1. William Ockham says:

    ew,

    Despite what the article says, jury duty summons in Texas are generated from voter registration rolls. I would guess that what happened here is that 330 people claimed not to be citizens to get out of jury duty, but only 41 of them really weren’t. Bexar County has a population of roughly 1.3 million people. I have a hard time believing that 41 voters over a 6 year period is a problem worthy of all this hype.

  2. Anonymous says:

    WO

    The numbers are even more ridiculous in Suffolk:

    The Nassau Board subpoena arrived about three weeks ago and sought information on more than 200 people, sources said. The subpoena to the Suffolk Board was dated March 21 and contained 21 names – though only five were found to be registered, sources said.

    21 names, with a 25% match rate.

  3. Carolyn in Baltimore says:

    I remember that Data Point in FL, when they were purging, didn’t need exact names or birthdates to finger ’felons’ and then didn’t care at all that the list was 90% incorrect. They’re not looking for fraud, just purging likely dem voters.

  4. Sojourner says:

    William, I agree wholeheartedly that it is a tempest in a teapot…

    Just to clarify, I pulled this information off the Jury Services website for Tarrant County, TX: â€The Texas Legislature is responsible for all laws pertaining to jury service. Every other year the Secretary of State receives the Tarrant County voters list, the driver’s license and identification card lists from the Department of Public Safety. The Secretary of State then combines these lists and sends Tarrant County their jury list for the upcoming two years. If you have ever received or renewed your driver’s license in Tarrant County, it is possible you might receive a jury summons even though you no longer live in Tarrant County.â€

    However, to serve as a juror, one of the qualifications is that you â€Be qualified under the constitution and laws to vote in the county in which one is to serve as a juror. It is not necessary to be registered to vote, only qualified to vote.â€

    So, jury lists are a combination of drivers’ license info, ID cards, and prior voting lists. So, what Marcy indicated is correct. Non-citizens can be called for jury duty, but are not eligible to serve.

  5. Ishmael says:

    EW – Regarding the focus on jury rolls by ICE or DOJ – I believe that there has been a lot of work done as a result of Supreme Court decisions to ensure that jury pools contain an accurate reflection of the racial profile of a community, to ensure that someone is tried by a jury of peers, without being slanted to exclude minorities. Jury rolls used to be drawn in a lot of jurisdictions from property tax rolls, which had the effect of excluding the poor and minorities. Is it possible that there is a connection between the ICE interest in jury rolls, and the revisions of jury standards to comply with consent decrees or other civil rights enforcement activities within the Justice Department? I would think that there would be some interesting information that one could obtain from the studies that were done by the DOJ, other civil rights organizations, and census data if one wanted to do some voter suppression efforts. Just a thought.

  7. Anonymous says:

    Maybe this is a stupid comment, but why does ICE have to subpoena the rolls — that information is public records. Anyone should be able to walk into the department of elections (or in more advanced places go to a web site and download) a voter list for a geographic or jurisdictional area. I did this with an intern for a county in Nevada yesterday!

  8. earlofhuntingdon says:

    Like Rasputin, never count Rove out until he’s out. I would expect him to keep up to his old tricks. He has eighteen months of illegal election-fraud scams to work on before he leaves the safety of the oval office. His reputation, network and future consulting business depend on him continuing to do what he’s always done. Notwithstanding the spotlights, depleted ranks, and Congressional investigations.

    ICE is also part of DHS, which has been in the news for expanding its domestic intelligence resources and computer networks. As more knowing commentators have pointed out, today’s computers and software can quickly digest and analyze apparently random collections of data. Sample voter rolls from interesting districts across the country, for example. (Without an EU style privacy regime, there are no restrictions on what the govt or its contracts can do with data once its collected.) In any case, it’s beyond my imagination to think that KKKarl would not try to get the RNC’s magic computer working on that ocean of illegal wiretap data.

    [â€Wiretap†is no longer an adequate term; it suggests listening to a single line, like tapping a household water pipe for a drink. Today’s data collections aren’t even like tapping into a city’s mains; they swallow so much data they are more like diverting a river.]

  9. William Ockham says:

    Sojourner,

    I went back and looked at the implementation plan in Texas for the HAVA crap. Fall 2006 was the first time that information besides voter registration rolls were used for jury duty lists in Texas. It was also the first time that the data used by ICE was easily available. So, in a sense, we’re both right. Based on the way that jury duty lists are used in Texas, it’s not clear to me that anyone has yet been called for jury duty that wasn’t registered to vote.

    I also should point out that the number of alleged illegal voters falls well below the expected value for data entry errors in a system the size of Bexar County’s voter rolls. What I mean is that, based on my experience in designing software systems for large-scale data entry, I would expect more than 330 false positives to be turned up even if there were no cases of actual fraud.

  10. Sojourner says:

    William, thanks for the info! I just looked at that website and knew none of the history for the law. Your assessment about false positives is interesting!

  11. Anonymous says:

    Compared to the more than 18,000 votes that mysteriously disappeared in the 13th Congressional District in Florida, this is chump-change.

  12. Anonymous says:

    But the Bush administration said the Florida-CD13 was not a problem and this stuff here is; who am I to believe?