The voter roll purges continue. But when one is a voting rights activist who votes in every election, it's pretty shocking to find out your own name has been purged from the rolls!
Via ProgressNowNM:
Wood received a notice in the mail at her Santa Fe home on Tuesday. The notice directs Wood to verify her voting status with the Secretary of State's own database, "Voter View" .
However, when Wood checked her voting status there, she found that her status had been changed to "INACTIVE" in this mail purge alongside a list all of the elections she has voted in since 1992, a total of 44. Wood's most recent vote was just 88 days before she received the notice sent to alleged non-voters.
Wood moved from Albuquerque to her current address in Santa Fe more than 5 years ago and has voted absentee from there at least 4 times during elections when she was working in other parts of the state protecting others' right to vote.
"I'm just shocked that I took my job to fight for other people's job to get their vote counted, and now I'm having to fight for my own," Wood told ProgressNow New Mexico in a recorded interview.
The secretary of state's voter purge began just weeks after Secretary Duran stopped printing new voter registration cards, leaving at least six New Mexico counties without registration forms. Now we learn that during that same time Duran was not printing new voter cards she was instead able to print more than 177,000 voter registration cards to target to those she deemed non-voters.
New Mexico has an estimated 250,000 - 600,000 eligible but unregistered voters.
"This is exactly what we have all been afraid of when the secretary of state acts unilaterally to terminate the right to vote for voters only she can identify," says Pat Davis of ProgressNow NM. "Diane is just the first of the more than 177,000 legal voters to get this notice and it shows the incompetence of the secretary in administering our elections. How many more active voters were included in her massive purge of voters?"
It's bad enough that they're purging active voters from the rolls, but how do they explain the failure to print sufficient numbers of voter registration cards, causing voters to be unable to register?
In the coming weeks, voter registration is going to be the single biggest issue around this election. Groups like the Voter Participation Center are gearing up for a registration drive in 28 states. Now that the right wing doesn't have ACORN to push around, they're targeting any group which is actively involved in getting unregistered voters registered. It's going to be ugly and we're going to be successful, which will cause right wing heads to explode nationwide, no doubt.
Just remember this: If the right wing can't count on your vote, they don't want your vote to count.
