This past April, in the lead-up to Wisconsin's spring election, there was a ruckus that, from afar, made no sense. There didn't seem to be much to vote for. Bernie Sanders had already conceded, so the Democratic primary was a dud, and President Trump had no opponents. There was a state supreme court judgeship on the ballot, pitting a liberal, Jill Karofsky, against a conservative, Daniel Kelly, but even a liberal victory would only make a solidly conservative court one vote less so.
And yet the race was all blood and claw. A Republican-backed ad accused Karofsky, a prosecutor, of offering “no jail time for a monster who sexually assaulted a 5-year-old girl,” even though she'd had nothing to do with the sentencing. Karofsky said Kelly displayed “corruption in its purest form.” The other conservative justices on the court took the rare step of condemning Karofsky for being “insulting” and “slanderous,” with no “fitness for this bench.” Then, when the Democratic governor allowed more time for mail-in ballots because of the Covid-19 pandemic, Republican state legislators immediately defied him. They took their fight all the way to the United States Supreme Court, and won.
But there was more here than the usual partisan rancor: A single case from the Wisconsin Supreme Court's previous session had ended in a tie, because Kelly had recused himself. This case turned on a dull bureaucratic process, but one with alarming ramifications. A massive purge of the voter rolls had been planned for 2020, but it was delayed over fears that a lot of legitimate, mostly Democratic, voters would get cut. The tie-breaking vote would decide the timing of the purge—before or after the November presidential election. Karofsky was a likely “after” vote. What happened next made the stakes glaringly obvious. Karofsky won the election, setting the stage for a delayed purge. But then the conservative judge decided to do something so legally bizarre that the very word used to describe his action is not yet in Webster's Dictionary. With three months left in his lame-duck judgeship, Kelly decided to “unrecuse” himself, and suddenly a purge of 129,000 names seemed possible.
The furious maneuvering was testament to what is at stake this year. Wisconsin is a key state for President Trump in the November election, as it was in 2016. That year, he won by the narrowest of victories: 22,748 votes. Now it was conceivable that a single judge in a single case in a single state could determine if Trump kept his job.
Breathtaking voter purges like the one in Wisconsin have become more noticeable these days, in part because they now involve increasingly enormous chunks of voters—often in states and counties with a history of racial discrimination. Last year, North Carolina removed 8 percent of its voters from the rolls in one week. The most scandalous removal to date involved the Georgia governor's race in 2018, when Brian Kemp, then secretary of state, spent the two years before the race purging more than 300,000 voters. That Kemp was also the Republican candidate for governor meant the umpire was also in the game. He squeaked out a win, and to this day his opponent, Stacey Abrams, has refused to concede. Determining how many legitimate voters have been disappeared from voter rolls in these purges has been difficult to measure. After a Virginia election in 2013, one calculation revealed that as many as 17 percent of the purged voters in some counties should not have been. These error rates are not merely distorting the vote but now appear to be affecting outcomes.
Cleaning up the voter rolls makes sense and is mandated by federal law; states are required to remove the dead and those who have moved out of state by running their voter lists alongside state registers of death notices and postal records. But many states pile on conditions for voter eligibility that seem designed to increase the population deemed ineligible to vote. Ohio, like a number of states, has a “use it or lose it” law, which requires the removal of everyone who has skipped voting in two general elections in a row. Putting aside the principle—should citizens have the liberty to vote in as few elections as they please?—adding conditions makes the purging process more complex. And when you add complex conditions to a process involving a state database with millions of names, that means more room for error. For instance, in Ohio, the one opportunity you have to halt this process comes when the state mails out a postcard and asks, like some kind of ontological joke, if you reside at the same address. (“You sent me this card here, didn't you? Duh.”) How easy is it to flick the card into the trash can, along with your chance to vote on Election Day?
Numerous think tanks and voter groups have studied this problem of wrongly purged voters, typically after elections. But in a small town in Ohio, there is at least one man who is very much at battle stations, obsessed with fixing the problem before it happens. Steve Tingley-Hock is an IT guy who has long toiled in the trenches of database management, working the vast credit card data bank of American Express for years. In his off hours, he has developed a unique hobby: scrutinizing state voter files. Last fall he had an opportunity to put these skills to a unique test. Early on in an Ohio purge process, he and other data analysts received the purge list. Deploying several basic data query techniques, he identified thousands of voters mistakenly headed for ejection.
Now, armed with his work, voter rights groups in a handful of states are trying to plug these holes in the voter registration system—before hundreds of thousands of voters are drained from the rolls ahead of the presidential election. It's the story of database nerds, armed with a deep knowledge of SQL, trying to preserve democracy in America.
It all began in the middle of the summer of 2019, when Jen Miller was a little anxious. Miller is executive director of the League of Women Voters in Ohio. She lives in Columbus and is committed to maintaining proper voter rolls and encouraging people to cast ballots—a bipartisan mission that's remained unchanged since the league was founded in 1920. Miller was concerned because Ohio's new Republican secretary of state, Frank LaRose, had announced a massive purge of nearly 235,000 voters just a few months after 267,000 had been scrubbed from the rolls. “If you've already removed a quarter million,” she said, “you would think it wouldn't be another quarter.” Then she got a surprise.
“I'm in my garden, literally,” Miller told me, when LaRose “calls me on my cell phone and says, ‘Hey, Jen, would you like the list?’” At that moment, “my dogs decided to have a very noisy fight right beside me,” she said, as the weight of what just happened set in. LaRose was offering the ultimate in transparency. Miller's organization would get a chance to check his work before these voters got the boot. Of course Miller said yes, and LaRose forwarded the database file. The news spread.
When Michael Brickner—then the state director of All Voting Is Local-Ohio, an ACLU-affiliated voter group—first heard about the secretary of state's list, he was stunned. “I was like, ‘What? Really?’” Many voters find out they've been cut only when they're turned away from polling places on Election Day.
Then Miller got a look at the task at hand. When she clicked on the list, what she saw was a simple Excel spreadsheet with voters' identification numbers and their names and addresses, but no phone numbers and no explanation for why they were removed. Just names and addresses. Almost a quarter of a million of them. How do you contact them to find out if they still live in the same place and are active voters? Go to every door? Try to track down phone numbers and call them? Encourage every voter in the state to check their own status on the state's voter registration website, to make sure they weren't removed in error? That last method had always been part of the league's voter outreach, and it's how Miller got her first hint that the number of errors in the state's database might be immense.
Miller frequently gives public talks about voting. On stage, she's high energy. She's the daughter of a baker, the offspring of generations of bakers, she'll tell you. She might roll up her sleeves or, as she did at one event last year, wear a jean jacket over her business casual, with a gigantic button reading, “I believe in the Power of Women.”
There was this one speech she wanted to tell me about. She'd decided that she would demonstrate how to go about checking one's voter status. She had the state's voter site mirrored from her computer and projected onto a screen. In Ohio, she told the audience, you want to see yourself marked “active” on the site, and not “confirmation” status.
“I was explaining how to do it, and decided to use my name,” Miller recalled. “Then, click, and it said ‘confirmation’ status. And it was, like, the purge timeline had started on me!” But Miller hadn't moved, and she'd voted diligently in every election. “It was just like, ‘What?’” She had time to rectify the situation, but her status meant she was headed down the chute to the voter trash heap.
Naturally, she wanted to find out how she got bumped. She turned to a member of the league, Steve Tingley-Hock, who was already hard at work evaluating LaRose's purge list, which numbered nearly 235,000 names. She was hesitant to ask him to take on even more, but she was curious about the error. “It's kind of like asking your friend who's a roofer to do your roof on the weekend,” she said. Well, not quite. It's more like asking your friend who's a roofer but also spends his weekends studying the minutiae of roofing technology, is a one-man roofing cheerleader, and has been simply dying for someone to ask him to evaluate a roof.
It would be hard to overstate Tingley-Hock's passion for voter lists. He is a member of something called the Ohio Voter Project, which issues official analyses about voter lists. I asked Tingley-Hock about the membership of this elite organization. There are no other members. “I am the Ohio Voter Project,” he said.
It didn't take Tingley-Hock long to find the clerical error that led to Miller's status in the voter database. It happened when Franklin County, where she lives, uploaded its voter data to the state and something went a little haywire. The state uses four different vendors to pull names from all its counties and merges them into a master list. So human or technical errors should be no surprise.
As is his way, Tingley-Hock ran a comparative search to see how many other voters were listed as “active” on the Franklin County database but got glitched into “confirmation” status at the state level. He found more than 20,000 of them, just in this one county, all in a waiting period before being pushed off the rolls. Ohio has 88 counties.
No longer was there just an uneasy sense that something was hinky. Miller had the receipts—a precise list of names and addresses—and could show the secretary of state, unequivocally, that this specific set of active voters at the county level had been mistakenly cast into purgatory at the state level. Those Franklin County voters underscored the fact that the massive list that LaRose provided Miller might have serious issues.
Tingley-Hock and the league continued their broader effort to check the massive purge list. Several other groups, like All Voting Is Local, as well as newspapers like The Columbus Dispatch, were also poring over the data and finding various chunks of voters who didn't seem to belong in a purge. Tingley-Hock remembered when he ran his first query of 7.8 million voters in the state's database against those on the purge list. “All of them should have been in confirmation or inactive status,” Tingley-Hock said, so when his search came back with more than 11,000 in active status, “I ran it two more times to make sure I hadn't made a mistake.” He kept chipping away at the list like this, coming across errors affecting more names and then bringing them to Miller and LaRose. Thanks to the efforts of Tingley-Hock and other volunteers, as well as journalists and data analysts, by the the time the purge went through on September 6, more than 40,000 people on the initial list had been able to preserve their registration.
But the notion that so many voters could have been purged in error, or have little opportunity to reaffirm their status, alarmed many advocates. When the story became public, it was a shock. The secretary of state pledged to correct the mistakes; that was the reason he'd crowdsourced the list in the first place.
“He didn't crowdsource it,” Tingley-Hock told me. “He Steve-sourced it. The errors that I found in Ohio, for an IT person like me, they're egregious. I mean, I am embarrassed for my profession as practiced.” On the phone, Tingley-Hock comes across as a testy fellow, the kind of guy who could get prickly about a missing Oxford comma. The discovery of errors on this scale left him reeling. “How many times do you go out as an individual doing something in public where you're going to be wrong 20 percent of the time?”
Painstakingly checking these purged lists in real time had long been one of those projects everybody hoped somebody would get around to. “Steve just started bird-dogging it,” Brickner said, “and he did something a lot of other advocacy organizations and data scientists and experts have said that they wanted to do, and Steve just did it.”
There's a traditional, almost romantic view of voting in the US. Norman Rockwell captured it in his painting of the undecided voter. Maybe you know the picture. There's a white guy in a suit and hat standing in a curtained voting booth, holding a newspaper with pictures of Dewey and Roosevelt and the headline “WHICH ONE?”
The meaning was obvious: Voting was a civic duty. Americans might disagree about who to vote for, but voting was always to be encouraged. When Quinton Lucas, the young Democratic mayor of Kansas City, was turned away from his polling station earlier this spring because the clerk couldn't find his name on the voting rolls, he cheerfully tweeted a video selfie, saying, “No matter which side, it's important that your voice be heard!” (The error was fixed that day, and he voted.)
But those Rockwellian sentiments have taken a back seat in a time of political polarization. Democrats argue that Republicans are using suppression tactics to prevent legitimate voters from having their say, while Republicans counter that Democrats' loosey-goosey voting rules invite voter fraud.
But that's a false equivalence, convenient for cable talk shows. Suppression tactics have been shown to leave millions of voters stranded on Election Day, while the fraud allegations have simply never held up. Think about how hard fraud would actually be. You'd have to find a dead guy still on the rolls, or a person who had moved out of state, convince someone to commit a felony for a single vote, and then send them in with a fake ID or the ability to accurately forge a signature. In fact, an analysis by the conservative Heritage Foundation of more than 3 billion votes cast in US elections dating back to World War II found just 10 instances of in-person voter fraud. (That's not a typo. They found 10. That's 0.000000003 percent.) A presidential commission created by President Trump and headed by Kris Kobach, the former Kansas secretary of state who has pressed for strict voter-ID laws, spent a year digging for recent examples of in-person voter fraud and came up dry, nothing but a few secondhand rumors.
If one could identify the moment when the frequency and size of voter purges really changed, it would probably be the 2013 US Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder. An Alabama county had challenged the law that required the federal government to approve changes to voting rules in states and counties, particularly in the South, with an egregious history of discriminatory voter suppression. The court concluded that a federal oversight was no longer needed. In the opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote sunnily that things “have changed dramatically” since the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that required the oversight. Racism of the type that required “extraordinary measures to address an extraordinary problem” was a thing of the past.
Since Roberts issued his opinion, states have gone wild passing laws that restrict early voting, end same-day registration, and require photo identification—all of which might have been challenged by federal overseers. In Texas, a federal district court found that a set of voter provisions had “a discriminatory effect and purpose” and constituted a poll tax; they were resubmitted the very same day that the Supreme Court issued its opinion. The rules are now in force.
All these measures tend to disenfranchise voters whose lives are typically more in flux—poor voters, people who live in cities, younger voters, and racial minorities. These people also tend to vote for Democrats. The numbers bear out the true significance of Roberts' 2013 court opinion: According to one calculation by the Brennan Center, almost “4 million more names were purged from the rolls between 2014 and 2016 than between 2006 and 2008.” Or take Georgia again. In the four years after Shelby, the state purged twice as many voters—1.5 million—as it did in the four years before the decision.
Most recently, top Republican Party officials have thrown out that old Rockwell script about the civic romance of voting.
This spring, when Democrats in Congress proposed more money for absentee voting because of the pandemic, Trump lost it during an interview with Fox & Friends: “They had things—levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you'd never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
In February, I traveled to Marysville, Ohio, a small town nestled around a few cloverleafs up the highway from Columbus. Tingley-Hock had invited me to watch him work.
We agreed to meet downtown at the public library on a Saturday morning. I had hoped to sit around Tingley-Hock's dining room table, where he typically powers up his laptop, but he waved me off from coming to his house. There was the concern about his dog, Mocha, who isn't fond of newcomers. Then there were the cats, Tango, Daphne, Wendy, and Zeus. “And those are the indoor cats,” he said. There was also the menagerie of outdoor cats, which “varies by time of day, anywhere from a couple to six or eight.” Library it is.
Tingley-Hock pulled up to Marysville Public Library in an old white pickup so mottled with to-be-painted splotches that he appeared to be wheeling around town in a Holstein cow. His truck, like so much of the technology in his life, is about as analog as he can make it. When I mentioned that I had gotten to the library with my rental car's onboard GPS, he furrowed his brow. He may be as nimble as a gymnast on the keyboard, but he's no fan of tracking technologies.
Tingley-Hock looks nothing like the delicate pinkie-extending Anglo tea-drinker my prejudices conjured from his name. He is a fullback of a man, well into his sixties, with a long white mane, scrunched apple cheeks, and spry blue eyes that suggested the Wizard of Oz, pre-tornado. We sat in a library conference room, and he gave me a primer on how to run one's fingers through a quarter million voters to find potential mistakes.
Voter lists are massive data sets that typically change from day to day, as names are taken out and new ones get added. In most states, a fresh voter list is made available every week or every month. Some states charge for the list, but in Ohio, the weekly list is free and requires nothing more than hitting the Download button on a public website. Only a few elections ago, comparing these voter lists from week to week would have required immense computing power and a lot of time. Not anymore.
Tingley-Hock's mobile gear consists of nothing more than a basic Thinkpad, a Lenovo E350, with a Unix operating system running Perl with a fast processor. (At home he uses a modified tower Windows 10 desktop.) He can download Ohio's voter database of 7.8 million voters every week and run a program that flags every change in voter status. He prints out the list. One of the issues that plagues these voter lists is the oldest—garbage in/garbage out. The ETL (extract, transform, load) software he runs will snag on so much as a stray comma or an odd character, like an upside-down question mark or a foreign letter.
We ran the program, brooming the files of tiny little bits of orthographic litter so we could compare the new files to the old. Most of the time, we waited. “You load the file, and when it blows up, it tells you which line it blew up on, so you go to that line, you correct it, and then you run it again,” he said. Ohio has a particular problem, for some reason, with stray + signs. “In Georgia, there are usually a few backslashes that blow up, but other than that it loads pretty clean.” As we ran Ohio's list, the system kept blowing up.
“OK,” Tingley-Hock said, “so we have another problem in line 1,570,093.” He scrolled down past a million and a half voters. “Oh, there it is, right after Tyler—the plus sign.”
Once Tingley-Hock tidied up literally every jot and tittle, he ran the software to compare this week's list to last week's and pull out every change in the voter list. The day that we ran Ohio's latest list, 4,736 names were jettisoned. North Carolina, likewise, drops several thousand voters every week. After he does his work, he posts the numbers on his site.
The next day, Tingley-Hock and I met at a local sports bar. A sign in the door of Benny's Pizza Pub & Patio scolded me: “No weapons allowed on premises.” Despite having my liberty crimped, the wings were tasty. We went over the numbers. These routine drops never get any notice, but they add up to numbers as big as any concentrated purge. North Carolina quietly dropped 94,000 voters in 2018 this way, he said. Most are probably names of people who have died or moved, but who's checking? “This goes on week after week after week after week, and nobody blinks an eye about it.”
He gets exasperated. His frowning-wizard face appears. If the massive purges have an error rate of somewhere around 20 percent, are these regular drops comparably flawed?
Given that purges tend to affect Democratic voters, I was expecting to hear that the Democratic National Committee had a robust program to address them. When I reached Reyna Walters-Morgan, the DNC's director of voter protection and civic engagement, she said, “We rely very heavily on our state party partners to do some additional web work and follow up on these issues.” When I pressed, asking if the DNC was examining these lists with granular attention—the way Tingley-Hock does—she said we'd have to go off the record. During this secret, off-the-record conversation, she said nothing of any interest.
Walters-Morgan did want me to know that the national party, on the record, was on top of the situation. “The DNC also has a year-round voter assistance hotline, and we ramp it up around election time,” she said. Wade Rathke, a veteran voter-registration advocate, considers the voter assistance hotline laughable. That is, he literally burst out laughing when I asked him about it. If you don't realize you've been excluded from voting until Election Day, a complaint to a hotline does little good. But reaching out to disenfranchised voters before Election Day—now that has promise.
Late last year, The New York Times ran a story about Tingley-Hock's work, and several activists realized that he was spinning gold. Rathke was one of them. Rathke's name may be familiar: In 1970 he founded Acorn, one of the largest and most successful groups that organized poor and working people. Acorn also registered millions of new voters over the years. The other reason Rathke's name may ring a bell is that he had to step down from a leadership role at Acorn in the US in 2008, after it was made public that his brother had embezzled money from the organization and that the board had approved a secret repayment agreement. Two years later, the US organization collapsed after far-right propagandist James O'Keefe doctored footage that showed low-level staffers giving legally dubious advice to Hannah Giles, a conservative activist, who was posing as a sex worker trying to escape an abusive pimp.
Rathke, however, has never stopped organizing. Still lean and gangly at 72, he runs Acorn International. After talking to Tingley-Hock, he decided to get back into the US voter registration game. He created the Voter Purge Project, whose primary mission is to give Steve Tingley-Hock regular downloads of voter registration files so he can quickly cull the names of voters who've been dropped.
Before Rathke got involved, Tingley-Hock was working only on state lists—like those in Ohio or North Carolina—that were free or relatively cheap to obtain. “One of the scandals here,” Rathke said, “is that some lists are exorbitantly expensive. In Alabama, it costs over $36,000 every time you pull a list. In Wisconsin, which has a huge issue around their purges, it's $12,500.”
So far, Rathke's organization is working toward a regular vetting of voter rolls in 13 states. He is preparing to sue nine states, including Wisconsin, to obtain lower-cost access to their voter lists. In June he began his first field test of 100 voters in Georgia, pulled from one of Tingley-Hock's lists. So far, his volunteers knocked on doors and found 80 people home, 16 of whom were voters wrongly dropped.
Recently, another bit of serendipity occurred. An app developer in San Francisco named Nick O'Neill started reading about voter purges. An idea hit him. He'd already created apps to make it easier for citizens to contact their representatives. Now he wanted to try a new method for keeping them registered to vote.
“We came up with this idea of applying relational contacts to purged voters,” O'Neill said. The more personal contact a voter has with someone, the more likely they are to act. Such motivation, says Don Green, a professor of political science at Columbia University, is “stronger if you talk to people that you know—your neighbor, your family members, or coworkers.” In fact, Green says, it's “a gigantic effect. Huge effect.”
So O'Neill created an app. Once you've downloaded it, the Voter Network app would check in regularly with a constantly updated list of voters being dropped or purged, and it would ping you if one of them synced with a name in the address book on your phone. The idea is that you'll get in touch with the dropped voter and let them know that they won't be able to vote unless they register again.
After creating the app, O'Neill faced one big hurdle: Where to get that constantly updated list of voters being dropped or purged?
“I just happened to set up a Twitter alert for anyone mentioning voter purges,” O'Neill said, “and I saw this project and some tweets about it, and it turned out to be Wade's project.” The app is available on Google Play, but it is still in development. When it becomes fully operational, purged voters could be getting a text from a friend telling them to reregister—or register for the first time.
This idea of relying on people who know each other to get out the vote, Green says, is really a return to “old political organizing tactics.” One person contacts 10 others, who each contact 10 more. These are the kinds of tactics that have been used since Rathke first got into organizing, back when Richard Nixon was president—updated for the smart phone.
Megan Gall, the national data director for All Voting Is Local, also reached out to Tingley-Hock; he is sending her lists of people pushed off the rolls weekly or monthly in Ohio, Georgia, and Florida. Gall's group then contacts those people to get them reregistered.
Gall's colleagues have been testing the efficacy of different messages delivered by text. “The two most powerful messages,” she said, “have been a generic voting rights message, like, ‘Hey, voting is your right, it is safe, it is secret, you should go do it.’ The other one is a little bit of social pressure.” Telling a voter that their neighbor is registered turns out to be a major motivator. The power of the relational contact again.
Curiously, an outraged text message—“They're stealing your right to vote!”—does not work as well. It gets people enraged enough to click on the All Voting Is Local site. “But then,” Gall told me, “when we followed up and said, ‘How likely are you to register to vote?’ that messaging actually suppressed people's interest.” So far the organization has texted more than 1 million people in Florida, Georgia, and Ohio, and it recently expanded its operations into Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona.
All that on-the-ground, text-by-text, friend-to-friend activism could make a big difference in enfranchising voters in November. But the real impact of the work of Tingley-Hock and the League of Women Voters and others—the real legacy of Ohio—might happen at an earlier stage, with the actual purges. “Secretaries of state who are processing these lists,” Rathke said, “have to be correct. That hasn't been true, until now.”
In other words, they know they are being watched.
The biggest purge since LaRose finalized Ohio's list happened last winter in Georgia. There, the voter rolls had remained untouched since 2017, when a massive purge “affected a disproportionate number of people of color,” according to one analysis, and had huge implications for the controversial 2018 governor's race. But when the new secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, publicly said that he would be releasing his work in December, just as Ohio had done, he made a point of sounding downright Rockwellian.
“Accurate and up-to-date voter rolls are vital to secure elections,” Raffensperger proclaimed. “That is why my office is releasing the full list to ensure that people who are still eligible voters can update their information.”
Right away, Tingley-Hock called Raffensperger's office to buy the voter files ($250 a pull). The Atlanta Journal-Constitution also went to work comparing the purge list with the previous voter database to do the same. According the Journal-Constitution, the number of voters tossed for not voting was more than 120,000, so the voter reregistration folks have their work cut out for them. But in terms of racial or ethnic patterns, both Tingley-Hock and the newspaper, working separately, found the same surprising thing: Minorities were not overrepresented. In fact, the purge list this time reflected voters in general. The newspaper study broke the purge down by county and found that the cuts were almost exactly in line with local demographics.
“In Georgia, they have to report a person's gender, their race, and their ethnicity,” Tingley-Hock said. His findings were in line with the newspaper's. If 33 percent of the full voter base was Black, then 31 percent of the voters purged were Black. White voters are 63 percent of the voter base and 59 percent of those cut. “It was absolutely almost dead on to the makeup of the state as a whole.”
Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, the state supreme court decided in early July that it wouldn't fast-track the voter purge after all. The court will hear arguments in the case in September, but given the timing and Wisconsin law, a purge is unlikely until 2021. Two judges dissented from that opinion: One was David Kelly, who will be replaced by Karofsky in August.
So, in Wisconsin, justice will take its time. And in other states, perhaps, bureaucrats in charge of maintaining state voters lists appear to know that in a newsroom, or in a kitchen prowling with cats, someone is sweeping the detritus from lines of data, comparing lists, and holding them to account.
JACK HITT (@jackhitt) is the author, most recently, of Bunch of Amateurs: A Search for the American Character and cohosts the history podcast Uncivil.
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