Washington State Democratic Chairs Organization

Thanks to Noemie Maxwell from the 47th, we now know some details about the efforts by the Washington State Secretary of State's office to "clean up" the voter rolls. Credit also needs to go to Susan Sheary, Mark Boswell, Bob Nelson, and Bryan Kesterson.

Since January of 2006, about 350,000 voter registrations have been removed from the Washington State Voter Registration Database. Washington is a fundamentally good-government state. But we are in a time when Republicans are waging what Rose Strong, a member of the King County GOP Advisory Board, calls a "war" - in which she says that her party can't rely on the "attractiveness" of their causes and candidates -- but also aggressively pursue challenges to illegal voters, particularly in minority areas. Voter fraud is rare event. But Republicans are hellbent on pretending it's an epidemic.

Rose serves on the KC GOP advisory board right along with Lori Sotelo, the Republican famous for her perjurious challenge in 2005 to hundreds of voter registrations concentrated in Democratic-leaning areas. We have seen in our state -- from the fury and threat of a recall campaign directed at Secretary of State Sam Reed to the actual firing of Attorney General John McKay for his refusal to pursue phantom voter fraud -- that Republican officials are under tremendous pressure to use the power of their offices to knock Democratic votes and voters out of the game. We've seen from a host of dirty tricks from fake Attorney General Letterhead sent out by Rob McKenna to fake sex offender notices sent out by the state GOP to Robo-calls that tricked voters into thinking they were from Democrats.... that the Republican Party in this state is hellbent on knocking Democrats out of the game by all means. They can't win on the attractiveness of candidates and causes, as Rose says. So they're going after the voters.

There's an awful lot of room in all the database purging going on in WA for Republicans to try their dirty tricks. Is our system robust enough to withstand this? Maybe. But we shouldn't just trust that it is. From campaign practices to election integrity to voter registration -- we need comprehensive citizen oversight so that the will of the voters --- not the war tactics of the Republicans -- determine the outcome of our democratic elections.

You can read the entire story on Washblog here: "Sometimes Vote Suppression is as Important as Vote-Getting": Cleaning up WA Voter Rolls

The WSDCO is working on a resolution directing the WSDCC to push for an investigation and to see what we can do to make sure that every eligible citizen has the right to vote. If you would like to help with the resolution, please contact Bryan Kesterson, chair of the 47th LD.