postal Service records show that a total of “about” 11,500 names would have been eligible for removal, consistent with the 11,000 figure provided yesterday evening by Thomas.

Yet the Times says the total is 33,000.

Secretary of state spokeswoman Kelly Chesney gave a statement to the Detroit Free Press earlier yesterday, where she said Land’s office called the New York Times and spoke with the reporter and that he was unable to explain their calculation.

“That’s not a sound number,” said Kelly Chesney, spokeswoman for the Michigan Secretary of State. “We don’t know how they got to that number. We’ve actually called them and the reporter can’t even explain the methodology.”

The Times article described its methodology this way in the original article:

The purge estimates were calculated using data from state election officials, who produce a snapshot every month or so of the voter rolls with details about each registered voter on record, making it possible to determine how many have been removed.

The Times’s methodology for calculating the purge estimates was reviewed by two voting experts, Kimball Brace, the director of Election Data Services, a Washington consulting firm that tracks voting trends, and R. Michael Alvarez, a political science professor at the California Institute of Technology.

For its part, The New York Times further explained how it came to its figures in response to a Free Press query:

In an e-mail to the Free Press, New York Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis said the newspaper took two snapshots of the state’s election rolls — on Aug. 5 and Sept. 5 — to determine how many voters were removed, taking into account the rough numbers of people believed to have died or moved out of state during that period.

“We used a range of different categories of information, including each voter’s first and last name, the voter identifier number that is assigned by the state and the birth date, to count voters who were on the rolls in the first snapshot but were missing in the second, not those who had moved within the state or changed their names,” Mathis wrote.

So the question remains, why did the Times’ snapshot comparison of the voter roll show an extra 22,000 names missing in August than the secretary of state’s office says they purged from the roll?